Author: modernistudies

Edited by Sarah Jackson, Philip Leonard and Annabel Williams

Call for Papers

From the ‘waves of sound, transmitted o’er the line’ in Jones Very’s ‘The Telephone’ (1877) to the ‘thin voice speak[ing] / from a drowning world’ in Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Six Rings’ (2018), telephones have been calling in and across literary texts for almost one hundred and fifty years. But although considerable research on the smartphone has been undertaken in recent media and cultural studies, the relationship between telephony and literature remains largely neglected. In fact, as Nicholas Royle points out in Telepathy and Literature (1991), ‘really we have no idea what a telephone is, or what a voice is, or when or how. Least of all when it is linked up with the question of literature’. Taking the ‘question of literature’ as its starting point, this edited volume of essays will address the telephone’s propensity to mediate but also to interrupt communication, as well as the ways in which it taps into some of the most urgent concerns of the modern and contemporary age, including surveillance, mobility, resistance, responsibility, power and warfare. Exploring its complex, multiple and mutating functions in literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present day, the proposed volume will consider both historical and recent manifestations of the telephone, and its capacity to call across borders, languages, and cultures.

Building on the 2020 Telepoetics online conference, and following strong interest from publishers including Edinburgh University Press, we invite proposals for essays (6500-8000 words) that explore the relationship between literature and telephony in a range of global contexts and from the nineteenth century to the present day. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• privacy and surveillance
• communications warfare
• mobility, migration, and globalization
• technologies of desire
• telephony as translation
• textual interference, interruption or interception
• lyric calling and texting
• telephony and D/deaf experience
• telephony and labour
• ethics and answerability
• voice and address
• networks and communicative landscapes
• distraction and attention
• telephony and the embodied/disembodied voice
• telephony and catastrophe
• telephony and contamination

Please submit to the editors by 25 September 2020:

•  The title of your essay
•  A 300-word synopsis outlining the content of your essay
•  A list of the key authors and/or texts covered in your essay
•  The estimated word count for your essay (this should be between 6500-8000 words)
•  The number and details of any illustrations that you wish to include, and a brief statement about why these illustrations are essential to accompany the text
•  A 150-word author biography, including your institutional affiliation and contact details

Please note that if you plan to include material in copyright (e.g. substantial prose extracts), you will be responsible for securing the necessary permissions.

To submit your proposal, please email: sarah.jackson02@ntu.ac.uk

We will notify authors of acceptance by 1 December 2020 and will require the final draft of essays to be submitted by 1 September 2021. See https://crossedlines.co.uk/call-for-papers/ for further details and announcements.

ABOUT THE EDITORS

Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor of Literature at Nottingham Trent University, an AHRC Leadership Fellow (2018), an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker (2016) and a Vice-Chancellor’s Outstanding Researcher (2017). Specialising in modern and contemporary literature and theory, her publications include Tactile Poetics: Touch and Contemporary Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), a poetry collection Pelt (Bloodaxe, 2012), which won the Seamus Heaney Prize and was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, and a co-edited special issue of parallax on the ‘Unidentifiable Literary Object’. She is currently working on an AHRC-funded project on literature and telephony.

Philip Leonard is Professor of Literature and Theory at Nottingham Trent University. His research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature and theory, globalization and the concept of ‘world’, and technology. He is author of Orbital Poetics: Literature, Theory, World (Open Access; Bloomsbury, 2019) and Literature after Globalization: Textuality, Technology, and the Nation-State (Bloomsbury, 2013). In 2019, Prof. Leonard was elected Chair of the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies.

Annabel Williams is currently completing her first monograph ‘Off-stage a war’: Cosmopolitanism, Travel, and Late Modernism. From September 2020 she will be a Library Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, researching the work of Arthur Koestler and Muriel Spark as part of her next book project on modern remote-control culture. She has published on writers including Rebecca West, Ezra Pound, Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh in Modernist Cultures, Textual Practice and Twentieth-Century Literature (forthcoming). 

