Author: modernistudies

Call for Submissions: Issue 42

Postgraduate English, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, has been publishing postgraduate research biannually since the year 2000 and is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the world. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

The journal aims to provide a space for postgraduate students and early-career researchers to showcase their work and receive feedback from established academics. While the journal is based in the UK, we seek to cultivate an international range of contributors and judge submissions primarily for strength of argument and fresh insight over a fixed writing style.

We invite postgraduate students and early-career researchers to submit papers of 5000 – 7000 words, or book reviews of 1000 – 2000 words by Friday 28th May 2021, for consideration for the journal’s 42nd edition.

Papers can be on any theme or area of literary research; we will also consider work with an interdisciplinary focus. Submissions must follow the MHRA Style Guide. If submitting a book review, please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review.

Submissions should be sent as an anonymised Word document to the current editors, Hannah Voss and Vicky Penn, at pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk. Submissions should also include a cover sheet in a separate document, detailing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, ORCID id if you have one, and a 200 – 300 word abstract that indicates five keywords for indexing. Please note our full guidelines and editorial process on our website: http://community.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english.

For queries or further information contact: pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk.

University of Leuven
9-10 December 2021

This interdisciplinary symposium, open to contributions on all art forms, aims to explore the deepest temporal strata of the so-called “historical” or “classic” avant-gardes. Our goal is to chart how these avant-gardes, both within Europe and beyond, engaged with the longue durée, with “prehistory”, with deep time and with civilizations more temporally remote than Greco-Roman Antiquity.

Confirmed invited speakers include Antonia Lant (NYU Tisch) and Maria Stavrinaki (University Paris I Pantheon-
Sorbonne).

Rationale
Scholarship of the last decades has stretched the geographic delimitations of the classic avant-gardes both on the European continent and beyond. A considerable amount of scholarly energy in recent decades has gone into articulating a renewed pan-European and decentered view of the classic avant-gardes that leaves behind previous assumptions of centralized loci of avant-garde activity within a handful of major European metropolises. At the same time, research on cognate movements in the arts stemming from the Americas, the African continent and the Middle East, Asia and Japan has further expanded our view of the avant-gardes, demonstrating that the historical avant-gardes were not only a European but also a multifarious global undertaking.

This notable geographical expansion of our understanding of the classic avant-gardes contrasts sharply with our still very limited historical and temporal view of the avant-gardes. Indeed, whereas we have long moved beyond assertions that the avant-gardes were exclusively concerned with the present or the future, or that the avant-gardes responded only to immediately predating, 19 th -century trends, the classic avant-gardes’ relationship to the distant past remains understudied. Certain periods revisited by the classic avant-gardes, such as the Middle Ages and the Baroque, have already figured quite prominently in research. However, more distant time periods still present ample opportunity for investigation.

This symposium seeks to further our understanding of the historical avant-gardes by reconsidering their outer temporal parameters. The European avant-gardes located the founding moment of dominant “European” culture in the Renaissance marriage of European Antiquity and Christianity. Part of their working assumption was, accordingly, that sources for rebooting European culture had to be located in periods before the Renaissance, if not, before the arrival of Classical Antiquity. If we follow this logic, then cultures belonging to pre-European periods abound, both on the European continent (from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Etruscans, Celts and Illyrians) and beyond (from what is generically called “prehistory” to Ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian times). Which of these or other pre-European cultures did the classic avant-gardes revisit and enter into meaningful dialogue with? How and why? And which of these cultures did it by and large neglect and why? In a global context, which historical moments did exo-European avant-gardes invoke?

Papers
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers that explore the longue durée in avant-gardes launched either from the European continent (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Ultraism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Neue Sachlichkeit, …) or other from other continents (Mavo, Art and Freedom, Anthropophagia, Estridentismo, Muralism, …) during, roughly, the first half of the 20 th century. Contributions can be focused on case- studies of individual avant-gardists, movements or more comparative analyses. Possible approaches to consider are:

