Author: modernistudies

Simone de Beauvoir saw old age as a category of unrecognized but radical difference, a situation of being “outside humanity.” The old, Beauvoir argues, are foreigners, even to themselves. Ann Kaplan has similarly theorized old age as an experience of ideological trauma, while Kathleen Woodward shows that the old, and old women in particular, are incompatible with psychoanalytic models of the subject. For all of these theorists, old age is a troubling site of psychic violence, where our understandings of identity, subjectivity, and humanity come under pressure. This proposed panel for the 2016 conference of the Modernist Studies Association poses the question of what old age meant to modernism. In Beauvoir’s historical narrative, the question of old age became particularly urgent in the early and mid twentieth century, which witnessed a shift in the culture of aging: age seemed to become the condition of all humanity, not its outer limit. Human civilization itself took on the mantle of the old person, as human knowledge, rather than accumulating and growing, instead became obsolete. This panel takes up Beauvoir’s interest in both historicizing and theorizing aging in modernism, that literary period known for its investment in the new.

Papers might consider:

·      The old body in modernism

·      Aging and memory or time

·      The narrative function of age in modernist texts

·      Texts centered around old people (Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth, Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington, Barbara Pym’sQuartet in Autumn, Doris Lessing’s Diary of Jane Somers)

·      Mythic old age (Tiresias, the sibyl, the crone)

·      Modernist writers in their own old age

·      Generational divides in modernism

·      The modernist grandparent

·      The aged person vs the aged civilization

·      Old age in/and the culture industry

·      Age and celebrity culture in the early 20^th century

Conference: MSA 18, Pasadena, 17-20 November 2016

Please send 250 word abstracts along with brief biographical notes to Heather Fielding athfieldin@purdue.edu by March 25, 2016.

* CALL FOR PAPERS NOW OPEN *

One-Day Conference

May 27^th 2016

University of Sussex

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kate McLoughlin (Oxford)

This conference invites participants to think broadly about the term “hospitable” and the different ways that hospitality could be at work in modernist texts.

Existing scholarship into “modernist parties” invites further consideration of hospitality as the gracious welcoming of guests, usually within the home of the host or hostess. Food, drink, and entertainment are all suitable topics of discussion for this conference. Thinking about the environment in which hosting occurs could motivate explorations of the hospitable places that exist beyond the private home, such as the varying salons of modernism. Discussion of the figure of the host or hostess, aristocratic or otherwise, could generate literary, social, or economic discussions of hosting and of hospitality. More generally, the bodies that appear within modernist texts could be examined in the ways that they function as hospitable spaces.

Derrida’s work on l’hospitalité in the context of l’étranger extends the idea of hospitality across new thresholds. In this light, hospitality can lead into discussions of nationalism and of “host” countries. Xenophobia, fascism, or patriarchy could all be regarded as inhospitable applications of the laws of hospitality. War might be considered as a catalyst for hospitable or inhospitable relations. The slipperiness of the terms host / guest may generate discussions of the uncanniness and / or the reversibility at the centre of hospitality. “The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte). These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality”.

Finally modernism itself may be considered as hospitable or inhospitable in terms of the relationships that appear between modernist texts and writers. Subjects that may be considered in this vein include: to whom does modernism extend its cordial invitation? What could be defined as the hospitable spaces of modernism? Who is turned away from the modernist party and why?

Subjects to be considered may include but are not limited to:

• Modernist party-going and party-giving
• Literary and artistic salons
• Food and drink in modernism
• Dancing / musical modernism
• Hosts / guests in modernist literature
• The body as a hospitable space
• Friendliness / generosity / animosity
• Inhospitality in modernism
• Elitism
• Host as enemy / host as ghost
• Derridean hospitality – l’hospitalité / l’étranger
• Hospitable / inhospitable borders
• Nationalism – “Host” countries
• Hospitable modernist families – literal / textual / intellectual
• Literary hospitality

Proposals are encouraged from all researchers working in modernist studies with abstracts from graduates and early-career researchers particularly welcome. Preference will be given to papers that foster interdisciplinary exchange. Abstracts of 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers.

Please send abstracts along with a brief biographical note to hospitablemodernismconference@gmail.com by 1st April 2016.

This event is sponsored by the Centre for Modernist Studies, Sussex.

