Author: modernistudies

Periodical Counter Cultures: Tradition, Conformity, and Dissent 

CALL FOR PAPERS

The 5th International Conference of the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit), www.espr-it.eu

7-8 July 2016
Liverpool John Moores University, UK

From the Black Dwarf to the little magazines of the European avant-gardes, from protest literature of the industrial revolution to the samizdat publications of the Soviet Bloc, from Punch to punk, periodical publications have long been associated with a challenge to dominant and mainstream culture. For ESPRit 2016 we return to this aspect of periodical culture, exploring the counter-cultural role of periodicals with particular emphasis on comparative and methodological points of view. Proposals are invited on topics that include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Periodicals as sites for the genesis and dissemination of counter-cultural ideas, programmes, and manifestos
• The assimilation of periodical counter cultures into the tradition
• Theoretical and methodological approaches to the periodical as counter culture and as establishment
• The agency of periodicals at threshold moments of social, political, and cultural change
• Illegal and underground publications
• The interplay between established periodicals and radical newcomers
• Change and disruption in the history of long-standing periodicals

ESPRit encourages proposals that speak both within and across local, regional and national boundaries and especially those that are able to offer a comparative perspective. We also encourage proposals that examine the full range of periodical culture, that is, all types of periodical publication, including newspapers and specialist magazines, and all aspects of the periodical as an object of study, including design and backroom production.

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers (max 250 words), panels of three or four papers, round tables, one-hour workshops or other suitable sessions, together with a short CV (max. one page), to 2016esprit@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 25 January 2016.

Esprit 2016 cfp-2

Athens School of Fine Arts, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens

21-22 October 2016

Poet, critic, curator, and theoretician Nicolas Calas’s work spanned the formation of modernism in Greece, the theoretical and political orientation of French Surrealism in the late 1930s, Surrealism’s American interlude in the 1940s, and the directions of postwar art in the US. This symposium seeks to open Calas’s theories and practice to a broader public and invites proposals from scholars and creative artists to reflect upon the contexts of his theoretical, critical, poetic output, as well as his curatorial practice and involvement within the art world. Addressing this important yet for a time neglected or mythologised figure of the transcontinental avant-garde, this symposium aims to reappraise Calas and present new work on under-researched angles and hitherto unexplored connections with artists, critics, and scholars of his own time. The intention is to explore the important interfaces of Calas’s writings on art, theory, his poetry and politics, and engage with him as a ‘nomadic sage’ moving across and within different cultures and critical idioms.

Parallel events will also comprise a series of workshops and an exhibition that will be hosted at the Athens School of Fine Arts. The workshops will be organised under three thematic clusters,poetics, politics, paradox, and will invite practicing artists who work in different media to respond to the diverse contexts of Calas’s work and engage with The Elena and Nicolas Calas archive that is held in The Nordic Library in Athens. The symposium will coincide with the opening of the exhibition that will present work produced in the workshops.

Plenary speaker: Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, City University of New York

Please send proposals (250 words) for 20-minute papers together with a short bio note toregardingcalas@gmail.com by April 30, 2016.

Possible lines of enquiry ‘regarding Nicolas Calas’ may include:

•              Politics, poetry and psychoanalysis and their influence on Calas’s thought and practice

•              Surrealist affinities and Calas’s eclecticism and unique voice

The American art scene during the Cold War

•              The contexts of Abstract Expressionism, Calas’s participation at The Club, his exchange with Barnett Newman and other up-and-coming artists of the European and American art scenes such as Jasper Johns, Marcel Broodthaers, Chryssa, Takis, George Brecht, Fluxus, John Cage et al.

•              Calas’s writings for art magazines such as View, Tiger’s Eye, Artforum, Art Magazineet al.