Editor: Jeremy Colangelo (jcolang2@uwo.ca)

Abstracts due: September 10, 2020

Full papers due: February 1, 2021

This article cluster seeks thoughtful, theoretically engaged essays on the subject of pain and pain expression in modernism and modernist literature for a proposed cluster of peer reviewed articles on Modernism/Modernity’s Print Plus platform. Bodily experience was a central concern for modernist art, and pain has long been seen as the horizon of bodily representation, that limit where knowledge and symbol break down. Yet it is also a central, unavoidable fact of many of the most important political events to occur during the modernist period: the two world wars, most obviously, but also the lynching epidemic in the United States, the hunger strikes of Mahatma Gandhi, and the force-feedings of women’s suffrage activists in Britain and elsewhere, to name but a few examples. Likewise, where modernist authors specifically took up the question of pain (as for instance in Ernst Jünger’s On Pain) they often did so with socio-political effects in mind. The role of pain expression in political activism is a central, yet under-addressed, question of the era, one which this cluster intends to shed useful light on.

Central to the question of pain is the question of evidence, and of belief: who feels? how do they feel? how do we know that they feel? (And who is this “we”?) As Elaine Scarry famously writes in The Body in Pain, “to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.” Yet Scarry’s oft-quoted maxim leaves more doubt than certainty. What is the location of this doubt? And what powers give this doubt relevance, the force and consequences that demand the doubting be appeased? These questions have been central to recent political debates and protests, which so often turn on the refusal of belief, or the exploitation of pain’s essential doubtfulness – on the cry of “I can’t breathe!” being met with the stony face of white supremacy’s implacable scepticism. Operative at the intersection of suffering and activism is what Miranda Fricker, in Epistemic Injustice, refers to as “testimonial injustice,” or an injustice which attacks the subject’s credibility. In light of this problem, as Saidiya Hartman asks in Scenes of Subjection, “how does one give expression to these outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of this benumbing spectacle . . . [or] the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other or the prurience that is so often the response to such displays?”

This question, which is far from easily answered, appears throughout twentieth- and late nineteenth-century literature – from W.E.B. Du Bois’s essay on the “Sorrow Songs,” to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” with its depiction of the misery of un-belief, to Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” and its inscriptive torture device, to the abstracted Cartesianism of Samuel Beckett’s writings, with his characters’ disembodied aches and agonies. In modernism, pain and the evidence of pain have always been closely intertwined concerns, linking political and aesthetic matters wherever they appear. In “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf observes that if “a sufferer tr[ies] to describe a pain in his head to a doctor . . . language at once runs dry,” yet the scene of the patient and doctor – of the medical gaze and the belief in patient testimony which it can either offer or deny – is but one of many scenes for pain expression, and perhaps the most limited one. The expression of pain is, in fact, everywhere in modernism, visible if one remains alert to its forms and contexts, and it appears with tremendous variety.

This cluster of essays seeks to bring attention to the role of pain and pain expression in modernist literature and culture, especially in terms of the works’ political contexts. It is especially interested in the intersection of activism, phenomenology, and epistemology (all three terms of course meant in an extremely broad sense). It is not limited to explicitly political writing (though essays on such works are of course welcome) but is interested as well in articles that seek to re-politicize pain and pain expression, removing it from the solipsism with which it has been read. The goal is to begin new discussions in modernist pain studies, developing on work already being done in disability theory, trauma theory, and the like, to create a more robust understanding of what it means for a work of literature to express the feeling of pain, and what then follows from that expression.

Possible subjects could include, but are not limited to:

• Pain and political spectacle
• The performance, or performativity, of pain and the role of unorthodox pain expression
• The racialization or gendering of pain
• Pain and neurodiversity
• Comparative approaches to pain writing (e.g. how does a Latin American modernist writing on pain compare to a European one?)
• Pain and abjection
• The political role of the avoidance of pain or, alternatively, of pain’s exaltation
• The distinction between pain and other forms of suffering, or the taxonomy of different types of pain
• Pain and medicine, or medicalization
• Pain and phenomenology
• Pain and trauma

The cluster is open to articles from all theoretical perspectives and methodologies, but prospective contributors are encouraged to read up on major texts in disability studies which touch on the topic.

