For those engaged in writing or researching life-writing, the
emergence of conflicting narratives or evidence in life-stories always
poses a challenge – and a subject of fascination. This full-day
workshop will encourage participants to examine areas of dispute that
may have arisen during their own research: from existent biographies
presenting conflicting versions of a subject’s life, to source
materials or witnesses testifying with dramatically different
evidence. The workshop will explore the range of reasons for such
apparent conflicts, and will foster discussion about ways in which to
manage, reconcile and interrogate these alternative genealogies.
The workshop will include three speakers presenting ‘case-histories’
of their own tussle with conflicting biographical evidence: the
award-winning author and journalist Rebecca Abrams, the assyriologist
Jacob Dahl and his cousin Noa Lavi (both currently wrangling with
their own contested family history), and the literary scholar Kate
McLoughlin (who will talk about the rivalry between Ernest Hemingway
and Martha Gellhorn concerning landing on the Normandy beaches on
D-Day). OCLW’s director and associate director, Hermione Lee and
Elleke Boehmer, will lead interactive workshop sessions designed to
help attendees turn complex evidence into narrative shape in their own
projects. The whole workshop will take place in the beautiful
surroundings of Wolfson College, and will include lunch and
refreshments throughout the day. Numbers are limited to 30, to allow
for delegates to benefit from small-group interactions.
Registration is now open for ‘Sensory Modernism(s): Cultures of Perception’, a one-day conference at the University of Leeds due to be held on Thursday 21 May. ‘Sensory Modernism(s)’ seeks to address the interrelationship of modernism and sensory perception. The spirit of the conference is interdisciplinary, and invokes characterisations of modernism derived from a wide range of discursive domains. Keynote speakers are Dr Richard Brown, Dr Christina Bradstreet and Caro Verbeek.
Next Monday (18 May) at 5.30, Edmund King (Open University) is giving a paper on ‘British Manuscript Cultures of the First World War’, part of the Open University/Institute of English Studies Book History and Bibliography Research Group seminar series at Senate House: details pasted in below; other details about the seminar series are at http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/395/Book+History+and+Bibliography+Research+Seminar
18 May 2015 (Monday)
Room 104 (Senate House, Malet Street, London, first floor)
17:30 – 19:30
Edmund King (Open University)
British Manuscript Cultures of the First World War
Open University Book History and Bibliography Research Seminar
That the British volunteers and conscripts of the First World War made up the largest civilian army in the nation’s history is widely appreciated. What is less well known is the scale of the communications infrastructure necessary to keep these “citizen soldiers” in touch with the home front. Between 1914 and 1918, the British Postal Service’s Home Depot in London handled 2 billion letters and 114 million parcels addressed to soldiers serving overseas. Many of these soldiers were spending the first substantial period of time in their lives away from loved ones. Large numbers found themselves writing to parents and siblings for the very first time, learning the art of letter writing as they did so. Others for the first time in their lives started keeping diaries and journals of their day-to-day experiences. The war thus represented a kind of portal through which citizen soldiers, regardless of social status, were introduced to habits of self-recording through manuscript that had previously been largely the province of the upper and middle classes. Using specific examples drawn from soldiers’ letters and diaries, this paper will ask what it was that was unique about the manuscript cultures of the First World War.
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN for the University of York Centre for Modern Studies Postgraduate Symposium ‘Mapping Identities in the Modern World, 1830-present’, taking place on 2nd June.
This interdisciplinary one-day symposium aims to give postgraduate students across the arts and humanities the opportunity to develop interdisciplinary debates and ideas around the concept of identity, questioning the way in which identities are (re)formed, constructed and explored psychically and spatially in the modern world.
Our keynote speaker is poet, essayist and travel writer Marius Kociejowski. He has published four collections of poetry: Coast (Greville Press), Doctor Honoris Causa and Music’s Bride (Anvil Press). So Dance the Lords of Language – Poems 1975-2001 was published in Canada by Porcupine’s Quill in 2003. Most recently he has published God’s Zoo: Artists, Exiles, Londoners (Carcanet Press, 2014), relating a series of encounters with creative artists living in London who are exiled from their cultural and geographical roots.
Registration is free and open to all, with lunch and refreshments provided and a wine reception following the keynote. To register please email cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk with any dietary and access requirements by 25th May 2015.
“Re-Imagining the Gothic” and the University of Sheffield is almost here! This is a friendly reminder that if you’d like to attend the symposium all you need to do is shoot us an email with your name and institution to reimagininggoth15@gmail.com
The Showcasing Event, taking place from 3-7pm in Jessop West exhibition space and the University and is FREE and OPEN TO ALL, no registration required! There will be a keynote speech from author Lynn Shepherd and tons of great projects on ‘re-imagining’ Gothic studies!
So if you love the gothic or just want to experience something different, check us out!
Beckett and Modernism
The Second Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society
Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Haynes
The year 2016 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Beckett Studies (JOBS), founded in 1976 by James Knowlson and John Pilling. To celebrate this occasion, we are proud to announce both of them as keynote speakers at the second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society, dedicated to Beckett and Modernism. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Last Modernist’, Beckett has also been situated within the postmodern canon. After a long critical debate, the term ‘modernism’ has recently been reframed by a vibrant field of what is sometimes called the ‘new modernist studies’, and the term ‘Late Modernism’ seems to be gaining currency in Beckett studies.
