Registration is now open for the Object Emotions: Polemics conference, April 15-16, University of Cambridge. Jointly organized between Cambridge, Yale, and Berkeley, this multi-disciplinary event features international participants speaking on topics as diverse as ‘Objects, Gender and Emotion in Narratives about Migrant Women’ and ‘Speculative Affect and Object Misery in Hoarders’. Steven Connor (Cambridge) and Ross Wilson (Cambridge) will be giving keynote addresses. Registration is £15 and includes tea and coffee, lunch, and a wine reception. More details, registration information, and a schedule can be found here:https://objectemotions2016.wordpress.com
Author: modernistudies
Dear colleagues
Just a reminder that the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will host Robin Veder (Penn State Harrisburg), speaking on ‘Embodied Elitism, Energy Regulation, and the American Audience for Modernism’.
Wednesday 2 March, 6 pm, Senate House, London, Room 261
Abstract
Early twentieth-century American modernists – artists, art critics, art models, and art historians – reified the American taste for modernism in an embodied elitism. Key figures in the American avant-garde repeatedly formulated modernist aesthetic experience in terms of somatic self-consciousness, specifically kinesthesia, the sense of movement. By learning to regulate postural alignment and breath, they cultivated and controlled kinesthetic responsiveness, a practice that perfectly complemented the ‘introspective’ protocol of experimental physiological psychology, which American university laboratories were conducting and dispersing to the art community via theoretical and pedagogical texts. Veder contends that in both the body cultures of modernity and the physiological aesthetics of modernism, the concept of ‘poise’ figured as a discourse of energy regulation. Building upon Bourdieu, Veder shows that in this context, the hexis of poise accompanied the habitus of physiological aesthetics, both contributing to a new kinesthetic category of elite identity formation.
Robin Veder is Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the College of William in Mary, and she has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism, Harvard’s Garden and Landscape Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks, and in spring 2016, the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University. She is author of several articles on transatlantic art history, visual culture, history of the body, and landscape studies of the long nineteenth century, appearing in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, American Art, Visual Resources, Journal of Victorian Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and International Journal of the History of Sport. Veder’s book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy, was published by the Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England’s Visual Culture Series in 2015.
For more details and information about other sessions, see:https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com
And you can follow us on Twitter @Litviscult
Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
Royal Holloway, University of London
This proposed special session will explore how the transnational turn in literary studies has impacted the ways we research and write about the New Negro Renaissance. Publications like Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem and the 2013 special edition of Modernism/modernity “The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies” (20.3) have pushed us to expand the boundaries of the New Negro Renaissance. As a result of works like these, scholars have begun to accept that what we call the “Harlem Renaissance” was not limited to Harlem’s urban locale; the term signifies a global uptick in black cultural production encompassing the Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
This panel invites papers that explore how this new, transnational perspective on the Harlem Renaissance has impacted the ways we research and write about black cultural production during this era. What new approaches has the transnational turn invited? How has viewing the Harlem Renaissance as a global phenomenon forced us to adopt new methods, questions, and/or materials?
Please send a 250-word abstract and 1-page CV to Kelly Hanson (hansonkr@indiana.edu) by March 10, 2016.
The Historical Novel as a Generic Hybrid
MLA Special Session
This panel welcomes reassessment of the historical novel from literary scholars working in a wide range of historical periods and geographic regions. While the classic historical novel is often thought of as a literary genre in its own right, many historical narratives are actually generic hybrids comprised of other genres. What is the significance of these generic elements? Does the historical novel contain certain essential features or is the term merely a placeholder for fictions about the past? How has its definition changed over time, and how might we wish to alter it today?
Please submit a proposal of approximately 300 words and one-page CV to Benjamin D. O’Dell atbdodell2@illinois.edu. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, March 15th, 2016.
Categories
CFP: Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing
We are seeking papers for ‘Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing’, a one-day conference to be held at Edinburgh Napier University (Merchiston Campus) on Friday the 13th of May 2016. The conference invites scholars to share their research about and methodologies for textual editing of modernist literature. ‘Textual editing’ broadly refers to developments in the traditional research and practices involved in discovering, contextualising, and preparing literary works for publication, for both scholarly and other readers. However, it also concerns problems and methods inherent to the production and dissemination of modernist digital editions and digital archives. We welcome proposals in any area of modernist scholarship that engages with ‘editing’, the archive, and editorial practice.
This conference will speak to the recent resurgence in interest in the modernist text as editorial object and the various platforms through which readers encounter modernist text. In modernist studies, several large-scale editorial projects are currently underway, including the Dorothy Richardson and the Wyndham Lewis Editions projects, and last year saw the Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: Vol. II win the Modernist Studies Association book prize. These are paralleled in recent digital archives and editions such as the Modernist Versions Project and Infinite Ulysses. The question of how contemporary editorial practice can draw on modernist practice is of keen interest, as textual editing was often a key self-reflexive concern for modernist authors, many of whom were publishers and editors themselves. From the collaborative editorial practices that underpinned such works as T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood to the production of modernist little magazines, innovative modernist editorial practices continue to interest scholars as they take on the role of contemporary editors to texts such as these.
