Author: modernistudies

CFPs

CFP: The Third Biennial Conference of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 9, 2015

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.

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 speaker: Professor Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University); 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/

Registration open

Registration open: “Perfectly phrased and quite as true”: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890-1950

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 9, 2015

Registration is now open for the one-day conference, ‘”Perfectly phrased and quite as true”: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890-1950’, to be held at King’s Manor, the University of York, on Saturday 4 July 2015.

This one-day conference features 14 speakers, with keynote lectures by Dr Mark Sandy (Durham University) and Dr James Williams (University of York), and a reading of aphorisms and poetry by Professor Peter Robinson (University of Reading). The programme is available to view at this link: https://aphoristicmodernity.wordpress.com/programme/

Registration is £20 for the full day and £5 for just the final keynote and reading. Registration can be completed via this link:http://store.york.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=505

For further information, please see the conference website: https://aphoristicmodernity.wordpress.com/ or email aphoristicmodernity@gmail.com

CFPs Postgraduate

The Review of English Studies Essay Prize 2015: Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers, Deadline 30 June

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 8, 2015

http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/revesj/essay_awards.html

RES Essay Prize

Winner of the 2014 RES Essay Prize

The Editors of The Review of English Studies are pleased to announce the winner of the journal’s 2014 Essay Prize. The article below is freely available online.

The Satanic ‘or’: Milton and Protestant Anti-Allegorism
by Vladimir Brljak

2015 RES Essay Prize

The Review of English Studies is now inviting entries for its 2015 Essay Prize. The RES Essay Prize aims to encourage scholarship amongst postgraduate research students in Britain and abroad. The essay can be on any topic of English literature or the English language from the earliest period to the present.

The prize

The winner will receive:

Publication of the winning essay in the June 2016 issue of The Review of English Studies
A cash prize of £250
£250 worth of OUP books
A free year’s subscription to The Review of English Studies

How to enter

Entries should be submitted through our online submission system. Click here to access the system and submit your paper any time between 1 April 2015 and the closing date, 30 June 2015.

Please click here to read through the entry guidelines and terms.

The competition rules

The competition is open to anyone studying for a higher degree, or who completed one no earlier than October 2012. The winner’s student status verification will be requested from their academic supervisor or head of department. The entry must not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

Click here for full details of the competition rules.

Past winners

Click here to read past winning articles FREE online.

Jobs Postgraduate

Funded PhD @ Exeter: Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation Studentship

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 4, 2015

Redirected from here: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=1873

Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation Studentship Ref: 1873

About the award

The West country has a rich tradition of writing that forges literary identities out of experiences or memories of specific places, from Wordsworth and Coleridge walking the Quantocks to Hardy’s nostalgia for Wessex. Many of these writers took an active interest in farming and husbandry (Henry Williamson, Ted Hughes), as well as in the local legends and songs of the area (Sabine Baring-Gould), and the stories of local communities (Eden Phillpotts). And these writers often collaborated or developed literary networks that provided a focus as well as a viable cultural alternative to metropolitan groups, such as the Bloomsbury set. Our proposal, therefore, is to examine literary and creative networks in the south-west: their heritage, connections with the land and environment, and their attachment to particular sites of writing, art, and/or music. The Ronald Duncan archive will provide a fascinating and rich set of resources for this PhD through an examination of Duncan’s engagement with the south-west landscape, his interest in agriculture and husbandry and works such as Where I Live, Devon and Cornwall and Journal of a Husbandman, as well as his creation of the Devon festival in the 1950s. The PhD would also explore Duncan’s tangled position within a number of local and metropolitan literary networks, placing his life and career within a broader history of literary networks and regional literary culture.

For this project, the resources of the Ronald Duncan archive will be supplemented by other collections from south-west writers held by The University of Exeter Special Collections. It has, for example, archives of Williamson, Hughes, the library of Baring-Gould, and other local writers, and the region has a rich history of writers visiting and writing about the area (George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Charles Kingsley, Philip Gosse, George Tugwell, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and many others) that would afford a unique opportunity to research the imaginative place of literature in the West country.

