Author: modernistudies

Friday 8th and Saturday 9th July 2016

University of Westminster, London

Hosted by the Higher Education and Theory (HEAT) network, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture (University of Westminster) and the Philosophy of Education Research Centre (University of Winchester)

The conference is intended to provide an interdisciplinary forum for addressing how we might respond to the contemporary crisis or transformation of education without succumbing to conservative nostalgia for the past or an uncritical acquiescence to present forces in an increasingly corporately-driven agenda. The concept of the avant-garde will be used as a lens to focus these discussions.

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed a series of social, political, economic and technological upheavals that transformed aesthetics and contributed to a sense of the crisis of the arts and culture. While the technical developments of photography, radio and film, increasing commodification, the emergence of the culture industry and the rise of kitsch, mass and popular culture produced tensions within art that lead to a reactionary nostalgia for the culture of the past they also gave rise to a period of intense artistic innovation and experimentation that has come to be associated with modernism and the avant-garde. As Poggioli Renato puts it, avant-garde literature sought to be not a ‘display case or a salesroom but a free, or least an open, laboratory’.

In his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger claimed the avant-garde turns against both ‘the distribution apparatus on which the work of art depends, and the status of art in bourgeois society as defined by the concept of the autonomy’. If the publication of Bürger’s book in 1974 perhaps marks the point of avant-garde art’s exhausted collapse into postmodernism, Hannah Arendt was already in the 1950s anticipating an attendant ‘crisis of education’. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a comparable series of transformations – the rise of the internet and new media, the dominance of the education industry, commodification and indebtedness, globalisation and the growth of mass and popular education – have lead teachers, scholars and activists to talk increasingly of a contemporary assault on education.

In response to these claims, this conference seeks to address these issues through the lens of the avant-garde. It seeks to recover an alternative perspective for theoretical approaches beyond the impasses designated by classical philosophies and postmodern theories of education. For the avant-garde is ‘not that which is most historically advanced in the sense that it has most history behind it’ but, as Peter Osborne suggests, that which ‘disrupts the linear time-consciousness of progress in such a way as to enable us, like the child, to “discover the new anew” and, along with it, the possibility of a better future’. Or, as Jacques Rancière more succinctly claims, the avant-garde is ‘the aesthetic anticipation of the future’.

A hundred years on from the frenetic flurry of movements and manifestoes that characterized the high point of modernism and the avant-garde in art, this conference asks where can we find the comparable experimentation in pedagogical theory and practice or the open laboratory of learning? How might such modernist or avant-garde impulses in the arts provide a framework for calling into question not merely traditional or bourgeois pedagogical ideas, techniques and the distribution apparatus upon which education depends, but perhaps also the dominance and assumed value of higher education itself within contemporary society?

Currently Confirmed Speakers:

Alan Golding (English, Louisville, KY.), author of ‘Isn’t the avant-garde always pedagogical: Experimental Poetics and/as Pedagogy’ (2006) and From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (1995).

Aislinn O’Donnell (Learning, Society and Religious Education, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick), author of ‘Experimental Philosophy and Pedagogy’ (2015) and ‘Another Relationship to Failure: Reflections on Beckett, Failure and Education’ (2014).

Gary Peters (Faculty of Arts, York St John University), author of ‘Ignorant Students/Ignorant Teachers’ (2010) and Irony and Singularity: Aesthetic Education from Kant to Levinas (2005).

Hannah Proctor (English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London), author of ‘Synthetic Dreams: Gender, Modernity and Art Silk Stockings’ (2015) and ‘Neuronal Ideologies: Catherine Malabou’s Explosive Plasticity in Light of the Marxist Psychology of A. R. Luria’ (2011).

Peter Roberts (School of Educational Studies and Leadership, University of Canterbury, NZ), author of Happiness, Hope, and Despair: Rethinking the Role of Education (2016) and Better Worlds: Education, Art, and Utopia (2013).

Stevphen Shukaitis (Centre for Work, Organization and Society, University of Essex), author of “Pedagogical Labor in an Age of Devalued Reproduction” (2016) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics & Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde (2016).

