British Association for Modernist Studies - Website Designed and Developed by Callum LeithDear fellow modernists,
The new academic year is almost upon us and it is time to look at opportunities of presenting papers on our current work.
The Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE
10.30 Registration. Tea & Coffee.
11.00 Welcome: Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University).
11.15 Dr Fiona Green (Cambridge University) ~ ‘Marianne Moore, Syllabics, and History’
~ Chair: Victoria Bazin.
12.15 Lunch (provided).
1.30 Francesca Bratton (Durham University) ‘Publishing a Fragmentary Whole: Hart
Crane’s The Bridge in Little Magazines’. Chair: Julie Taylor.
2.30 Jude Riley (Northumbria University) ‘Not real, scarcely there at all’: Elizabeth
Madox Roberts and Intellectual Disability in Southern Modernism’. Chair: Ann-Marie
Einhaus.
3.30 Tea & Coffee.
4.00 Professor Michael O’Neill (Durham University) ‘Endings in Yeats and Edward
Thomas’. Chair: Claire Nally.
5.00 Closing Remarks Katherine Baxter (Northumbria University).
The event is free of charge, but attendees must register to ensure a place:
Email: Victoria.Bazin@northumbria.ac.uk.
Getting there from Newcastle Central Station: The Lit and Phil is only a few minutes walk from the central station. Please see map: http://www.litandphil.org.uk/information/visit-us/
Getting there by car: Car parking spaces are available near Newcastle Central Station. It is best not to use the station itself for parking as long stay is very expensive. See map for details of parking nearby: http://en.parkopedia.co.uk/parking/ne1_1se/
Dear BAMS colleagues,
I’m writing with a reminder that the deadline for the submission of abstracts for Modernist Work is less than 6 weeks away, and to announce that a small number of travel bursaries will be available to assist with travel and accommodation costs for postgraduate students.
AMSN3: Modernist Work
The Third Biennial Conference of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network
Date: 29-31 March 2016
Venue: University of New South Wales, Sydney
Abstracts due: 1 October 2015
Notification of acceptance: 1 November 2015
This conference aims to explore the manifold intersections of modernist culture and the concept of “work”. Modernism emerged during a moment of rapid transformation in the conditions and meaning of labour. New jobs and professions proliferated with dizzying speed in the wake of the second industrial revolution, along with new techniques of “scientific management”. Under the influence of these and other changes, the kinds of work available to women changed markedly during the modernist period, while legal gender restrictions were abolished in a growing number of professions. At the same time, many strands of modernist culture involved a rethinking of the concept of “work” in literary and aesthetic domains, in often contradictory ways. Modernist writers and artists repeatedly interrogated the nature and function of an artistic career in an age of mass culture, and radical critiques of the notion of the art “work” itself—as organic, as self-contained, as a product of artistic skill—were launched from various sectors of the avant-garde. Numerous subsequent interventions in critical and aesthetic theory can be placed in the lineage of this initial modernist questioning of the work itself.
We are seeking papers on the relationship between modernism and work in any of its myriad configurations—formal, historical, empirical, theoretical, literal, metaphorical, textual, contextual, material and everything in between. We also welcome papers that test the boundaries of the concept of modernism itself, whether by extending its chronological scope, rethinking its traditional canon or questioning its privileged media.
Postgraduate travel bursaries
The Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia (UNSW) together with the Australasian Modernist Studies Network will offer a small number of bursaries of up to $500 each for Australian and international graduate students. Bursary applications will be invited following the acceptance of paper proposals.
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University)
Professor Morag Shiach (Queen Mary University of London)
Other keynote speakers to be advised
Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three papers examining any aspect of the conference theme. Proposals from postgraduate students are especially encouraged.
Please send 300 word abstracts and a brief biographical note to j.attridge@unsw.edu.au by Thursday 1 October 2015.
The full cfp can be viewed and downloaded here.
Registration and other information will be available through the AMSN website, at http://amsn.org.au/
All best wishes,
John Attridge
School of the Arts and Media
University of New South Wales
Registration is open for Rewriting(s): MHRA Postgraduate and Early Career Conference, to be held at the Institute of Modern Language Research on the 16th October 2015.
Keynote and MHRA Presidential Address: Professor Martin McLaughlin (Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian at the University of Oxford/ Fellow of Magdalen College).
For the programme and registration form please see the IMLR’s listing below:
Registration closes on the 2nd October.
We look forward to seeing you there!
Biofiction, literature that names its protagonist after an actual biographical figure, has become a dominant literary form in recent years. Before the 1980s, there were only a handful of well-regarded biographical novelists, but since the 1980s, writers such as Gore Vidal, Bruce Duffy, Joanna Scott, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Julia Alvarez, Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Lily Tuck, Jay Parini, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Colum McCann, David Ebershoff, Anne Enright, and Hilary Mantel, to name only a notable few, authored important biographical novels that garnered much critical acclaim. But the scholarship about biofiction is only recently starting to gain traction, and there is as of yet no formal place where scholars can share their work with each other, promote the study and teaching of biofiction, and organize events about it.
