Author: modernistudies

Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani/Italian Association for North American Studies

23rd AISNA Biennial Conference, Naples 24-26 September 2015

“Harbors: Flows and Migrations of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas. The U.S. A. in/and the World.” 

CFP: Modernism and its Italian Harbors

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart. In storms and

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide

around my fathomless arms, I am unable . . .

Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster”

Modernism means a lot more than early twentieth-century  artistic experiments. Rediscovered in its planetarity (Friedman 2010),  the idea of modernism today conjures a kaleidoscope of possible connections, potential transits, actual displacements. The New Modernist Studies gives us a  geo-cultural concept  that extends in space and time (well beyond the reified divide between European modernism and creative production originating beyond Europe, as well as the standard chronological period between 1890 and 1945), points to an incessant movement of transnational circulation and translation (Mao & Walkowitz 2008; Berman 2012; Doyle 2005; Hayot 2012; Gallo 2010), and  reintroduces us to neglected intimacies between the aesthetic practice of the historical avant-gardes and contemporary philosophical-critical schools like theory (Ayers  2008; Ross 2008).

What is the role of Italy in this rich web of flows and migrations? What becomes of English-speaking modernism in/through Italy? Contributions are invited which explore  the possible Italian harbors of modernism’s migratory, transformative, and diasporic course. The term “harbor” here, in its literal and metaphorical meanings, is used to encourage  multiple venues of inquiry: a place, an idea, an author or a cluster of authors, an artifact, or anything which might provide a point of anchorage for  Anglophone  modernism, enabling it to circulate, produce, and thus appear anew and re-emerge– displaced– under the guise of  other and unforeseen forms, moods, affects,  movements, or ideas.

Please send 250 word abstracts, along with a brief biography,  to  the panel organizer:  mmitrano@luc.edu,  or mena.mitrano@tin.it  by June 3, 2015.

This panel has been approved. I’d love to hear from you!

Mena Mitrano

Adjunct Professor, Loyola University Chicago,  Rome Center

Editorial Board RSA Journal (Rivista di Studi Americani)

Via Massimi 114/A

00136 Rome, Italy

+39-335-667-1682

University of Rennes, France, June 1-2-3, 2016

The fifth EAM congress invites scholars to consider the coupling of the notions of quest and investigation in works of art or movements of the avant-garde or neo-avant-garde, or of the various forms of modernism, even though modernism and the avant-garde seem often to have been constructed in opposition to the spiritual or scientific heritage suggested by these two terms. The notion of quest suggests a metaphysical beyond informed by mysticism, implying the absence of an end or of a conclusion, whereas the notion of investigation implies a totally rational conception of reality and a process likely to bring a definite result and reach a conclusion. Coupling the two notions, quest/investigation, is therefore an invitation to overcome an initial paradox: the endlessness of the quest as opposed to the fixed scope of the investigation. The co-articulation of the two notions may shed some light on marginal or neglected works. It may also question the dialectical relationship between modern and anti-modern, between avant-garde and rear-guard, between insistent innovations and archaisms, acknowledged or disguised.

Whether dialectical or dynamic, the approach we suggest applies to all the fields or domains of research in the Arts, literature, aesthetics, cinema, photography, drama, T.V. or digital media, architecture, music, design…
As a guide to researchers, we suggest four possible approaches:

1 A genetic approach: this would deal with the process of creation itself as quest or investigation (artistic protocols, the work as investigation, models or projects designed as research, studies, excavations, exploration, etc.)

2 A formal approach: to identify the motifs, terms, or forms of the quest or investigation in works of art, fiction and/or documentary (e.g: works of mystical inspiration, the reintroduction of the sacred; or the schematic models for a project, the presence of user manuals, guidelines, etc.)

3 An approach in terms of reception: the place or the role of the spectator or reader confronted by an open/closed work, the state of completion or incompletion of the work (is the finitude or completeness of the work put into question by new technologies? do these technologies enable a new appropriation of the work?)

4 An epistemological or meta-discursive approach: dealing with historiography and historicity, new modes of research, new technologies (restoration of paintings, collaborative creations, databases, etc.). This approach considers the way in which the quest/investigation of the researcher and the artistic quest or investigation itself mutually inform or act on each other.

The submissions should explicitly mention which of the four approaches is primarily involved.

The scientific committee invites proposals for panels of three or four speakers, or for double panels of up to eight speakers. Individual proposals are also accepted. Panels may not consist only of graduate students. All submissions must contain a title (for each paper and for the panel), a 300-word abstract (of the individual paper or of all the papers of the proposed panel), the name and qualifications of the author(s), the language in which the paper(s) will be read (English, French, German, Spanish). Proposals must be submitted in a Word, Times New Roman 12 format (no PDF) before September 1, 2015 to the following address:

EAM.rennes2016@gmail.com

Answers will be sent by October 15th 2015.

We are delighted to announce the call for papers for the inaugural MONC conference.

Literature at War: H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and their Contemporaries in and around the First World War

Saturday 19 September 2015, at King’s College London, Waterloo Campus, London SE1

Sponsors:

The H. G. Wells Society

Ford Madox Ford Society

Centre for Modern Literature and Culture, King’s College London

Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London

This year sees the centenary of two major literary events, the publication of Ford’s The Good Soldier (‘the saddest story I have ever heard’), and of Wells’s Boon, the cantankerous literary satire that terminated his friendship with Henry James. Both works can be read as offering, though in very different ways, a kind of final verdict on British Edwardian culture; and both can also be seen to reflect their authors’ growing sense of the apparent impotence and irrelevance of the literary and artistic worlds in time of war. Yet 1914-18 and its immediate aftermath was also a time of extraordinary cultural vibrancy, in which the war novels of Wells and Ford – Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Parade’s End (1924-8) – would play their part. Henry James, in his famous defence of his art in reply to Boon, wrote of ‘the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift’, a credo that could have been echoed by Wells, Ford and many of their contemporaries despite their sharply conflicting understandings of ‘life’ and its relation to literature.

This one-day conference invites papers reflecting the contrasting views of literature and the First World War in the writing of Wells, Ford and their contemporaries. A variety of approaches will be welcomed, including perspectives on life-writing, propaganda, satire, utopia and the writing of history.

Enquiries to: max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk or j.p.parrinder@reading.ac.uk

Proposals for 20-minute papers (250-word abstracts) should be sent to ahri@kcl.ac.uk by 11 June 2015.

AHRI

ahri@kcl.ac.uk