The conference will feature a selection of panel papers; a roundtable discussion joined by Dr Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow), Dr Jason Harding (Durham University), and another guest TBC; and two keynote speakers:
Professor Scott McCracken (Keele University) will present a talk about the scholarly edition as cultural production. Prof McCracken is the Principal Investigator for the Richardson Editions Project, which is funded by the AHRC and which is leading to the publication of scholarly editions of Richardson’s 13-volume Pilgrimage with Oxford University Press.
Dr Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) will present a talk titled ‘Problems, Possibilities, Polemics: Taking the Arrows of Wyndham Lewis’. Dr Waddell is on the Editorial Board of the Oxford University Press Complete Edition of Wyndham Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction.
For panel paper consideration, please submit a 200-word abstract and brief biography to Tara Thomson at t.thomson2@napier.ac.uk by the 1st of April.
The day’s programme will be followed by a wine reception. Registration will be limited, so we ask that all participants register in advance at http://editingmodernism.eventbrite.co.uk.
Please send any inquiries to Tara Thomson at t.thomson2@napier.ac.uk.
Modernist Paratexts (CFP for the Modernist Studies Association Conference [MSA 18], 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California)(https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa18/)
In Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette posed a rhetorical question about a canonical modernist text to highlight the functional importance of the then largely ignored paratext: “reduced to its text alone and without the help of any instructions for use, how would we read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?” Genette undertook a synchronic structuralist account of the paratext, the body of productions, such as the title, author’s name, preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, or dedicatory letter, that constitutes the zone of transition and transaction surrounding a text and presenting it as a text.
This proposed panel, Modernist Paratexts, seeks papers working from the diachronic angle: What was happening to the paratext in the modernist period? Which paratextual forms proliferated, which declined, and why? To what uses was this “privileged site of a pragmatics and a strategy” put? In what ways was the paratext used by authors and their agents “in the service, well or badly understood or accomplished, of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading” of it? While Genette’s work productively frames this panel’s inquiries, all theoretical and critical approaches to the paratext are welcome. In keeping with the conference theme “Culture Industries,” papers might consider the new modes of cultural production and consumption announced or invited by the paratext in the modernist period.
Potential paper topics include but are not limited to:
- The fate and/or uses of
o one or more paratextual forms, such as the preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, and dedicatory letter
o authorial or non-authorial paratexts
o original, subsequent, or belated paratexts
- Paratexts mediating different reading publics
- The paratext and new communication or media technologies
- The paratext in periodicals or little magazines
- The paratext and small printing presses
- The paratext in other art forms or media
Please send an abstract of 350-500 words and a brief bio-bibliographical statement by March 15 to Sarah Copland (coplands2@macewan.ca).
CFP: Special Issue of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations
Transatlanticism’s Influence on British Literary Study
Transatlanticism is often credited with enriching, and sometimes even correcting, the study of American literature. By de-emphasising the nation and its perceived coherence and uncovering crosscurrents from the British Isles, Europe, and Africa, transatlanticism seems the opposite of American exceptionalism. How, though, has transatlanticism enriched or challenged the study of British literature? The journal Symbiosis invites articles of 5,000 to 7,000 words for a special issue on this topic, to appear in April 2017. Articles may, for example, analyse new authors, texts, genres, readings, or movements highlighted by the transatlantic context; study the influence of American writing on British writing; study how an encounter with American peoples gives shape to British literary styles or forms; analyse the cultural transmission of American discourses in the British Isles; disentangle (or entangle) the impact on ideas of Englishness of postcolonialism, Irish and Scottish studies, and transatlanticism; assess strategies for teaching transatlanticism; or discuss how the transatlantic puts pressure on period or genre designations within British literary study (like ‘Romantic’ or ‘Victorian’). Regardless of the focus, articles should articulate the ramifications of transatlanticism for future studies of British literature. Submissions should be double spaced throughout, prepared (initially) to any recognised humanities style sheet, and addressed or sent as email attachments to both the guest editors (contact information listed below) by July 1st 2016. Please contact the guest editors with queries pertaining to the special issue.
Stephanie Palmer, Senior Lecturer of English, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK.stephanie.palmer@ntu.ac.uk
Erin Atchison, University of Auckland. erin.j.atchison@gmail.com
The IES is pleased to announce the start of a new seminar series on Comparative Modernisms:
Far from being just an isolated aesthetic movement of the early twentieth century, Modernism is now recognized as an international phenomenon spreading across all art genres and aspects of modern life with a determining effect on contemporary cultural and artistic practices. Moreover, new research into Modernism, exploring its historical, philosophical, empirical alongside aesthetic contexts within modernity, further confirms the necessity for a global, interdisciplinary approach to examine the movement’s multiple and intriguing ramifications.
