Author: modernistudies

SCR, Park House, University of Reading, Wednesday 9^th September 2015

“If civilisation is to recover, if Europe is ever again a world centre of humane art and thought, we must shake ourselves free from the passions and prejudices and even the just resentments of war.” (Gilbert Murray, The Gate: International Review of Literature and Art in English and German, 1947).

In recent years scholarship on literary modernism has increasingly focused on the “making” of modernism through the agents involved in writing, editing, illustrating, publishing, translating and reviewing modernist texts. The focus has ostensibly been on a period running from the opening years of the twentieth century to the Second World War. Yet modernist texts were eagerly seized by editors and publishers in the years immediately following the cessation of hostilities as a means by which to revive literary production, to span the breach in international intellectual exchange represented by the war years and, in the words of Gilbert Murray, to use the world of letters as “the right meeting place for men of thought and good will, irrespective of nationality”. This one-day symposium, which focuses on the publication of modernist writing in the period from 1945-1955, will give scholars the opportunity to explore the complications and tensions, but also the possibilities, that the end of the war brought to those involved in literary production itself or more generally working in the wider publishing landscape of the period. Papers are invited from scholars and groups of scholars working on modernist writing in the immediate post-war years. These papers might explore themes and concepts related to:

– the role of writers, editors, illustrators and publishers in the authorship, (re)publishing and (inter)national transmission of modernist writing;

– the role of translation and international language policies and practices in restoring literary and intellectual exchange;

– the national and international politics of literary publication in the immediate post-war period;

– new fora: the emergence of “little magazines” and small presses;

– new approaches: the potential for revision, reinterpretation and innovation;

– new visions: the forging of new networks of intellectual exchange.

Please submit abstracts for papers (250-300 words) to:

Dr Alison E. Martin – a.e.martin@reading.ac.uk – by Friday 26th June 2015.

Dr. Alison E. Martin, FHEA

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Lecturer, Department of Modern Languages and European Studies

University of Reading

Whiteknights PO Box 218

READING RG6 6AA

Please join the Edith Wharton Society for its upcoming Conference in Washington, DC. The conference directors seek papers focusing on all aspects of Wharton’s work. Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton’s texts, including the short fiction, poetry, plays, essays, travel writing, and other nonfiction, in addition to the novels. While all topics are welcome, the location of the conference in the U. S. capital invites readings related to nationalism, cosmopolitanism, transatlanticism, seats of power, Americana, museum cultures in the 19th C, material cultures, and the work of preservation. Further, given the centennial years of World War I, papers offering new examinations of Wharton’s relationship to the war are particularly invited. Proposals might also explore Wharton’s work in the context of such figures as Teddy Roosevelt and Henry Adams or Wharton’s work in relation to that of her contemporaries, such as Gertrude Stein, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Henry James, and more. All theoretical approaches are welcome, including feminist, psychoanalytic, historicist, Marxist, queer studies, affective studies, disability studies, and ecocritical perspectives. 

We plan to organize paper sessions, roundtables, and panel presentations. In addition, there will be a keynote speaker and opportunities for tours of local exhibits. Further details forthcoming at the conference website https://whartoninwashington2016.wordpress.com/.

Please submit 350-500-word abstracts and brief CV as one Word document to WhartoninWashington2016@gmail.com  by July 15, 2015.  All conference participants must be members of the Edith Wharton Society at the time of registration.

For more information about the conference, contact Conference Directors Melanie Dawson (College of William & Mary) and Jennifer Haytock (The College at Brockport, SUNY) through the conference email account.

AMSN3: Modernist Work

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.

How did modernist artists and writers respond to revolutions in the world of work? How did modernists construe the occupation of the artist and the category of the work of art? Which theoretical perspectives are best suited, today, to understanding the meaning of “work” in modernism? And what kinds of work are we doing, anyway, those of us who “work on modernism”? These and many others are the kinds of question that we will work on, through and over at this conference.

Possible topics include, but are by no means limited to:

– the office

– modernists’ day jobs

– networks and networking

– brainwork

– dreamwork

– facework

– women and work

– “Professions for Women”

– alienation/reification/rationalization

– professionalism/specialization

– mechanization/automatization

– the emergence of the concept of unemployment

– Marx and Marxist aesthetics

– trade unionism and Labour politics

– working-class writing and reading

– “the working of the work” (“die Wirklichkeit des Werkes”)

– “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”

– unworking/worklessness (“désoeuvrement”)

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.

Registration and other information will be available through the AMSN website, at http://amsn.org.au/