To promote scholarly work about biofiction, I have set up a listserv with the following objectives: 1) to organize conference panels on the topic of biofiction—hopefully, we can host an annual panel at the MLA convention, 2) to announce new publications about biofiction, 3) to issue CFPs about biofiction to the most suitable scholars, 4) to encourage and engage in conversations about biofiction, 5) and to share strategies for teaching biofiction.Let me explain why this is the time to create such a venue. As I mentioned above, many prominent writers have authored stellar biographical novels. But with regard to scholarship, the field has witnessed some exciting developments in the past twenty-five years: recent scholars such as Ina Schabert, Alain Buisine, Stephanie Bird, Mark C. Carnes, John Keener, Martin Middeke, Werner Huber, Monica Latham, Sandra Mayer, Julia Novak, Lucia Boldrini, Cora Kaplan, Marie-Luise Kohlke, Beverley Southgate, and David Lodge have authored works that have advanced the conversation about biofiction. It was the pioneering work of all these scholars that led me to author Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists (2014), which consists of interviews with sixteen authors of biofiction. In doing this project, many scholars and authors told me that there is a need for a venue to bring together those who have an interest in promoting and advancing scholarship about the genre. Hence the creation of this listserv.
But there is an additional reason why this is the time for such a listserv. Bloomsbury will publish an anthology about biofiction in November 2016, which contains authors’ prefaces, afterwords, statements, lectures, interviews, and essays about biofiction as well as scholarly studies of the genre. So committed to biofiction is Bloomsbury that its academic division is currently considering starting a new series devoted exclusively to the aesthetic form. There is clearly a growing market for scholarly studies about biofiction.
To subscribe, send a message to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu) with Biofiction in the subject line.
Registration for the Modernist Short Story Conference, supported by the Katherine Mansfield Society, is now open! Please send completed registration forms to modernistshortstory2015@gmail.com by 7/9/15.
A fully funded PhD studentship — consisting of a fee waiver and an annual stipend of £16,000 for three years — is being offered in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. The project will investigate the role Penguin has had in shaping readers’ responses to China by assessing Penguin’s early back catalogue of books about China or on Chinese themes by both Western and Chinese authors during the 1930s and 1940s. The archive held at the University of Bristol holds an array of novels, poetry, reportage and non‐fiction for adults and children. The diversity of titles encompasses the range of responses to and interactions with China during the early twentieth century.
For more information see http://www.westminster.ac.uk/courses/research-degrees/research-areas/social-sciences-humanities-and-languages/research-studentships/social-sciences-and-humanities-research-studentships
Northern Modernism Seminar website
Friday 25 September
Hosted by Northumbria University & the North East Modernist Research Initiative at
The Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 1SE
10.30 Registration. Tea & Coffee.
11.00 Welcome: Victoria Bazin (Northumbria University).
11.15 Dr Fiona Green (Cambridge University) ~ ‘Marianne Moore, Syllabics, and History’
~ Chair: Victoria Bazin.
12.15 Lunch (provided).
1.30 Francesca Bratton (Durham University) ‘Publishing a Fragmentary Whole: Hart
Crane’s The Bridge in Little Magazines’. Chair: Julie Taylor.
2.30 Jude Riley (Northumbria University) ‘Not real, scarcely there at all’: Elizabeth
Madox Roberts and Intellectual Disability in Southern Modernism’. Chair: Ann-Marie
Einhaus.
3.30 Tea & Coffee.
4.00 Professor Michael O’Neill (Durham University) ‘Endings in Yeats and Edward
Thomas’. Chair: Claire Nally.
5.00 Closing Remarks Katherine Baxter (Northumbria University).
The event is free of charge, but attendees must register to ensure a place:
Email: Victoria.Bazin@northumbria.ac.uk.
Getting there from Newcastle Central Station: The Lit and Phil is only a few minutes walk from the central
station. Please see attached map: http://www.litandphil.org.uk/information/visit-us/
Getting there by car: Car parking spaces are available near Newcastle Central Station. It is best not to use
the station itself for parking as long stay is very expensive. See map for details of parking nearby: http://en.parkopedia.co.uk/parking/ne1_1se/
We all have these thoughts sometimes.’
— Stevie Smith, Some Are More Human Than Others (1958)
The work of Stevie Smith (1902-1971) has received uneven critical attention. Widely loved outside the academy, her novels and poetry resist traditional modernist narratives. In a critical context which values texts according to their complexity, her writing – with its nursery-rhyme rhythms and accompanying sketches – can seem disconcertingly “simple”.
However, Smith is enjoying a revival both within and beyond academia. Not only has Virago Press recently re-released her novels, but a critical edition of her poems is forthcoming.
Given this resurgence in popular and academic interest in her writing, we invite you to share ‘thoughts ‘on Stevie Smith’s work, for a one-day conference in Oxford.
Contributors may consider, but need not be limited to:
– Stevie Smith and her contemporaries
– Smith and life-writing
– Smith in relation to modernism/postmodernism
– Stevie Smith’s critical history
– Smith and her forebears (myth, fairytale, the Romantics, the Victorians…)
– Stevie Smith and visual art
– Smith and “simplicity”
– Smith in her historical-political context
– Stevie Smith and gender
– Artistic responses to Stevie Smith’s writing (music, drama, etc)
Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers, to be delivered as part of panels of three. Individual proposals (of 250 words), and panel proposals (of up to 700 words), for three papers that interact under a common theme, are warmly accepted. Creative responses to Smith’s work are also welcome.
The conference’s plenary speakers have been confirmed as Professor Dame Hermione Lee and Dr Will May.
Please send proposals to steviesmithconference@gmail.com. The deadline for submissions is 11th November 2015. The one-day conference will take place on 11th March 2016 at Jesus College, Oxford.
For more information, please visit https://steviesmithconference.wordpress.com/. We welcome you to disseminate this CfP widely.
This conference is organised in association with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW).
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