Abstracts of about 300 words are due on September 10. Essays should be about 3,000 words long, cited according to the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, and will be due on February 1. All submissions should be addressed to Jeremy Colangelo via email, at jcolang2@uwo.ca. Further details about Print Plus can be found at https://modernismmodernity.org/about.

Online conference: 7 December 2020

Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden

Keynote Speakers: Professor Anne D. Wallace (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Professor Jon Hegglund (Washington State University)

Organisers: Dr Lucy Jeffery & Professor Vicky Angelaki

In the Exeter Book (c. 975), the speaker in an Anglo-Saxon lament entitled ‘The Wanderer’ elegises over the plight of a ‘lone-dweller’ who, ‘weary of hardships’ and ‘the death of kinsmen’, ‘longs for relief’ as he follows ‘paths of exile’ in search of ‘the Almighty’s mercy’.[1] As the verse explores the nature of wandering, the reader (or listener) contemplates how the speaker’s journey has informed his ethical and geographical path. The idea of walking is – as it would also be for later writers and thinkers as diverse as Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mahatma Gandhi, and W. G. Sebald – a source of creative inspiration and a call to political activity. Today, as we face a global pandemic that has made the citizens of over two hundred countries wary of stepping into the great outdoors, walking has acquired added significance.

Depending on one’s geographic and/or economic situation, walking has become salvation, hobby, danger, and protest. In some areas, the sanctioned restrictions on people’s movement meant that the physical and cognitive freedoms at the disposal of the wanderer were removed. Similarly, the compulsory closure of shops, bars, theatres, and museums has rendered the flâneur’s stroll through crowded streets that burgeon with the spoils of capitalism impossible. One can no longer, as Walter Benjamin observed of Baudelaire’s flâneur, ‘go about the city’ in a state of ‘anamnestic intoxication’ and ‘[feed] on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes’.[2] Conversely, 2020 has seen a rise in protest marches concerned with social and racial equality, rendering the walk representative of political agency and activism. Moreover, as the act of walking has become an enactment of the freedoms that remain during quarantine, it is understood in contrast to our increasingly familiar state of Beckettian seclusion.

As we have become more mindful of our day-to-day comings and goings, our engagement with literature that either extolls the virtues of walking or warns against the perils of the journey has both heightened and changed. Furthermore, as our experience of confinement and self-isolation has reshaped our everyday lives, we may recontextualise our examination of literature in relation to a politics of space and place. This online conference, hosted by the Department of English at Mid Sweden University, will explore what the act of walking stands for and what it signifies today in various textual forms. The one-day event aims to reflect the various ways in which walking, in its manifold possibilities and contexts, informs our understanding of the ways in which our experience of confinement has impacted our understanding of society and reading of literature

With this in mind, we would like to take stock of the scholarship concerning walking and interrogate how our new politicised landscape is reshaping our understanding of literary landscapes across a range of genres and periods. We aim to explore: what narratives of walking reveal about our understanding of the politics of space, health, and the environment (both urban and rural); and, more broadly, how people are responding creatively to the question of space and confinement today. The project seeks to re-evaluate how we respond to and understand the tradition of the literary walk in light of the twenty-first century’s technological developments, societal shifts, environmental challenges, and political situation.

We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage analyses that explore walking through, but not limited to, the following lines of inquiry:

• Cartographic narration
• Ecocriticism
• Exile
• Freedom and confinement
• Literary topology
• Medical humanities
• Mobility studies
• Music
• Performance
• Peripatetic liminality
• Pilgrimage
• Political marches / protests
• Private and public spaces
• Slowness
• Solitude / self-isolation
• Technology
• The pastoral
• The urban flâneur
• Transcendentalism
• Visual arts

We are keen to investigate the concept of walking in fictive and non-fictive texts and accounts. Any chosen critical, theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary perspective is therefore welcome. We hope that this conference will provide researchers interested in interdisciplinary (especially environment, health, politics) approaches to literature with rigorous and engaging discussions concerning creative and/or theoretical approaches to the theme of walking.

