Author: modernistudies

DRAFF

5th–6th August, 2016

Trinity College Dublin

Keynote speakers:
Mark Nixon (University of Reading)

Dirk Van Hulle (Universiteit Antwerpen)

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Deadline for abstracts: 15th November, 2015

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‘I don’t suppose many people know what “Draff” is, but if they look it up, they will be put off.’

Charles Prentice to Samuel Beckett (25th September, 1933)

As suggested by his original title for More Pricks Than Kicks (1934), and proved by the pochades, roughs, foirades, and (un)abandoned works of his mature œuvre, works often presented by their author as being no more than the run-off from the creative process, Beckett was anything but put off by draff. The same can surely be said of the scholars who have long devoted themselves to studying Beckett’s aesthetic engagement with the seemingly worthless.

In recent decades, however, Beckett Studies’ fascination with the residual has taken a much more literal meaning as the field, as well as its perception of Beckett and his art, has been reshaped by unprecedented access to the refuse, dregs, and lees of a voluminous archive, as well as the blackened pages of forgotten diaries and private correspondence. Despite, or perhaps because of, this flood of fresh effluvia, however, particular aspects of, and questions pertaining to, Beckett’s canon have been left unexamined, understudied, or wholly ignored.

Taking place next year in Trinity College Dublin, two decades after Damned to Fame(1996) opened a new chapter in Beckett scholarship, this bilingual conference invites proposals for 20-minute papers, in English or French, from prospective delegates who, sharing Beckett’s conviction in the value of what is left behind, are keen to pick through the ends and odds of Beckett Studies:

• Why, for instance, does Beckett’s poetry continue to attract so little critical attention?
• The nature of Beckett’s relation to Joyce and Proust has provoked much debate, but what are we to make of Beckett’s lesser-studied literary influences (e.g. Burton, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Hölderlin)?
• What are the correspondences between Beckett’s writing and the lesser-studied cultural and political spaces in which he lived and worked, such as France during the Franco-Algerian war?
• As we deepen our awareness of the role played by the visual arts in Beckett’s work, what might that same work have owed to his keen ear for music and his love of certain composers (e.g. Beethoven’s pauses, Schubert’s Lieder)?
• At a time of increasing interest in the bilingual Beckett, what was the role of Beckett’s lesser-known languages (e.g. German, Latin, Spanish) and, as we come to a better knowledge of Beckett’s own work as a translator, what might there be to gain in examining how Beckett’s art has been reimagined by those translators – and performers – who have made his words heard in languages he himself did not speak (e.g. Chinese, Dutch, Polish)?
• With the approaching publication of the German Diaries and the final volume of Beckett’s letters, to what uses can and should scholars put the inestimable trove of material represented by the biographic archive?
• How might the publication of such (auto)biographic material affect our appreciation of Beckett’s canons – the published, the ‘grey’, and the emerging? Where within this continuum should we situate the work he consigned to the wastepaper basket or, indeed, the ‘old shit’ he allowed to be republished?

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, in English or French, as well as a short bio of no more than 150 words, should be sent to conference organisers Stephen Stacey and James Little at draff2016@gmail.com no later than 15th November 2015.

Whilst prospective delegates are encouraged to consider those topics outlined above, proposals for papers addressing any heretofore under-analysed aspect of Beckett’s ‘literary waste’ are warmly welcomed for this two-day conference, during which both Beckett’s and Beckett Studies’ disjecta membra will be dragged into the ‘pestiferous sunlight’ of scholarly discourse.

International D.H. Lawrence Conference St Ives Cornwall 12-14 September 2016

“Outside England…Far off from the world”: D.H. Lawrence, Cornwall and Regional Modernism

Organised in association with the University of Exeter Penryn Campus, this conference will be held at the Tregenna Castle Hotel St Ives to commemorate the centenary of                    D.H. Lawrence’s move to the nearby village of Zennor.

In the midst of the Great War, Lawrence arrived in Zennor following a brief stay in Porthcothan in North Cornwall. His description of Porthcothan as “Outside England…Far off from the world” shows the impression this place made on his imagination, but his reaction to Zennor was even more remarkable: “When we came over the shoulder of the wild hill, above the sea, to Zennor, I felt we were coming into the Promised Land. I know there will a new heaven and a new earth take place now: we have triumphed…this isn’t merely territory, it is a new continent of the soul”.

In seeking to highlight the significance of Lawrence’s fascination with Cornwall, this conference will use his response to that place as a way into looking at broader issues in his work and, more widely, the position of place in British modernism. In the context of Lawrence’s utterances about the Midlands, which have attracted much critical attention, it will probe Lawrence’s use of the term “outside England” to describe his response to Cornwall that, by comparison, has been largely overlooked. Whilst this conference seeks to bring together scholars and postgraduates to focus on the role of place in the work of D.H. Lawrence, it will also consider the significance of peripherality and localism, creative responses to marginalisation, the expression of disparities between imagined and familiar locations and the legacy of pastoral experience in modernist literature. In interrogating these ideas, it intends to contribute to broader discussions about the complex and interrelated relationship between place and the literary imagination.

Whilst we particularly welcome abstracts that consider all aspects of D.H. Lawrence’s—often fluctuating—responses to place, either pastoral or city and especially to Cornwall, we also invite papers on other related topics that focus on the significance of place in the modernist period, which may include but are not limited to;

Consideration of how perceptions of particular places can alter in reaction to traumatic events such as war

The construction of place as the Other

Differences between literary interpretations of place and the lived experience of the inhabitants of that place

The conflict between the pastoral and the city in modernist experience and writing

The impact of outsiders into rural communities

Groupings of literary, political or cultural figures that were encouraged by specific locations or any consequences of these associations

The relationship between place and the literary form

The tensions between class/race/gender and pastoral/city places

Literary interpretations of the connections between history and place

The relevance of place in attempts to find a more hopeful future

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for proposed 25 minute papers to

dhlcornwall@btinternet.com

cfp deadline: 1 December 2015 successful applicants will be notified by 1 February 2016.

There will be an opportunity for selected papers to be published in a special conference edition of the journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society.

The conference will be held at the Tregenna Castle Hotel St Ives which is within walking distance of this artistically alluring seaside town that Lawrence knew well. St Ives can be reached by train from London Paddington (changing at St Erth).

Further information regarding the conference is available at

www.lawrencecornwall.wix.com/conference

• more traditional translation work, such as work for the Poets’ Translation Series edited by Richard Aldington, Yeats’s King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, and Louis MacNeice’s Agamemnon;
• more experimental translation work by modernists such as Pound (e.g. Homage to Sextus Propertius, Women of Trachis) and H.D. (e.g. Hippolytus Temporizes, Ion); 
• freer appropriations and adaptations of Classical material, such as H.D.’s responses to Sappho and Meleager; Pound’s and Joyce’s engagements with the Odyssey; Pound’s and H.D.’s work with the Eleusinian mysteries; and Cummings’s experiments with Catullus, Homer, and Greek myth.