Author: modernistudies

Touching the Body in Pieces: Affective Ecologies of the Modern Body (NeMLA- March 2016, Hartford, CT)

From artist Hans Bellmer’s distorted dolls, to Rupert Brooke’s “dust” in a “corner of a foreign field,” to Virginia Woolf’s “orts, scraps, and fragments,” bodies – textual, phenomenological, cultural, political, and physical – seem to fall to pieces in modernism. How can we conceptualize the modern body in light of its affective and ecological surrounds?

Broadly, this panel seeks to examine these ecologies of bodies and their surrounds in modernism. Specifically, we endeavor to explore textual bodies and their composition (or decomposition) in ways that help us understand the ecological placement of the body as it engages with modernism’s historical and physical environments. What is the relation of modern bodies to both “hard” and “soft” surrounds? How is the natural body “queered” by the natural world or other surroundings? Does the queer intervene in these conceptions of dualistic bodies, as Judith Butler argues? How is the wounded body – which seems to negotiate both the hard and soft by opening permeable bodily and subjective bounds – represented in or through landscapes of war, or in relationships with nature and landscape? What is embodiment, or what are the boundaries of the body and its hard surrounds if the body itself is an affective environment or ecology of its own? How does modernity’s affective shift register or occlude a relationship between subject the “outside”? How is the body and/or its emotions disseminated, or dismantled? Related elements to consider could include WWI, WWII, “publicity,” cities and urbanity, T.S. Eliot’s cool impersonality, nation or politics, robotic or prosthetic bodies; and in parallel, the domestic, rurality, sentimentality, the homefront, sympathy or suffrage.

We welcome all approaches to the question of the modern body’s conceptualization or re-/de-conceptualization, including those that cross disciplinary bounds.

Go to http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15703 to submit a 200-300 word abstract by September 30, 2015. Email molly_hall@my.uri.edu or kara_watts@my.uri.edu with any questions.

CALL FOR PAPERS

University of Warwick, 22-23 January 2016

Translation was an integral part of the literary practice of many twentieth-century writers and thinkers. It provided them with such an important lens for viewing other cultures and their own past that, as Steven Yao argues, the period of modernism could well be dubbed ‘an age of translations’. This conference seeks to explore the role of translation in the development of literary, religious, and philosophical responses to the new realities of the twentieth century, in particular, the disappearance of a stable religious framework and the traumas of totalitarianism, the World Wars, and the Holocaust. The conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, early career researchers and doctoral candidates working in translation studies, comparative literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and cultural memory studies. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Translating the religious and the mythical in twentieth-century poetry and prose
• Translation and literary, religious, and philosophical responses to twentieth-century traumas
• Religious controversy and translation
• Modern and postmodern myths in translation
• Secularism and postsecularism in translation
• Translation and (trans)cultural memory

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Prof. Susan Bassnett (University of Warwick)

Prof. Jean Boase-Beier (University of East Anglia)

Prof. Peter Davies (University of Edinburgh)

Submission guidelines: Proposals for 20-min papers should include a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio-note with institutional affiliation and email contact. Please submit your proposal to: transandmodernism@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 30 October 2015

3rd-5th February, 2016

The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji 

Keynote addresses from Prof. Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Prof. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (University of California, Los Angeles)

Roundtable with Pacific writers, including Vanessa Griffen and Satendra Nandan.

In recent decades critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Simon Gikandi, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have reassessed the temporalities, spatialities and formal components of modernism and modernity. While hegemonic power structures in politics and literature played often decisive roles in shaping global modernisms, lines of influence predicated on models of core/periphery have been recognised as reductive. Previously dominant models of reception grounded on mimicry or delayed adoption are increasingly understood to devalue the creative agencies of global modernists. Instead, new frameworks of alternative modernities, multiple modernities, modernity at large, new world modernisms, geomodernisms, and transnational modernisms are enabling exploration of the multiplicity of modernist experiences, histories, and form.

When South Pacific writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Vincent Eri, Satendra Nandan, Konai Helu Thaman, and Vanessa Griffen forged a new literature of Oceania, they gave voice to the lived reality of transnational Oceanic modernities by opening local narrative traditions to the experimentations of global modernisms. Their innovations and compromises created a writing of Oceanic modernity that disrupts reductive models of periodisation, influence or imitation, evincing relations that are, as Andreas Huyssen writes, ‘reciprocal though asymmetrical’. Recognising the multiplicity of responses to the ruptures and relations of modernity, and the importance of local contextualisation in comprehending global modernisms, this symposium is devoted to Oceanic Modernism, and the relationship between modernities and modernisms in the South Pacific.

This symposium brings together regional and international scholars to work towards an understanding of Oceanic Modernism that is detailed and coherent, without being uniform or conformist. In particular, the symposium seeks to examine the relationship between Oceanic works – literature, art, dance, architecture and so on – and the modernities from which these emerged, and the relationship between Oceanic works and other modernisms, however so defined. We invite papers on South Pacific works that address these and other related issues, and/or the relationship between Oceanic Modernism and the following:

• Nationalism
• Indigenisation
• Form
• Postcolonialism
• Appropriation
• Independence
• Politics
• Tradition
• Location
• Time/Space
• Contingency

We welcome proposals for papers (not exceeding twenty minutes) and panels (maximum three speakers). Please submit your title and a proposal of 300 words to oceanicmodernisms@gmail.com by 1st October, 2015.