• Forgotten or neglected primitivisms and deviant ontologies; and the language of primitivism itself – Is the discourse of “primitivism” apt to capture the full complexity of the avant-gardes’ ties to the longue durée?
• Understudied mediating actors, practices and discourses – how did the avant-gardes come to learn about the pre-European? Who or what shaped their views of it? And what role did scientific disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography, among others, play in lesser studied contexts?
• Aesthetic representations of the longue durée – how does the pre-European manifest itself in the art forms and practices of the avant-gardes? What role did different art forms and media (and their combinations) play here? What aspects of the pre-European cultures were highlighted? (How) did these representations contrast with those of historians and historiographers?
• Anachronisms, chronological schisms and temporal vortices, pathways into the past, the archaeological fragment which invites imaginative completion; confrontations of the prehistoric in the present and the foreign in the familiar.
• Pre-European periods and cultures as manifestations of a different, deep-temporal ecological awareness in the avant-gardes – we continue to see the avant-gardes mostly as products of the industrialized modern metropolis, but (how) did their exploration of the longue durée also not give shape to another understanding of the environment?
• (How) did the avant-gardes recuperate and co-opt the past? To what extent did they attempt to meld ancient civilizations into contemporaneous cultures (e.g. Europeanizing the ancient Egyptians)?
  
  Papers presented will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume.

Practical
Before Europe: The Classic Avant-Gardes in the Long Durée will take place in the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Given the current health and travel situation, we are open to alternative arrangements in light of contingencies. The
symposium language is English.
Those wishing to attend are requested to send an abstract (max 500 words) to leannerae.darnbrough@kuleuven.be
by Wednesday, June 30 th 2021 as well as a short biography (max 200 words) including institutional affiliation and up
to five previous publications. Abstracts should be in Word format.

Organization
This symposium is convened by Sascha Bru and Leanne Rae Darnbrough.
It is hosted by the MDRN research lab of the University of Leuven.

International Virginia Woolf Society Panel for MLA 2022

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Woolf’s Darkness,” opens with this quotation from Woolf, and follows with a discussion that celebrates Woolf’s investment in uncertainty and even darkness as a space of possibility. As Solnit writes, darkness is the time in which “things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”

In a similar vein, Paul Saint-Amour notes that Woolf’s “diary entry for June 27, 1940, reads, ‘I can’t believe there will be a 27th June 1941.’ All the same, she went on to make one of the most radical feminist statements of her time, on behalf of a future she didn’t believe she would live to see.” Woolf has, Saint-Amour marvels, “the courage to make both connections and distinctions — between men and women, soldiers and civilians, one’s own death and another’s death — in the face of a threat that would efface them all.”

As Woolf teaches critics how to write clearly and sympathetically in the midst of uncertainty or darkness, her works offer a primer on hope, wonder, and play. Such achievements are hard-earned; Woolf rejects sentimentalism even as she reimagines distraction, uncertainty, and dread to awaken such wonder. This panel seeks papers that show us how and where hope surfaces in Woolf’s writing.

Potential topics include:

• The transformation of the sublime in Woolf’s modernism
• Woolf’s reactions to nature
• Woolf’s alternatives to national memorials following the First World War
• Ethical and aesthetic responses to the war
• Portrayals of childhood
• The place of art, frivolity and joy during times of darkness
• How does Woolf’s oeuvre combat popular portrayals of Woolfian melancholy?

Please send CVs and abstracts of 300 words to Angela Harris (angela.cat.harris@gmail.com) by
March 15.

The Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (ISSN 2506-8709) offers an online publication platform to researchers who wish to explore various aesthetic ‘crossings’ concerning media, genres and/or spaces. Targeted squarely at investigating the ‘in-between,’ the journal seeks contributions from scholars broadly covering medial, literary, generic, spatial and cultural crossings that bridge a plurality of potential discourses, modalities, and methodologies. We particularly welcome articles focusing on e.g. intra-, inter- and transmedial phenomena, hypermedia, genre hybridization and mixing, (inter-/cross-)cultural exchange, networks, interactions, contact zones, entanglements, cross-border movements, multilingualism, transnationality, topographies, etc. 

We welcome contributions between 5,000 and 6,000 words (references and footnotes included) in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed. JLIC supports textual as well as multi-media formatting. All work submitted to JLIC should reference and be formatted according to our Author Guidelines. Articles may be submitted in Word format. Figures, video and audio files etc. should be saved separately from the text. 

The deadline for articles is 26 April 2021. Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (in English and, if applicable, also in the language of your article, i.e. Dutch, French, German, Italian or Spanish) and a list of 5 keywords (in the same (two) language(s)) and a 100-word author bio (in English only) to jlic@vub.be by 28 February 2021. Potential contributors should bear in mind that a two-stage review process is envisaged for full essays. In the first stage, articles will be reviewed by one of the journal editors. In the second stage, articles will be double-blind peer-reviewed by at least one external anonymous expert referee.  

JLIC considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that: 

– the manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work. 

– the manuscript has been submitted only to the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings; it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere. 

– the manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libellous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal. 

– the author has obtained the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in their article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your article for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission.