Author: modernistudies

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Events

Virginia Woolf & Music

Please find below a quick update about the concert series ‘Virginia Woolf & Music’ which begins on March 4th in St Andrews.

The website for the concert series is now live and can be found at:

http://virginiawoolfmusic.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk

Additionally, Special Collections staff are going to present highlights from the Kirkpatrick Archive, recently acquired by St Andrews University Library, at the Symposium ‘Woolf and music’ on the afternoon of March 3rd. This will be the first chance to see some of the collection of about 70 Bloomsbury letters plus two previously unknown photographs of Woolf. The Symposium is free but registration is required: please contact lmg3@st-andrews.ac.uk for details.

Other events include a pre-performance talk and a small exhibition, ‘Virginia Woolf & St Andrews’. These promise to be really enjoyable so we do hope to see some of you in St Andrews.

With good wishes, Emma Sutton

School of English, University of St Andrews

Categories
Past Events PG Training Day Postgraduate

BAMS Postgraduate Training Day: Research Skills for Modernist Studies

British Association for Modernist Studies

Postgraduate Training Day: Research Skills for Modernist Studies

Hosted by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford

Friday 11 March 2016

The seventh annual BAMS postgraduate training day will explore recent trends in modernist studies and give practical advice on research management, with the aim of preparing you for a career in modernist studies. This event is open to registered on-course doctoral students working in the field of modernism. Registration (including lunch) is free to members of BAMS, and a limited number of travel bursaries are also available to BAMS members whose transport costs over £20. Registration is £5 for non-members. Places are limited, so please register by clicking here (or go to www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk and search ‘BAMS’) by Monday 7 March. To apply for a travel bursary, please send travel information and/ or receipts to bamsresearchskills@gmail.com.  General enquiries may also be directed to this address.

To join BAMS (including a subscription to Modernist Cultures) go to https://bams.ac.uk/membership/. Student rate: £32; online-only £23.

BAMS research training day programme

Categories
CFPs Events Uncategorized

CFP: Orphan Identities

CFP: Orphan Identities

 

Dear Modernists,

We are delighted to announce the CFP for the Orphan Identities Symposium, and hope that you will be able to participate in the event.

Kind regards, Diane

 

Dr Diane Warren

Dr Alex Gray

Dr Jennifer Jones

 

 

 

Orphan Identities Symposium: Call for Papers

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 12th 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.

​

 

Dr Diane Warren

Milldam LB 1.14, telephone 02392 842193

 

Categories
Events Seminars

Wharton in Wartime, 3 – 4.15pm, Wednesday 10 February, Oxford

Wharton in Wartime

3 – 4.15pm, Wednesday 10 February, St. Luke’s Chapel, Radcliffe Humanities Site, Woodstock Road, Oxford

A roundtable discussion to mark the publication of Alice Kelly’s critical edition of Edith Wharton’s First World War reportage Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

Featuring
Professor Dame Hermione Lee (Wolfson College, Oxford)
Dr Shafquat Towheed (Open University)
Dr Alice Kelly (Women in the Humanities, TORCH)

Chaired by Professor Elleke Boehmer (TORCH)

Followed by a wine reception sponsored by Women in the Humanities

http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/wharton-wartime

Categories
CFPs

MSA18 CFP: Modernism and the Origin and Rise of Biofiction

CFP for an MSA 18 Panel on the topic of

Modernism and the Origin and Rise of Biofiction

MSA 18: November 17-20 in Pasadena, CA

250-Word Abstracts due March 20th

Send cv and abstracts to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu)

 

In 1937, Georg Lukács published The Historical Novel, a landmark study that examines the nature and power of the literary form.  But he also discusses the biographical novel, which is a form of fiction that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure.  Many biographical novels were published in the 1930s by notable writers like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Graves, Arna Bontemps, Lion Feuchtwanger, Irving Stone, and Zora Neale Hurston.  But Lukács condemned the form as irredeemable.

I am seeking submissions for a panel about the role modernism played in the rise and legitimization of biofiction.  For instance, modernist theories of knowledge led some writers to author biblical biographical novels that challenged and debunked ideas in and approaches to the Bible.  Thomas Mann and Zora Neale Hurston wrote biographical novels about Joseph, Moses, and Herod.  Specifically which theories of knowledge led Mann and Hurston to write biographical novels about biblical figures?  How do modernist theories of knowledge impact the characterizations of the biblical figures in the novels?  How do the modernist theories of knowledge, as dramatized in the novels, force readers to rework their understanding of and approach to the Bible?  How have Mann’s and Hurston’s works contributed to the rise of the contemporary biblical biographical novels of Frederick Buechner, Anita Diamant, David Maine, ColmTóibín and Geraldine Brooks, to mention only a notable few?

A more theoretical question is: to what degree did distinctly modernist ideas contribute to the making of the biographical novel?  According to Lukács, the hero of a historical novel should be a fictional figure that functions as a historical-social type.  Thus, he condemns the biographical novel, because its protagonist is based on an actual historical figure.  Is Lukács right to condemn the biographical novel? If not, why not?  Lukács believes that the successful historical novel should give readers the objective proportions and weights of history.  To what degree and in what sense does the biographical novel refute core ideas at the center of Lukács’ work about historical fiction by centering the novel in the consciousness of a biographical subject?  What kind of history do readers get from biofiction?  And what kind of biographical subject do readers get from biofiction?

Modernist writers did much to challenge and deconstruct traditional versions of subjectivity, especially those based on strict binaries.  How have modernist theories of the subject contributed to the formation and valorization of biofiction?  And, is it a coincidence that so many contemporary biographical novels have been written about famous or important modernists, including Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Egon Schiele, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, Sergey Nabakov, Frid Kahlo, and Walter Benjamin, just to mention only a notable few?

As you can see, the questions are endless.  For those interested in this panel, send a cv and a 250-word abstract to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu) by March 20th.

Categories
Postgraduate Uncategorized

‘We All Have These Thoughts Sometimes’: A conference on Stevie Smith 11 March 2016

Dear All,
BURSARIES AVAILABLE
‘We All Have These Thoughts Sometimes’: A conference on Stevie Smith
11 March 2016
Jesus College, Oxford
https://steviesmithconference.wordpress.com/
We are delighted to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the Oxford English Faculty, seven small bursaries are now available for postgraduate and early-career researchers. Each bursary is equivalent to the registration fee for an unsalaried delegate (£30). They are aimed at attendees who have not secured funding to attend the conference from their institutions or from external sources.
To apply for a bursary, please email steviesmithconference@gmail.com by 14th February 2016, explaining in less than 300 words why you want to attend the conference, and (if relevant) how attendance will contribute to your academic career. Applicants are reminded that it is not necessary to use the full 300 words available.
Delegates who have already registered for the conference, and believe they are eligible, are welcome to apply.
All best,
Noreen Masud, DPhil candidate
Categories
CFPs

“Samuel Beckett and World Literature” Conference, Call for Papers

University of Kent 4 – 5 May 2016

Keynote Speakers
Stanley E. Gontarski, Florida State University
Fábio de Souza Andrade, University of São Paulo

Almost unknown before the première of E n attendant Godot i n 1953, the immediate success of the play led to Samuel Beckett very quickly acquiring an international reputation. Since then, his works have been translated into numerous languages, and have exerted a considerable influence upon art and literature across the world. The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 confirmed Beckett’s status as a major figure in world literature.

However, while there is no doubt that his oeuvre lends itself to translation and adaptation, Beckett’s concern with directorial and verbal precision cautions against misappropriation, notwithstanding the seemingly decontextualised nature of his postwar writings. Moreover, in light of his global dissemination, Beckett’s commitment to ‘impotence’, ‘ignorance’, and ‘impoverishment’ takes on a new meaning. Despite the prevailing tendency to consider Beckett as an absurdist, his works resist being circumscribed by any literary and aesthetic category, and perhaps for this very reason have flourished in cultures very different from the one in which they originated.

So what is it in his writings that enables this global circulation? In what ways is Beckett culturally reciprocated and refracted? How do nation and nationality figure in his writings? These are some of the many questions that arise when considering Beckett as amongst the foremost figures of world literature today.

This international conference is designed to address the questions of Beckett as a figure of world literature and world literature as figured in Beckett. We would like to invite papers, presentations, and performances from students, academics, artists and fellow enthusiasts on the following topics, although participants should not consider themselves restricted by these:

  • Beckett’s influence, reception and circulation across disciplines
  • Rethinking global modernism in the light of his works
  • Beckett as a self­translator and studies of Beckett in translation
  • Cinematographic and theatrical adaptations of Beckett’s plays
  • The intercultural, sociological, and political dissemination of Beckett’s work
  • Beckett and global contemporary criticism and theory
  • Reappraising Beckettian motifs through appropriations and relocations
  • Teaching Beckett as part of international French and English curriculums
  • Beckett and the literary field
  • Retracing publication and translation trajectories
  • Beckett’s circulation in the digital world

    Abstracts and p roposals of no more than 300 words are invited by 2 6 February 2016. Please e­mail submissions to beckettworldlit@kent.ac.uk, along with a short bio. Please also use this email address if you wish to contact the organisers with any queries. Please visit our website: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/beckettworldlit/ for more information and for latest updates.

    This conference is supported by The Centre for Modern European Literature and the Humanities Faculty Research Fund, University of Kent.

 
With best wishes, 
 
Rosanne, Selvin and Titu

SBWL Conference Organisers 

 
University of Kent | Canterbury | Kent CT2 7NF | United Kingdom
Categories
CFPs

Political Demonology: The Logic of Evil in Contemporary Literature and Theology

Call for Papers

 

Political Demonology:

The Logic of Evil in Contemporary Literature and Theology

 

Day Conference – Friday, 20 May 2016

Worcester College, Oxford

 

This conference is intended to bring theologians, philosophers of religion, and literary scholars together to frame approaches to the problem of political evil—a project one might call ‘political demonology’—for our contemporary political and cultural crisis.

 

What or who is the political enemy? What is political evil or sin? If we are living in the age of ‘the complete triumph of the individual’ (Giles Châtelet), then the status of ‘individuality’ ‘subjectivity,’ and ‘soul,’ must be attended to in this context. But if individuality is coming to some kind of end (post-modern, post-capitalist, post-material, or otherwise), what moral-political regime is, or should be, appearing on the horizon? And what, then, is the meaning, place, and aesthetic of evil as a political phenomenon? Would the transformation of the individual mean liberation, oblivion, or even imply new forms of violence? And what is the role of statehood or the social? Through this interdisciplinary dialogue we seek to reformulate our own definitions, even as various contemporary crises violently reformulate them for us.

 

We seek 20-minute papers on any topic relating to ‘political demonology’—broadly defined as the genesis, location, logic, categorization, or implementation of political evil. Participants are encouraged to approach the topic from any angle. While we address ourselves to the present, historical approaches that illuminate the contemporary moment and our current conceptions are very welcome.

 

Questions to be considered might also include:

–      How might we define ‘political demonology’? What inheres in the act of pursuing, however speculatively, a political ‘demonology’? Is the concept of evil valuable to a political project?

–      From what point does evil arise in states and communities? What is its metaphysical horizon? How does it afflict political systems? Is it a personal, a systemic, or a substantial category? According to which logic does evil unfold? And what are the remedies—if they exist?

–      How might a contemporary understanding of political evil allow us to take a stance against the disposability of human beings, against self-reductionism and the privileging of self-management over creativity?

–      What are emerging metaphors and genres in the field of theological and literary hamartiology?

–      What might be the implications of the state of exception (Carl Schmitt) – reactionary, radical, or otherwise? Is transcendence an option or fiction? Can we talk about ‘radical evil’ or ‘radical good’?

 

Please send your abstract (200 words) to: demonologyoxford2016@gmail.com

by 20 March 2016

 

The conference is organized by the Political Demonology Working Group, initiated by Therese Feiler (Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Theology and Religion) and Michael Mayo (Junior Research Fellow in English, Worcester College).