Titles & abstracts to be sent to Matthew Charles by Tuesday 1st March 2016: M.Charles1@westminster.ac.uk

Possible Areas of Interest:

 Aesthetic education: Dada, Fluxist, Futurist, Surrealist or Vorticist perspectives

 Avant-garde architecture and spaces of learning

 Avant-garde pedagogies and institutional critique: unschooling, unlearning

 Chance, spontaneity, the irrational and the unconscious: towards anti-constructivist theories of learning

 Cognitive capitalism and teaching in the creative industries

 Contradictions of contemporary pedagogy: education and anti-education

 “Dada means nothing”: pedagogical pessimism, educational nihilism

 Ezra Pound as educator: teaching literature

 Feminism, modernism and education: Amy Lowell, H. D., May Sinclair and Virginia Woolf

 “Grand Pedagogy”: Brecht’s Didacticism

 Historic, Neo- and Post-Avant-gardes and education

 Kitsch, education and public policy

 Pedagogical experimentations and innovations: flipped, blended, hybrid learning and the avant-garde

 Queer Pedagogies/Queering Education

 The Academy and the avant-garde: dependence and resistance

 The poets, artists and pedagogues of the Black Mountain College

 The Russian avant-garde, biomechanics, Soviet psychology: historical, dialectical and anthropological materialist theories of education

 Torn-halves: elite education, the Educational Industry and Adorno

 Walter Benjamin on teaching in the age of digital reproducibility

Many thanks,

Matthew

University of Bologna  6/7 September 2016

Confirmed Speakers:

Stephen Bann, University of Bristol

Howard J. Booth, University of Manchester

Jan Montefiore, University of Kent

Harry Ricketts, Victoria University of Wellington

Papers are invited that address Rudyard Kipling’s engagement with the history, politics, and culture of mainland Europe. Though he reached a huge audience there, Kipling’s response to, and impact upon, continental Europe has been little discussed – an omission this conference aims to address. More can be said than that he loved France and its culture and held negative views about Germany. In fact, his response to continental Europe was complex, and changed over time. Kipling had a keen sense of Europe’s history, whether political, religious and cultural. Importantly, the European and British Empire contexts – where Kipling is usually viewed in terms of the latter – are not wholly separate and distinct. The global politics of Kipling’s time was formed by competing, mostly European, nations, empires and political movements.

Possible themes for papers include

• Kipling and Italy, France, Germany or other nations of mainland Europe
• Kipling, Europe and modernity
• The translation, publishing history and reception of Kipling’s works in mainland Europe
• Kipling and European nationalism
• The wider European dimensions of the history of the British Isles, and its nations and regions, in Kipling’s writing
• Kipling and an independent Ireland
• Kipling, Britain’s empire and other European empires
• Kipling and the European theatres of the First World War
• Kipling and medieval Europe
• Kipling, travel and mainland Europe
• Kipling and the European Left
• Kipling, Europe and wartime propaganda
• Kipling and the rise of Fascism and Nazism
• Kipling, Europe and the United States
• Kipling and European writers and artists

A special issue of The Kipling Journal is planned arising from the conference (subject to its usual peer review process)

Proposals of 250 words for 20-25 minute papers should be sent to Prof. Monica Turci, University of Bologna, at the conference email address kiplingandeurope@gmail.com by 20 February 2016.

Have you Heard…?

Navigating the Interstices Between Public and Private Knowledge

The annual MHRA Conference

Friday, 14 October 2016

at the Institute of Modern Languages Research,

University of London, Senate House, London WC1E 7HU

Keynote speakers: Professor Alison Sinclair (University of Cambridge) and Dr Filippo de Vivo (Birkbeck College, University of London)

One of the things that makes us human is language, both in the power of speech, and the production of written texts. How do ideas and opinions get into the public domain, and what is the nature of the sometimes fragile boundary between public and private?  The aim of this conference is to explore the power and vicissitudes of the transmission of knowledge, and of unofficial modes of communication.  Its intention is to go beyond the corpus of public elite literature and to bring into consideration the transmission of knowledge in a broad range of forms, including the trivial and ephemeral (as in pamphlets, chapbooks, street literature and newspapers). This range of material allows us to explore the cultural imaginary in ways that are many, various and erratically policed.  What we choose to suppress in terms of public knowledge may well be as significant as what we choose to propagate. This interdisciplinary conference aims to consider the interactions between public and private knowledge, and the ambiguous, unofficial space that lies between.