Irish Caribbean Connections: An Interdisciplinary Conference

University College Cork

22-23 July 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS

Irish Caribbean Connections is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to explore synergies between Ireland and the Caribbean islands.  This event follows the vibrant  Caribbean Irish Connections conference held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 2012.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

LORNA GOODISON

INTRODUCED BY JAHAN RAMAZANI

We welcome proposals for papers across the range of disciplines, including but not confined to the following areas:

• the performing arts, drama, music, literature, and the visual arts
• cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational studies
• the Black and Green Atlantic
• diaspora, exile, migration, slavery, colonialism
• antislavery movements, revolution
• the Irish in the Caribbean
• travel writing
• Ireland and the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean
• history; geography; politics; archaeology; sociology; sociolinguistics; religion
• digital humanities; international digitization projects

Organisers: Lee Jenkins (University College Cork); Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin)

Abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers should be emailed to Lee Jenkins at l.jenkins@ucc.ie by 31st March 2016.

Irish-Caribbean Connections takes place just before the 2016 conference of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), to be held at University College Cork on 25-29 July. For details, visithttp://iasil2016.com/

Irish-Caribbean Connections is supported by the University College Cork Strategic Research Fund

“First Encounters: Early Cinema and American Modernism”
Over the past few decades, important scholarship under the rubric of the New Modernist Studies has unearthed the tensile relationship of film and literary modernism. This scholarship has, by and large, focused on the cinematic qualities of the work of certain modernists such as Virginia Woolf and John Dos Passos. A related body of work has examined, usually anecdotally or biographically, the careers of modernists like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald who tried their luck in Hollywood during the 1930s. As rewarding as this work has proved to be, scholars of modernism have seemed less interested in considering just how literary culture more broadly responded to the motion picture at the very moment of – and in the immediate aftermath of — its emergence.
This panel takes as its starting point the quite radical transformations in American cultural life of the early twentieth century – in particular, the increasing interdependence of writing and film cultures. As Marsha Orgeron has noted, “something in the culture of authorship was changing, and the shift was at least in part a result of the demands and operating principles of the motion picture industry” (“Rethinking Authorship” 2003). This panel aims to move the discussion of modernism and cinema beyond a focus on aesthetics, and beyond – or, in advance of – the 1930s to consider the interactions of cinema and writing cultures more broadly. And, while scholars have largely framed this relationship in terms of a rivalry, we would like to consider the opportunities the upstart medium might have provided for modernist communities, institutions and practitioners.
In sum, we hope to expand the chronology as well as the ways in which we conceptualize modernist literary culture’s relation to cinema. We particularly invite papers that examine archival materials, copyright laws, subsidiary rights, motion-picture tie-ins, celebrity and fan-magazine culture, studio attempts to lure authors out West, and so forth, in order to produce a fuller account of a modernist literary culture deeply entangled with – indeed, perhaps inseparable from – early cinema culture.
Please send abstracts of 350-500 words, and a brief bio statement, by March 15 to Sarah Gleeson-White: sarah.gleeson-white@sydney.edu.au

The Afterlives of Eve

9-11 September 2016 at Newcastle University and Durham University

Keynotes: Sandra M. Gilbert (UC Davis), Wendy Furman-Adams (Whittier), John Bothwell (Durham)

From Genesis to mitochondrial Eve, the idea of a single common foremother has occupied a crucial space in the Western cultural imaginary. Eve, whether as bringer of sin, as life-giver, as burden, curse or saviour, functions as a commentary on maternity, sexuality, creativity and power. This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference will be an opportunity to explore the impact of her varied representations through the centuries and across different genres and media. How has this archetypal figure been revised and revisited by conservative and radical thought? What personal, polemical and/or creative uses have been made of the figure of Eve? What persists and what changes in her depictions across time and geographical space?  How have women and men negotiated their shared and different relationships to Eve? How has Eve been appropriated, neglected or rejected as a foremother? How does she speak to fantasies of masculine or feminine self-sufficiency? What cultural, political, literary and/or theological spaces does she occupy now? Topics might include, but need not be limited to:

Origins of/Sources for Eve                                                                                                                                 Other Eves                                                                                                                                                            The absence of Eve                                                                                                                                            Representations and Transformations of Eve                                                                                                         Eve as Over-reacher

We welcome papers from all disciplines in arts, humanities and sciences and covering any historical period. We also welcome panel proposals including PGR panel proposals. Titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words per speaker should be sent to Ruth Connolly (ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk) and Mandy Green (mandy.green@durham.ac.uk) by 12 March 2016. Panel proposals should also include a title for the panel’s programme. Speakers will be notified by March 21^st.