The new Seminars Series in Comparative Modernisms, launched by the Institute of English Studies in 2016, stresses both modernism’s continuing relevance in the present and its complex, relational nature which calls for a comparative perspective. It provides a forum for ground-breaking multidisciplinary, transnational and inter-textual research in modernist studies by inviting English and international speakers as well as hosting a variety of associated events, such as roundtables, workshops and colloquia.
The thematic of the series cuts across modernist literature, art and culture and accommodates research that speaks to contemporary issues, such as, modernist legacies, translatability and reception, European and international modernisms, inter-mediality, history and form, science and technology and the performance of modernity, by drawing on different theories, disciplines and modes of thinking.
Comparative Modernisms seminar series is convened by Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, a Visiting Research Fellow at IEL/SAS and Assist. Professor of European Literature and Theory at Peloponnese University.
All seminars and events are held in the Senate House, London. The seminars and some of the associated events are FREE and open to all. However, for reasons of room capacity, it is advised that you register your participation in advance at:angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk
Upcoming seminars:
Monday 22 February 2016, 18:00-20:00, Room 246
Catherine Bernard, Denis-Diderot University (Paris 7)
Modernist politics of translation: ‘Hanging suspended without attachment’
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Tuesday 1 March 2016, 18:00-20:00, Room 104
Rachel Bowlby, UCL-Princeton University, BA Fellow
The Psychological Moment: the early modernist turn to psychology
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Future confirmed speakers include:
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London
Jane Goldman, University of Glasgow
Laura Marcus, Oxford University
Avant-Gardes and Avatars: Modernism and Performance
A Prospective Special Issue of Modernism/modernity
Proposed Publication in 2018
Abstracts by 1 April 2016
Completed essay submissions by 1 September 2016
Questions: sbaycheng@bowdoin.edu
As any science fiction reader can attest, visions about possible futures often precede, if not necessarily predict, the technologies to come. This may be particularly true of modernism and its fantasies of the future on stage. In 1907 Edward Gordon Craig dreamed of a Übermarrionette, an autonomous, synthetic performer who would liberate the theatre from the whims and flaws of human actors. Playwright Karel Čapek wrote the first robot as drama in R.U.R. 1920, and Antonin Artaud was the first to describe a theatre of réalité virtuel in The Theatre and Its Double (1938). Both modernist theater and cinema often served as a space for imaginings of the future.
Not surprisingly then, contemporary scholars have looked often to modernist performances as the foundation for relations among media, performance, and new forms of writing. Lev Manovich, for instance, locates the origins of new media in avant-garde formalist cinema, and historian Tom Scheinfeldt has referred to emerging digital humanities as the “performative humanities,” noting the ways that new technologically enhanced approaches not only analyze but also transform text into performance.
Amid the ongoing discussions of cultural and technological transformation, this issue of Modernism/modernity considers the role of modernist theater and performance and their legacies. Looking critically at the relations among modernism, technology, and contemporary performance, this special issue of Modernism/modernity gathers new work from critical avant-garde studies, media archaeology, and intermediality to consider how modernism across genre—texts, media, and performance—shapes our understanding of a technologically infused present and how emerging critical practices reevaluate writing, film, and performances of the past.
Calling Modernist Foodies!
Co-editors: Adam Fajardo, Philip Keel Geheber, and Jessica Martell
Food is a crossroads that links a number of perennial modernist concerns: aesthetics, authenticity, culture, commodification, empire, hunger, hygiene, interiority, mass production, nutrition, politics, standardization, tradition, and others. We invite proposals for 5000-6000 word chapters that explore the representation of food — at any phase from production to consumption — in modernist literatures and cultures. We seek essays that generate new possibilities for understanding the relationship between modernist aesthetics and food cultures in a globalizing world, and that further the ongoing interrogation of modernism’s geographical and temporal borders.
Because the twentieth century heralded the rise of truly globalized food chains, this collection aims to be transnational in scope, although individual chapters may certainly operate within national borders. We welcome previously unpublished essays that encompass a diverse range of concerns and methodologies in their explorations of cross-cultural contact and/or global systems of production and supply chains. While the editors’ research interests are primarily grounded in literature, we would also be interested in essays that employ interdisciplinary approaches or explore other modernist media, such as the visual arts or performance.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
-depictions of dining and meals in modernist works
-salons and socialization
-the presentation of farming, agriculture, and rural life
-food marketing, commodification, and supply chains
-hygiene, legislation, and public health
-psychology, interiority, intimacy, or identity
-malnutrition, starvation, rationing, hunger strikes
-transnational and transcultural signification of food
-material culture and developing food technologies
Interested authors should send a 500-word proposal tomodernismandfood@gmail.com by May 1, 2016. Submissions should be attached as MS Word documents or PDFs. Please provide a short biography. Notification of acceptance will be given by June 1, 2016. Completed chapters will be due by Dec 31, 2016. Please note the accepted abstract does not guarantee inclusion in the volume, which will also consider the quality of the final chapter.
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