We warmly welcome postgraduates, ECRs, and senior academics interested in how the global climate and epidemiological challenges we currently face inform our understanding of literature that engages with ecocritical issues and notions of confinement. Please send abstracts (200-250 words), including a title and short bio (100 words) to lucy.jeffery@miun.se by 1 October 2020. Papers must be between 15 – 20 minutes in length. We aim to respond to all applicants with a decision on their submission by 9 October 2020. Please note that as this conference will take place online, there is no conference fee.

If you are interested in attending this online event, but do not wish to present a paper, please contact us directly via email. The conference programme will be posted on the Mid Sweden University English Department webpage https://www.miun.se/online-conference

in due course. Please address any questions you may have to lucy.jeffery@miun.se

We look forward to hearing from you,

Dr Lucy Jeffery and Professor Vicky Angelaki.

[1] ‘The Wanderer’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages Volume A, 9^th edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, James Simpson, and Alfred David (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 117-120, 118.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 417.

Mary Butts: Feminist Reconstructions

In the past couple of decades, much has been done to recover British modernist author Mary Butts (1890-1937).  Butts’s Collected Essays and unpublished novel Unborn Gods, forthcoming from McPherson & Co, attest to the ongoing nature of this project.  There is still much more to do, and much to explore in a body of work that plays between high modernist forms and more popular genres, a work that might be described as occult, Gothic, queer, proto-environmental, and feminist. Questions must be asked of Butts’s work and her position in the modernist canon, but also of the continued recovery and reconstruction of this important author.

This call for papers is for an invited proposal from Bloomsbury, who are looking to engage more fully with modernist women authors.  The proposed collection aims to be self-conscious and self-analytical of this engagement.

This call for papers invites proposals that respond, broadly, to the title “Feminist Reconstructions.”  We seek proposals for contributions to supplement confirmed essays from authors including Andrew Radford, Jane Garrity, and Stephen Ross.

Proposals might focus on any of Butts’s writing: novels, short stories, poetry, journals, essays, and letters, published and archival materials.  “Feminist recovery” should not limit what is explored but be a means to open up meaning and analysis.

Feminism

Essays might in engage with (though are not limited to),

• Contested sites of feminism in Butts work
• Feminist modernisms
• The need for a feminist recovery of the author.

Reconstruction

Essays might engage with (but are not limited to),

• Modernist “reconstructions” in an era of modernity
• Questions of race, class, gender, sexuality
• Environmentalism
• The national and transnational
• Butts’s literary “reconstructions” on the page
• Ritualism, dance, performance in Butts’s writing
• Butts as literary/cultural theorist
• 21^st century reconstructions of forgotten women modernists
• The use of digital media in the pursuit of reconstruction, in an age of reconstruction
• The future of Butts/women modernists/modernist studies

The collection aims to be a feminist engagement itself.  Rather than offer a traditional monograph of isolated arguments, we look to disrupt linearity and traditional forms of argument, which are often associated with patriarchal structures.  The collection will take its cue from the transnational artistic communities Butts moved within in the 1920s to create a non-linear exchange, a conversation between contributors.  To this end, authors will submit an essay of 7000 words, but will also later write a 2000-word response to another author’s essay, and be given the opportunity to read all other (completed) chapters so that they might reference these in their own work, to further a sense of conversation.  The book looks to be an assemblage of sorts, full of imaginative approaches to Butts’s work that collide with one another.  Experimentation is welcome.

Please email proposals of no more than 300 words, along with a brief biography, to the editor, Joel Hawkes, at jhawkes@uvic.ca by Monday 15 June, 2020.  (Final papers will be due January 2021)