We invite proposals covering a range of periods (from the medieval and early-modern to the twenty-first century) and across different national contexts (including French-, Hispanic-, Germanic-, Italian-, Slavonic- and English-speaking cultures).  We hope to attract scholars working in different fields (Modern Languages, English studies, Comparative Literature, Cultural History, Film and Media studies and Digital Humanities, Performance and Reception History, History of the Book and of Print Culture, and others).  Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• Unofficial production and consumption:  peddling, trafficking, barter
• Purposeful or purposeless dissemination of news, ideas, opinion, images
• Construction, regulation, censorship: public opinion, the cultural imaginary
• Gossip, rumour and the power of hearsay
• Gender and power in public and private knowledge
• Private vs published materials: correspondences, diaries, the ‘hidden’ archive
• Theorising the ‘unofficial’ (theorists might include, but are not limited to: Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Habermas, Foucault, Simmel, de Certeau)
• Questions of power and pleasure in the reception and/or dissemination of knowledge

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers.  Please send your abstract – of no more than 250 words – accompanied by a short biographical statement on the same page, to a.lewis@bbk.ac.uk by 15 February 2016.

“Culture Industries”

Pasadena, CA, November 17-20, 2016

Hosts: Claremont Graduate University and Pomona College

Deadlines:

Seminar Proposals: February 26, 2016

Workshop Proposals: February 26, 2016

Panel, Roundtable, and Digital Exhibition Proposals: April 15, 2016

The term “culture industries” may have been coined almost a century ago, but it remains as relevant as ever and provides the theme for the 2016 MSA annual conference in Pasadena, California. New modes of cultural production and consumption continue to inform our everyday lives, and they are increasingly shaped by the presence of innovative transport, communication, and media technologies. If distances are shrinking as a result, we need to continue addressing how the concepts of urban/regional, national/transnational, local/global cultures are getting redefined in the process. Southern California is an ideal site for such an exercise: once the capital of a monolithic culture industry reviled by Theodor Adorno, it has remained a lively nexus for an ethnically diverse population that encourages the proliferation of cultures in the plural. An ongoing challenge, then, involves the close examination of how the very concept of culture is increasingly bound up with new ways of thinking about old distinctions between high and low, serious and popular, aesthetics and form, politics and identity, self and other, human and machine. Topics for papers on this theme may also include:

• interdisciplinary approaches to design
• ecological utopias
• static institutions and portable archives
• digital non-humanities
• altered experiences of time and space
• unimaginable communities
• media mashups
• modernity as barbarity
• the persistence of print

The conference organizers for “Culture Industries” invite proposals for seminars and pre-conference workshops (due Feb. 26), panels, roundtables, poster sessions, multimedia/digital exhibitions (due April 15). We encourage proposals relevant to the conference theme but welcome panel, seminar, and roundtable proposals on all topics related to modernism. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its relevance to the conference theme. We ask that proposals provide complete panels and roundtables. Individuals seeking to create or to participate in a panel or roundtable are encouraged to visit the MSA CFP page or the MSA Facebook page for guidelines to develop and opportunities to promote a panel or roundtable. All proposals must include requests for AV provisions.

All queries should be directed to MSAPasadena@gmail.com.

Streams: In order to encourage interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches and to draw upon the special opportunities presented by this year’s Southern California location, the Pasadena organizers will be considering panels run under two special streams: “Dream Factories,” which will focus on extraliterary topics such as surrealism, psychoanalysis, fashion, architecture, cinema and design; and “California and the Cultures of Modernism,” which will consider linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity within modernism. If you are interested in proposing a panel linked to either of these streams, please make this clear in your proposal. Please direct questions about streams to the Program Chair, Lisi Schoenbach, at aschoenb@utk.edu, or to the Chair of Interdisciplinary Approaches, Scott Klein, at klein@wfu.edu.

Participation: Because we wish to involve as many people as possible as active participants, the MSA limits multiple appearances on the program. Thus, you may participate once, but only once, in each of the following categories:

• Seminar, either as leader or as participant • Panel or roundtable, as participant (you may also chair a different panel or roundtable) • “What Are You Reading?” session

You may lead a seminar, present a paper on a panel, and participate in a “What Are You Reading” session, but you may not present two papers. MSA rules do not allow panel or roundtable organizers to chair their own session if they are also speaking in the session. The session chair must be someone who is otherwise not participating in the session. Panel organizers are encouraged to identify a moderator and include this information with their proposals; the MSA Program Committee can also ask another conference attendee to serve as a moderator. Participation in a pre-conference workshop or in a digital exhibition does not constrain other forms of participation.