CFP Political Demonology 20 May 2016

Categories
Seminars

Kinesthetic Modernism, Weds 2 March

We are very pleased to welcome Robin Veder (Penn State Harrisburg) to speak at the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar.

‘Embodied Elitism, Energy Regulation, and the American Audience for Modernism’

Wednesday 2 March, 6 pm, Senate House, London, Room 261

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

Categories
Workshop

Workshop at IASH Edinburgh

Call for Papers

Above. Degrees of Elevation

One-day workshop – 12 May 2016, IASH Edinburgh

Dreams of reaching the above have animated human beings for millennia, not least showing in the central role of ascension in religious, spiritual and cultural narratives and practices: Icarus’s doomed ascent towards the sun, Christ’s Ascension, or the levitation of saints, to name but a few. Next to the continued importance of such spiritual and mythological interpretations and connotations of height and elevation, the above has also been connected to ideas of modernity and “progress” in more recent history: genealogical trees reaching towards the realm of God, the history of flight as the conquering of the domain above with ever-improved technological tools, or the emergence of a modern “vertical” city epitomised by the skyscraper.

Reflections on the “vertical” dimension thus shape our understanding of basic human conditions and vice versa. Being always situated in space: “I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them.” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception 1962: 140), human beings use notions of verticality to reflect their relations, environments and relative positions. In negotiations of the above, spiritual and religious connotations of elevation merge with anticipations of modernity and its implications regarding technology, domination and power. That is, imaginations in Western modernity take place in a domain characterised by interrelations and tensions between the spiritual, the technological and the material. This dynamics for example shows in the development of flying contraptions to aid spiritual with bodily ascent, in the Romantic discovery of the Alps as means of sublime elevation, as well as in Gothic architecture, which provides edificial concretisation of the religious yearning for the above. Not least, the interactions between technological progress and spiritual elevation are apparent when the “giant leap for mankind” (Neil Armstrong) onto the moon in 1969 was answered by a surge in the popularity of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s “transcendental meditation” with its promises of elevation of body and mind without technological aids.

Given the significance of non-horizontal spatial dimensions, it is surprising that elevation and verticality have not been a major focus of analysis for scholars working on the construction of space and the urban and rural environment. Despite a generally increased interest in aspects of space, place and scale over the last decades, scholars obviously hesitate to include the “above” as an explicit reference point for their analyses. Only recently have urbanists and geographers begun to break with the dominance of the horizontal and turned to the third dimension of space. Some scholars even call for a “vertical turn” in order to highlight the need and value of accounting for the above and its relations (see Graham and Hewitt (2013), “Getting of the Ground: On the Politics of Urban Verticality”. Progress in Human Geography 37.1: 72-92).

The workshop “Above. Degrees of Elevation” aims to draw on this recently emerging scholarship on the vertical and study the relevance of non-horizontal spaces for the constitution of human relations and connect it with scholarly interests deriving from various disciplines. Not least due to its limited accessibility, the above constitutes a space with specific characteristics, and it has not only been constituted through technology but also, and significantly, through imaginative exploration. Given the inseparability of material and imaginative aspects of the above, the workshop aims to think these together and explore their interrelations and the negotiations between them. Indeed, while scholars from a wide range of fields are concerned with the vertical, more exchange is needed to account for and connect the various aspects that the above and movements of elevation imply. The workshop therefore invites contributions on aspects of degrees of elevation in modern Western society from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including literature, theology, film studies, history and sociology.

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words (for 20 min papers) and a short bio-note to Nina.Engelhardt@uni-koeln.de

by February 15, 2016.

The Venue

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities The University of Edinburgh
Hope Park Square
EdinburghEH8 9NW

The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities was established in 1969 to promote interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences at the University of Edinburgh. It provides an international, interdisciplinary and autonomous space for discussion and debate. This Workshop has been funded as a Royal Society of Edinburgh Susan Manning Workshop, in memory of IASH’s former Director, Susan Manning. For more information, please see http://www.iash.ed.ac.uk/about/introduction.