We gratefully acknowledge support from MEMS at Newcastle (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/), Newcastle University’s Academic Conference Fund and also from IMEMS at Durham University (https://www.dur.ac.uk/imems/research/).                                                                                                             (A limited number of PGR bursaries may be available. Please indicate when sending your abstract whether you would like to be considered for a bursary.)

This panel seeks papers on the convergence of 20th-century American regionalism and modernism, especially in a transnational sense, for the MSA 18 conference, 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California (https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa18/).

In his essay for The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism entitled “Regionalism in American Modernism,” John N. Duvall concedes that efforts “to link regionalism to American modernism may seem, at first blush, a perverse enterprise” (242). Indeed, modernist studies scholars have commonly considered “modernist” and “regionalist” contradictory terms. Even as important efforts have been made recently to mediate these terms, including a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to “Regional Modernism,” scholarly work that brings the discourses of modernism and regionalism into closer conversation remains urgent. This panel seeks attempts to map out a space for early-20th-century American regionalist fiction within modernist studies while exploring the transnational possibilities of “regional modernism.” More than just the quaint local-color fiction of a previous generation, the regional modernist fiction of the early 20th century might be understood, like the more celebrated globe-trotting international modernism, as an attempt to reject the nation-state as the normative organizational unit for American community.

In the recent “spatial turn,” with its transnational aspirations, modernist studies have at times idealized the trans- without fully considering the national. Modernist fiction, as Jon Hegglund asserts, does not simply transcend this national attachment in the 20th century, rather it continually mediates the scale of the national. Instead of putting forward another spatial scale that outflanks the nation-state, what might be gained by turning to modernist writing that negotiates national attachment and seeks to think transnationally through the sub-national scale of the region? Can we understand “regional modernism” as an attempt to imagine America beyond the territorial nation-state, not through the globe-trotting internationalism more commonly associated with modernism, but according to its intra-national and sub-national distinctiveness? How might such a regional modernism connect local communities beyond national boundaries to non-US “American” spaces like those of the Caribbean, or Central and South America?

Please send abstracts of 500 words or less and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Jace Gatzemeyer (jpg224@psu.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).

Keywords: regional modernism, American regionalism, American modernism, transnationalism

Keynote Speakers: Laura Peters and David Floyd

In 1975, Nina Auerbach commented: “Although we are now ‘all orphans,’ alone and free and dispossessed of our past, we yearn for origins, for cultural continuity. In our continual achievement of paradox, we have made of the orphan himself our archetypal and perhaps only ancestor” (1975 p 416).

The literary orphan figure occupies a liminal position in culture. Poised on the margins of the family, examining the relationship between the influence of the past and the capacity for self-fashioning in the creation of identity, orphan figures prompt important questions about the relationship between the self, the family and the wider social matrix, and self and other in especial.

Forty years on from Auerbach’s influential essay, and in the wake of important new contributions to the debate from Laura Peters and David Floyd (our keynote speakers), it is timely to consider the roles played by literary orphans, and assess the ways in which they reflect and refract the concerns of their contemporaneous cultures.

The Orphan Identities symposium will take place at the University of Portsmouth on Saturday November 12^th 2016.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

fashioning orphan identity; the liminal nature of orphan figures; orphans and transportation/colonial narratives; the orphan as scapegoat; the orphan and modernity; the orphan as dangerous supplement; the therapeutic power of the orphan; the war child/refugee

We are particularly interested in papers that deal with literature post 1800. Abstracts of around 250 words should be sent to: orphan-identities@port.ac.uk by June 10th 2016.

Hello All,

Please consider submitting an abstract to a special session I am organizing for next year’s MLA annual convention in Philadelphia:

This panel seeks papers on the ecology of home landscape and war zone representations within modernist literature for the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia, 5–8 January 2017 (https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_8773). The centennial anniversary of World War I has coincided with what seems a critical mass in awareness of the urgency of our sustainability as a species. In looking at the role which that war and the literature it produced has played in structuring the past to our contemporary present—a present marked by ecological instability and crisis—it behooves us to explore how literary responses to World War I employ an aesthetic which can be said to reconfigure the subject in relation to both space and time as ecological. While much discussed modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway will offer fruitful grounds for considerations of the separation and intercession of the spaces of war and home, as well as the trench poets and war memoirists of the period such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, the organizer especially invites inquiries into the works of less discussed authors such as Max Plowman, Rebecca West, and Robinson Jeffers.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Molly Hall (molly_hall@uri.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).