All those who attend the MSA conference must be members of the organization with dues paid for 2016-2017 (MSA membership runs from July 1 until June 30 each year.) For information on MSA, please check the website. Participants are expected to present in person.

CALL FOR SEMINAR PROPOSALS 

Deadline: February 26, 2015

Seminars are among the most unique features of the MSA conference. Participants write brief position papers (5-7 pages) that are circulated and read prior to the conference. Because their size is limited to 15 participants, seminars generate lively exchange and often facilitate future collaborations. The format also allows a larger number of conference attendees to seek financial support from their institutions as they educate themselves and their colleagues on subjects of mutual interest. Seminars are two hours in length. Because seminars led solely by graduate students are not likely to be accepted, we encourage interested graduate students to invite a faculty member to lead the seminar with them. Please note that this is the call for seminar leaders. Sign-up for seminar participants will take place on a first-come, first-served basis coinciding with registration for the conference.

Seminar Topics: There are no limits on topics, but past experience has shown that the more clearly defined the topic and the more guidance provided by the leader, the more productive the discussion. “Clearly defined” should not be confused with “narrow,” as extremely narrow seminar topics tend to exclude many potential participants. To scan past seminar topics, go to the Conference Archives http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/archive.html on the MSA website, click the link to a prior conference, and then click on “Conference Schedule” or “Conference Program.” You’ll find seminars listed along with panels and other events.

Submit proposals by February 26, 2016 by completing the following online form: MSA 18 Seminar Proposal Form.

CALL FOR PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP PROPOSALS
Deadline: February 26, 2016

Pre-conference workshops are held on the Thursday that the conference begins. They focus on topics related to professional life, such as publishing, teaching, the job market, mid-career challenges and opportunities, research and the liberal arts college, and alternative/non-academic jobs. Popular workshops in previous years have been on topics including, “What Do Presses Want from a First Book?,” “Digital Approaches to Modernism,” and “Critical Writing.” Participation in a pre-conference workshop does not constrain participation in other aspects of the conference.

Workshops should be participatory in format and can be either 90 or 120 minutes in length. They may be entirely led by one person or may include a panel of experts. Please note that this call is for workshop leaders and that you should be prepared to arrive at the conference venue. Registration for workshops will occur at the same time as conference registration.

Submit proposals by February 26, 2016 by completing the following online form: MSA18 Thursday Workshop Proposal Form.

CALL FOR PANEL PROPOSALS 
Deadline: April 15, 2016

Successful proposals will introduce topics that promise to expand research and debate on a topic, and will present a clear rationale for the papers’ collective goal. Panel proposals that engage recent contentious research, exciting new approaches, or theoretical interventions into the field are encouraged. Topics are not limited to the theme conference theme.

Please bear in mind these guidelines:
We encourage interdisciplinary panels and strongly discourage panels on single authors. In order to allow for discussion, preference will be given to panels with three participants, though panels of four will be considered. Panels composed entirely of participants from a single department at a single institution are not likely to be accepted. Graduate students are welcome as panelists, but panels composed entirely of graduate students are less likely to be accepted than panels that include postdoctoral presenters together with graduate students.

Submit proposals by completing the following online form by April 15, 2016: MSA 18 Panel Proposal Form.

CALL FOR ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS
Deadline: April 15, 2016

All topics will be considered for roundtables, but we encourage proposals that develop the theme of the conference. Unlike panels, which generally feature a sequence of 15-20 minute talks followed by discussion, roundtables gather a group of participants around a shared concern in order to generate discussion among the participants and with the audience. To this end, instead of delivering full-length papers, participants are asked to deliver short position statements in response to questions distributed in advance by the organizer or to take turns responding to prompts from the moderator. The bulk of the session should be devoted to discussion. No paper titles are listed in the program, only the names of participants. Please bear in mind these guidelines:

Roundtables may feature as many as 6 speakers. We particularly welcome roundtables featuring participants from multiple disciplines, and we discourage roundtables on single authors. Roundtables composed entirely of participants from a single department at a single institution are not likely to be accepted. Graduate students are welcome as speakers, but roundtables composed entirely of graduate students are less likely to be accepted than those that include postdoctoral presenters together with graduate students.

Submit proposals by completing the following online form by April 15, 2016: Roundtable Proposal Form .

CALL FOR POSTER SESSIONS AND DIGITAL EXHIBITS
Deadline: April 15, 2016

Reflecting the growing role of the digital humanities in modernist studies and the proliferation of work that does not lend itself to presentation in the form of a scholarly paper, we invite proposals that provide a short overview (including web links) of 1) the nature, design, and purpose of a digital project; 2) how the project advances modernist studies; and 3) how the presenters would want to exhibit and explain the project at the conference. Be sure to list all participants and institutions involved in the project, and specify who among these would attend the conference.

Submit proposals by completing the following online form by April 15, 2016: Poster Session and Digital Exhibit Form.

Conference Access

The MSA is committed to ensuring that all conference registrants will be able to participate in conference events.

We ask that all conference attendees give thought to questions of access and work with the conference organizers to create an event that is welcoming to the entire community of participants.

If you would benefit from individual accommodations including, but not limited to, ASL translation, paper copies of session presentations, or large type documents, please contact the Program Committee Chair, Lisi Schoenbach, at aschoenb@utk.edu.

Call for Papers: Mood – Aesthetic, Psychological and Philosophical Perspectives

A Two-day Conference at the University of Warwick

6^th and 7^th May 2016

Keynote speakers:

Prof Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature, Stanford University)

Author of Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of Literature (2012), Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (2004) and After 1945 – Latency as Origin of the Present (2013).

Prof Giovanna Colombetti (Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University of Exeter)

Author of The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (2014) and co-editor of Emotion Experience, a 2005 special edition of the Journal of Consciousness Studies.

Mood is an affective phenomenon located at the intersection of philosophy, aesthetics, musicology, psychology and sociology. It is as central to our experience of the world and of art as it is difficult to grasp theoretically. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, this two-day conference will foster an interdisciplinary discourse about the nature of mood and its significance for human and aesthetic experience. As an emerging topic in literary criticism, mood has been problematised in a number of recent publications, in which critics have turned to other disciplines, especially psychology and musicology, in order to develop theories of mood. At the same time, scientific disciplines, such as psychiatry and cognitive science, examine this phenomenon empirically in relation to mood disorders like depression. However, thus far the interdisciplinary potential harboured by mood has not been explored sufficiently. The main objective of this conference is to bring together and to create synergy between disciplines whose research addresses the same phenomenon in different ways.

Summarising the outcomes of the conference, we wish to submit a book proposal for an edited volume on mood with articles that bring together perspectives on mood from the disciplines mentioned above. This publication shall foster a vivid interdisciplinary discussion about the nature and significance of mood as an emerging topic in the humanities, social sciences and in the sciences, contributing to the process of conceptualising mood from a perspective that is not limited to the arts but is also informed by philosophical thought and scientific research.

CALL FOR PAPERS:

We invite abstracts of up to 300 words, plus a brief biography, for papers of no more than 20 minutes or panels of three associated papers. We encourage submissions that address the concept of mood from a theoretical or interdisciplinary angle. Submissions can cover but are not limited to the following questions and topics:

• Concepts of mood/‘Stimmung’ in philosophy:
  • Heidegger’s ‘Stimmung’
  • Aesthetics and mood in Kant, Schiller et al.
  • Kierkegaard, existentialism and anxiety
• Mood in psychology, psychiatry and cognitive science
  • Mood and its relationship to the concepts of emotion and affect
  • Mood disorders: depression, bipolar disorder, etc.
  • Empirical studies of mood
  • Neurological and cognitive foundations of mood
• Aesthetics of mood
  • Aesthetics and theories of mood in literature
    • Concepts of mood, atmosphere, disposition and ethos in literature
    • Pathetic fallacy
    • The moods of Romanticism, Modernism, etc.
  • Mood in film and theatre
    • Cinematic and theatrical atmospheres
    • Cinematic portraits of mood: Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia, von Trier’s Melancholia, etc.
  • Mood and music: theories of ‘Stimmung’, attunement, harmony and dissonance
• Politics of mood/social moods
  • Normativity and mood
  • Social moods/collective states of mind/Prechter’s concept of mood in socionomics
• Mood in linguistics/grammatical mood
• Specific moods, such as:
  • Anxiety
  • Boredom
  • Melancholy
  • Ennui
  • Paranoia
  • Exhilaration
  • Ecstasy
  • Awkwardness

Abstracts should be sent to mood.warwick2016@gmail.com by 29 February 2016.

For more information, please visit

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/conferences/mood2016.

This conference is organised by Prof Thomas Docherty and Birgit Breidenbach (Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies) and funded by the Humanities Research Centre, the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies and the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts at the University of Warwick.