Calas in the Village Voice

•              Calas as educator

•              The influence of anthropology and his collaborations with Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict

•              Calas’s relation to Breton

•              Calas’s relation to Bataille and the Collège de sociologie

•              Calas as collector, curator and art director of various galleries, including his close relationship with Peggy Guggenheim, Marian Goodman, Lawrence Alloway,  and other gallerists, curators and collectors

•              His unfinished magnus opus on Hieronymus Bosch

•              Calas across and against the grain: affiliations and genealogies from St Paul to the Beats

•              Calas and the baroque

Regarding Nicolas Calas is organised by Mata Dimakopoulou, (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens), Vassiliki Kolocotroni, (University of Glasgow), Irini Marinaki, (Phd in Art History, Τhe London Consortium, University of London), Tereza Papamichali, (Phd candidate in Fine Art, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw), Konstantinos Stefanis, (Phd in Art History, Τhe London Consortium, University of London), Vassilis Vlastaras (Athens School of Fine Arts)

5 July 2016 – Warsaw, Poland

organised by Interdisciplinary Research Foundation

Elizabeth Bowen occupies a special place among twentieth-century writers. A superb novelist and a master of short story, she is known for her exquisite style and unconventional narrative technique. For the deep psychological insight she demonstrates in her works, Bowen has been called the “anatomist of consciousness”, the “historian and custodian of memory”. Her fiction has been considered in the light of modernist experimentalism and realist innovation, Gothic tradition and gender studies. However her contribution to world literature has been considerably underestimated and overshadowed by the achievements of canonical writers of the time.

The Conference seeks to explore the work of Elizabeth Bowen, both fiction and non-fiction, as well as works of other writers, artists, film-makers or scholars inspired by Bowen’s life and writing. We invite proposals from various disciplines including literature, linguistics, culture studies, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and arts.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• (Anglo-)Irish modernist fiction

• colonial and post-colonial literature

• Big House tradition

• home and domesticity

• bizarre objects

• Gothic sensibilities and the uncanny

• war time fiction

• memory and trauma

• displacement and exile

• marriage and motherhood

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 20 March 2016 to: bowen@irf-network.org. Download paper proposal form.

Full registration fee – 70 €         Student registration fee – 50 €

The registration fee covers all conference materials, coffee breaks, lunch, Warsaw city tour and post-conference publication.

Conference venue: As-Bud Conference Centre, Al. Jerozolimskie 81, Warsaw

 University of York, 1-2 July 2016

Prof Simon Jarvis (Cambridge)

Dr Natalie Pollard (Exeter)

poeticmeasures@gmail.com

https://poeticmeasures.wordpress.com/ 

How do we measure poetry? The words ‘measure’ and ‘meter’, with their shared etymological origin in the Greek metron, have a long history of being used synonymously. When William Carlos Williams wrote that ‘[t]he key to modern poetry is measure, which must reflect the flux of modern life’, however, he proposed ‘measure’ as an alternative to the metrical foot in response to ‘the flux of modern life’ that demanded measures of more fluid and unstable permutations.

The ‘formless spawning fury’ of ‘this filthy modern tide’ compels W.B. Yeats in his poem ‘The Statues’ to search alternative measures from other art forms. Describing ‘the lineaments of a plummet-measured face’, the poem aligns itself formally with solidity and precision of sculpture, and rearticulates measurement in terms of spatial, rather than temporal, co-ordinates. Giorgio Agamben, for one, measured the ‘lineaments’ of a poem’s form by the tension between the line break and the sentence to define the lyric poem, a tension Jorie Graham described as ‘the pull from the end, the suction towards closure, and the voice trying (quite desperately in spots) to find forms of delay, digression, side-motions which are not entirely dependent for their effectiveness on that sense-of-the-ending, that stark desire’. These ‘side-motions’ of a poem’s lineation resist the linearity of the sentence, using ‘forms of delay’ not to heighten suspense, but to bypass conventional expectations of closure.

Although Eliot, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, may have claimed that poetry can only be ‘measured’ against the ‘standards of the past’, his contention has to accommodate increasingly diverse and contested versions of both the past and the present. We thus welcome papers analysing the disparate measures modern poetry takes in a period of accelerated change, but also in a period symptomizing pervasive continuities in structures of privilege: papers investigating how we might count out poetry, but also how ‘measured language’ and its different uses might make poetry count.

Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:

• form and genre
• scale in poetry
• brevity and length
• poetic sequences

• units of measurement in poetry
• form, proportion and balance
• the immeasurable and/or non-measurable in poetry
• beginnings and ends
• poetry and other art forms: music, visual arts and/or craft; ekphrasis
• poetry and architecture
• poetry and mathematics
• modernism and canon formation; periodization

Please send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers or panel proposals by 1^st February 2016 topoeticmeasures@gmail.com, and a separate biography of no more than 100 words. The biography should be written in the third person. Please attach the biography and abstract as two separate Word documents.

Poetic Measures Poster

Poetic Measures CFP