Primary Supervisor: Professor Nick Groom

Professor Groom’s work investigates questions of authenticity and the emergence of national and regional identities. This interest began in his first book, a study of the formation of the English ballad tradition (The Making of Percy’s Reliques, Clarendon Press, 1999). In recent years, his work has become more interdisciplinary. His cultural history of The Union Jack(Atlantic, 2006; paperbacked 2007), examined expressions of British identities. Most recently, his study on the history of representations of the English environment was published in November 2013 as The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (Atlantic). It was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Prize and runner-up for the Countryfile Book of the Year. In the meantime his acclaimed book The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction was published by OUP in 2012 as a part of a long-term project rethinking the Gothic past in political and historicist terms. Professor Groom also has a strong interest in literature and place, as well as south-west writing. He is co-director of ECLIPSE (Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place, and Sustainability).

Summary

Application deadline:	29th June 2015
Number of awards:	1
Value:	£14,057 plus UK/EU tuition fees for eligible students
Duration of award:	per year
Contact: Dr Matt Barber	humanities-pgadmissions@exeter.ac.uk

How to apply

Entry criteria

We invite applications from candidates with a strong academic background in English Literary Studies, and a clear and engaging research proposal which can be developed through available research supervision. Successful applicants normally have a good first degree (at least 2.1, or international equivalent) in a relevant field of humanities, and have obtained, or are currently working towards a Masters degree at Merit level, or international equivalent, in modern and contemporary literature. If English is not your native language, you will also need to satisfy the English language entry requirements of the University of Exeter.

To apply

Applicants should complete an online web form and upload a one page CV, a research proposal of no more than 1,000 words, outlining the particular area or approach to this subject that they would like to undertake, transcripts, and two academic references and, if relevant, proof of English language proficiency, by 29 June 2015.

Applicants should ensure that the referees email their references in the form of a letter to the Postgraduate Administrator at humanities-pgadmissions@exeter.ac.uk by 29 June 2015. The responsibility for ensuring that references are received by the deadline rests with the candidates. Referees must email their references to us from their institutional email accounts (references sent from personal/private email accounts will not be accepted unless in the form of a scanned document on institutional headed paper and signed by the referee).

All application documents must be submitted in English. Certified translated copies of academic qualifications must also be provided.

More information

If you have any queries or would like to discuss this opportunity before applying, please contact Professor Nick Groom at n.groom@exeter.ac.uk.

If you have any queries regarding the application process please contact:

Postgraduate Administrator at: humanities-pgadmissions@exeter.ac.uk
College of Humanities Graduate School, University of Exeter
Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive
Exeter, Devon, EX4 4QH

Visit http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/ for more information.

Reading group

Reading Group: ANNA VANINSKAYA ON RUSSIAN FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS IN EDWARDIAN BRITAIN

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

PUSHKIN HOUSE, FRIDAY 19TH JUNE, 5.30PM

The Anglo-Russian Research Network will be holding its summer reading group at 5:30 on Friday 19 June at Pushkin House, Bloomsbury. We will be reading and discussing how a group of Russian press correspondents shaped Russian conceptions of Britain in the early twentieth century. The discussion will be led by Dr Anna Vaninskaya of the University of Edinburgh. The readings can be downloaded from this link (password required).

Few casual or professional observers of Russian media coverage of Britain today stop to reflect on its centuries-old history. But long before the internet, television and radio, the Russian periodical press supplied a running commentary on contemporary British developments and offered different versions of Britain for the consumption of general audiences. In the early twentieth century, London was home to a community of Russian foreign correspondents who fed the curiosity of the public back home, reinforced national prejudices and stereotypes, but also composed accounts that are interesting in their own right as social documents of Edwardian Britain. Among their number one finds immediately recognisable figures such as Korney Chukovsky and Samuil Marshak, as well as people now entirely forgotten, but at the time acknowledged to be the leading architects of the Russian perception of Britain. The session will focus on selections from the voluminous correspondences of Dioneo (Isaak Shklovsky) and Semyon Rapoport, newly translated into English as part of a project to bring these rare but fascinating historical sources to Anglophone readers. In line with the current media focus on the SNP and the effects of austerity, the chosen excerpts will deal with Scotland and the London working class – from a 1900s Russian point of view. Background material will also be provided.

If you plan to attend, it would be helpful if you could let Rebecca Beasley (rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk) and/ or Matthew Taunton (M.Taunton@uea.ac.uk) know. The discussion will finish at 7, and anyone available is very welcome to join us for dinner nearby.

Studentships

Funded PhD opportunity at the University of Exeter

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

Ronald Duncan Literary Foundation Studentship Ref: 1873

About the award

Primary Supervisor: Professor Nick Groom

Professor Groom’s work investigates questions of authenticity and the emergence of national and regional identities. This interest began in his first book, a study of the formation of the English ballad tradition (The Making of Percy’s Reliques, Clarendon Press, 1999). In recent years, his work has become more interdisciplinary. His cultural history of The Union Jack (Atlantic, 2006; paperbacked 2007), examined expressions of British identities. Most recently, his study on the history of representations of the English environment was published in November 2013 as The Seasons: An Elegy for the Passing of the Year (Atlantic). It was shortlisted for the Katharine Briggs Folklore Prize and runner-up for the Countryfile Book of the Year. In the meantime his acclaimed book The Gothic: A Very Short Introduction was published by OUP in 2012 as a part of a long-term project rethinking the Gothic past in political and historicist terms. Professor Groom also has a strong interest in literature and place, as well as south-west writing. He is co-director of ECLIPSE (Exeter Centre for Literatures of Identity, Place, and Sustainability).

Summary

Application deadline:	29th June 2015
Number of awards:	1
Value:	£14,057 plus UK/EU tuition fees for eligible students
Duration of award:	per year
Contact: Dr Matt Barber	humanities-pgadmissions@exeter.ac.uk

How to apply

Entry criteria

To apply

All application documents must be submitted in English. Certified translated copies of academic qualifications must also be provided.

More information

If you have any queries or would like to discuss this opportunity before applying, please contact Professor Nick Groom at n.groom@exeter.ac.uk.

If you have any queries regarding the application process please contact:

Postgraduate Administrator at: humanities-pgadmissions@exeter.ac.uk
College of Humanities Graduate School, University of Exeter
Queen’s Building, The Queen’s Drive
Exeter, Devon, EX4 4QH

Visit http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/ for more information.

Uncategorized

Blackwell’s Rare Books – forthcoming Modernism catalogue

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

Blackwell’s Rare Books is pleased to announce its second ‘Modernisms’ catalogue, focusing on literary innovation in the first half of the twentieth century – the catalogue includes important first editions, limited editions, inscribed copies, and manuscript material. Please contact rarebooks@blackwell.co.uk to request a free copy (specifying hard copy or email).

Please find a PDF flyer here

Call for submissions

Special Issue of Textus – call for contributors

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

The Archival Turn in Modern Literature

Special Issue of Textus: English Studies in Italy

Editors: Daniela Caselli, University of Manchester and Caroline Patey, Università degli Studi, Milano

This special issue of Textus will explore the ‘archival turn’ in modern literature and criticism. The archive has always been central to literary scholarship, especially in the pre-1900 period. However, the past decade has seen a resurgence of the critical and theoretical importance of the archive for studies of modernity, modernism, and even contemporary literature. At the same time, the motifs of the archive and archival research are increasingly infiltrating the form and structure of creative texts, blurring the boundaries between fictitious literary constructs and documentary writing. Archives and stored memories seem to be a favourite mode of narrative, dramatic or poetic re-visitations of the past and to inform a lot of exciting writing in the modern period (from Flann O’Brien’s The Dalkey Archive and Martha Cooley’s The Archivist, from A.S. Byatt to IanMcEwan). This archival passion has also triggered fresh and original approaches to canonical authors (among others, Henry James, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Joseph Conrad) and contributed to the opening of new theoretical approaches (first among them, ‘genetic criticism’).

The discovery of empirical data in criticism has also been portrayed as a new form of knowledge able to withstand the security risks created by cultural and critical theory. Recent uses of the archive have also contributed to the transformation of the late nineteenth century and twentieth century from avant-garde periods into epochs – from intractable critical challenges into historical objects of study. Thus, while contemporary writers increasingly encroach upon and incorporate the archive as an imaginary world, critical interventions have placed the archive at the core of their claims to advance scholarship. We have recently witnessed considerable investment on the part of institutions such as the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center in the acquisition of papers by J.M. Coetzee and David Foster Wallace and of Cambridge and Oxford University Press in the publishing of the letters of twentieth-century writers such as Samuel Beckett and Dorothy Richardson. In addition to this, the acrimonious dispute in France over Michel Foucault’s papers was a battle not devoid of irony given that ‘What is an Author?’ is a seminal critique of archive formations. The Digital Humanities are also playing an increasingly strategic role in departments of English literature, while genetic approaches to modern literature are expanding across Europe and North America (see, for instance, the ongoing Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project, or the work done by the Canadian Society for Digital Humanities).

In this special issue we ask: what are the challenges in making sense of the archive in the context of modern literature criticism? How does it work as a cultural phenomenon and as a practice of close reading? What has the practice of ‘archival writing’ to say about the tension between collection and creation? What happens when we encounter letters, or drafts, and we try to read them not only as ‘archival material’ or as ‘documents’ able to tell us something about the author’s intentions or the history of production, but we try instead to read them as texts in their own right? What new questions can be asked about the history of material culture in the modern period? How are these archival matters transformed when they migrate from the library/museum/collection to the writer’s page and become part and parcel of new fictions?

Among the issues that we would like to explore in this issue are:

new archival findings in modern literature
archival leanings in modern literature
archival motifs in fiction and poetry
the relationship between archival turn and critical theory
the role of the archive in historicizing modernity
how archival research affects the personae of modernist artists
the different uses of the archive in medieval and early modern studies in comparison to

studies of modernity and modernism

the digital humanities as a cultural phenomenon
genetic criticism in studies of modernity and modernism
the manuscript as fetish
the place of correspondence in the archive
life-writing and the archive
the relation between archive and memory
the neurosciences and the archive

Please send a 300-word abstract to both editors by Friday 24^th July 2015:

Caroline Patey caroline.patey@unimi.it

Daniela Caselli daniela.caselli@manchester.ac.uk

The editors will notify contributors by Friday 7^th August 2015.

The deadline for article submissions (6,000 words) is Friday 13^th November 2015.

Seminars

Writing with Scrapbooks: Cutting, Pasting, and Authorship

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

Everyone is welcome to come along this coming Monday (8 June) at 5.30 to the final Book History Research Group seminar of the year at Senate House, London. Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University) will be talking about the use of scrapbooks by Virginia Woolf and others: full details below. No need to register!

Monday 8 June 2015

Time: 5.30-7.00pm

Venue: Room G34, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet St, London, WC1E 7HU. Tel. 0207 8628675

Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University)

Writing with Scrapbooks: Cutting, Pasting, and Authorship

Nineteenth and early twentieth century newspaper readers cut up their reading and made scrapbooks from it in both the US and the UK. They used these scrapbooks as records of their interests and activities, as mediated by the press. Ordinary readers also did this to keep track of information, and to speak back to the media in a variety of ways. Scrapbooks kept by authors tracked their own published writing and collected news items for possible future incorporation into their works. Scrapbook-making British writers included Virginia Woolf, Charles Reade, and Lewis Carroll. This talk will discuss ways that writers used scrapbooks and consider how scrapbooks can complicate our ideas of authorship.

Ellen Gruber Garvey is is Professor of English at New Jersey City University and Visiting Professor at the Université Paris 8/Vincennes-St. Denis for the Spring 2015 semester. Her most recent book, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, 2012) won four awards, including the Institute for Humanities Research’s biennial Transdisciplinary Book Award and the Society of American Archivists’ Waldo Gifford Leland Award. Her previous book, The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press, 1996) won the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) prize for the year’s best book on book history. She has also written on American abolitionists’ use of newspapers as data, the advertising of books, and on women editing periodicals. She has written for the New York Times Disunion blog, Slate, and The Root, has held the Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands and is co-editor of the journal Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

This year’s Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History Research Group seminar series is ‘Paper, Pen and Ink 2: Manuscript Cultures in the Age of Print’. More details at http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/research-seminar-series/paper-pen-and-ink-2

If you have any queries about this seminar or the Book History seminar series in general, please contact Jonathan Gibson (jonathan.gibson@open.ac.uk)

CFPs

Call for Papers: Heroes Conference

Post author By modernistudies
Post date June 3, 2015

Call for Papers

Heroes

3-4 October 2015, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), London

Conference Theme

The figure of the hero is a matter of great cultural debate at the present time, in British contexts and beyond. Recent conflicts; natural disasters; ambitious expeditions; Olympic and Paralympic events – all have forged potential hero figures, renewing centuries-old discussions about just who, or what, a hero might be. This two-day conference will draw together academics from a wide variety of disciplines, alongside archivists, curators and librarians, plus colleagues from the commercial and charity sectors. It will foster conversations about hero figures past and present, considering their emergence or creation, their relationship with their fans or ‘worshippers’ in their own communities and/or further afield and, if relevant, the shifting fortunes of their reputations. We ask whether heroes emerge through deeds, character or morality, or whether they are created. We ponder the value of heroes to particular communities in the forging of their group identity. We trace the shaping and maintenance of heroic reputations in texts, art practice, oral culture and curatorship. Across the scope of the conference we seek to ask: who were, or are our heroes, and how/why could or should future heroes be selected or permitted to emerge?

Our conference will include the launch of the exhibition ‘Heroes of Exploration,’ which draws attention to heroic records in the collections of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), with a particular focus on heroism in mountain and Polar environments.

Possible Topics

The organising committee are interested in proposals from across the academic disciplines, the museums, galleries and archives sector, and those engaging with hero figures in their commercial or charity work. Within the academy, we anticipate interest from anthropology, art history, film and television studies, historical geography, history, politics, literature, and sociology. Topics which may be covered in the conference include, but are not limited to:

Theories of heroism, from ancient times to the present day
Historical heroes
Using heroes politically
Hero figures and brand identities
Heroes and charitable giving/engagement
Community identity and hero selection
Heroism and childhood
The changing reputation of specific heroes, or groups thereof
Heroism and imperialism
The perils of choosing a hero
Debunking hero figures; the heroic fall
Issues of gender in the notion of heroism
Heroism in the archives
The challenges of curating a heroic reputation
Curating/archiving heroic ‘things’ – tools, belongings or ‘relics’ of past heroes
Portraiture or sculpture and the construction of heroic reputation
Literary heroes
Heroes on film
Preserving heroes digitally
War heroism – soldiers, nurses and beyond
Race, gender and military heroism in Britain
Military heroes, veteran organisations and civilian relations
Civilian heroes; the ‘humble’ hero; heroism and class
Heroes of sport and/or exploration
Heroic bodies
Physical and mental struggle in the heroic life
Heroism and the history of emotion – how/why to heroes move us?

Note: We use ‘hero’ as ‘actor’ is used presently, i.e. in a gender-neutral way.

Submitting Paper and Panel Proposals

To propose a paper: Please send an abstract (max. 400 words), and a biographical note (max. 200 words)

To propose a panel: Please send abstracts and biographical notes (word limits as above) for each speaker, along with their contact details and institutional affiliation, plus a rationale for the panel as a whole (max. 600 words)

These should be sent to Dr. Abbie Garrington (Durham University): abbie.garrington@durham.ac.uk no later than Monday 20 July 2015. Abbie is also happy to answer any informal enquiries regarding papers, panels, and conference arrangements.

The Team

This conference forms part of The Hero Project, an AHRC-funded, year-long research initiative which looks at the historical contingency of the hero figure, and its role in the formation of community and national identity.

Principal Investigator: Dr. Abbie Garrington (MA PhD FRGS), English Studies, Durham University

Co-Investigator: Dr. Natasha Danilova (BA MA PhD), Politics and International Relations, University of Aberdeen

Co-Investigator: Dr. Berny Sèbe (Maîtrise DPhil FRHistS FRGS FHEA), Department of Modern Languages, University of Birmingham

Collaborator: Ms. Imogen Gibbon, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Scottish National Portrait Gallery

Collaborator: Dr. Catherine Souch, Head of Research and Higher Education, Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

Keep up with and comment upon the conference on Twitter: #heroesconf15