At the same time, several critics have called into question not only the criteria underlying these labels but also the act of categorization itself, the danger being in ‘the neatness of identifications’, as Beckett warned his readers from the start. Therefore, with this second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society, we would like to move beyond the point of labelling and examine the different ways in which Beckett interacted with the broad intellectual and artistic climate commonly referred to as ‘modernism’, taking Susan Stanford Friedman’s ‘definitional excursions’ into account: ‘Modernism requires tradition to “make it new”. Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against. Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions.’
Keynote Speakers
James Knowlson
John Pilling
Call for Papers
Beckett’s formative years coincided with the first publications of several modernist masterpieces. While the importance of Joyce and Proust for Beckett’s work has been widely recognized, his dislike of T. S. Eliot has perhaps been taken too much at face value. One aspect of Eliot’s poetics that Beckett would have agreed with is the importance of the literary tradition for modern writing. As his lectures on ‘The Modern Novel’ at TCD, his early essays and the hundreds of books in his personal library confirm, authors from the previous centuries were central to his twentieth-century poetics. One question to ask is how Beckett used that literary tradition to ‘make it new’, not only in his novels, but also in his plays and poems. Even though Virginia Woolf is entirely absent from his work, he did share her interest in the mind. How different is Beckett’s approach from Woolf’s attempt to ‘look within’, and how does his own exploration of the mind relate to the ‘inward turn’ generally associated with Modernism, and to the recent revision of this concept by David Herman (2011)?
That Beckett was fascinated by the material traces of cognitive processes is shown by his careful preservation of drafts, notebooks or marginalia, and we are still learning how these reading and writing traces in turn continued to shape his own thinking. Beckett was not only interested in the mind and the self, as his psychology notes confirm, but also in the nature of representation. While his familiarity with Mauthner’s Beiträge has received much attention, the influence of Sartre, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on Beckett’s notion of linguistic skepticism and phenomenology still deserves more attention. His work is also informed by his familiarity with numerous other cultural aspects: for instance, his knowledge of the visual arts, both modern and classical, acquired especially during his German trip in the late 1930s and through his friendship with Duthuit and his work on transition; the importance of early cinema, attested by Beckett’s reading of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film in 1936, cannot be ignored; the non-visual medium of radio is another modern artform that he explored, around the same time when he listened to dodecaphonic music with Avigdor Arikha.
Like many of the Modernists, Beckett asked himself what it meant to write in a modern sense, as a young TCD lecturer in 1930. He pondered the question for the next sixty years in his writing, and this conference aims to distill answers from the rich body of work he left behind.
The CFP for the second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society invites abstracts that could focus on, but do not need to be limited to, topics such as:
Modernist Minds
o Phenomenology and representation (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, …);
o Analytic philosophy and language (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, …);
o Psychology and the self (psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, …).
Modernist Poetics
o Beckett’s Manuscripts
o Linguistic scepticism
o Beckett and the ‘Modernists’ (Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Eliot, Flann
O’Brien, …)
o The modern novel
Modernism and Literary Tradition
o Intertextuality
o Beckett’s reading traces (library, notebooks, etc.)
o ‘Make It New’
Modern Art
o Early cinema, radio broadcasting, technological revolution
o Painting and sculpture
o Experimental music
o Theatrical innovation
Modern Times, Modern Spaces
o Beckett and politics
o Cosmopolitan/metropolitan Beckett
Deadline: 15 September 2015. Notification of decisions by 30 October 2015.
For more information about the conference contact dirk.vanhulle@uantwerpen.be
(THE PEER-REVIEWED YEARBOOK OF THE KATHERINE MANSFIELD SOCIETY)
KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND PSYCHOLOGY
Guest Editor: Professor Clare Hanson (University of Southampton, UK)
In a letter of October 1920, Katherine Mansfield distanced herself from the ‘mushroom growth of “cheap psychoanalysis”’ but in the next breath affirmed her belief that ‘with an artist one has to allow – oh tremendously for the subconscious element in his work’. As this suggests, her engagement with the models of subjectivity emerging from contemporary psychology was both complex and ambivalent. This volume invites papers that engage with all aspects of the interplay between Mansfield’s fiction and contemporary psychology and psychoanalysis.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
the subconscious and the unconscious popular psychology
the psychological novel Gurdjieff
Freud aesthetics and psychology
Jung
Submissions of between 5000–6000 words (inclusive of endnotes), in Word format and using MHRA style, should be emailed to the Guest Editor for this volume, Professor Clare Hanson, accompanied by a 50 word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
A detailed MHRA style guide is available from the Katherine Mansfield Society website:
Pieces of creative writing on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield – poetry, short stories, etc., should be submitted to the editors for consideration, accompanied by a 50 word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College, Oxford
With funding from the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London (CLWR)
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Sarah Churchwell
Andrew O’Hagan
Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities, University of East Anglia
2015 Writer in Residence,
The Eccles Centre at the British Library
Novelist
Creative Writing Fellow,
King’s College London
In the last decade, the fields of life-writing and celebrity studies have separately gained traction as areas for provocative critical analysis, but the significant connections between them have been overlooked. In celebrity studies, stories about individual people are examined through national, cultural, economic and political contexts. The function of the person’s image is considered rather than the life from which that image was/is derived. Conversely, life-writing does not always take into account the impact of celebrity on the life, and instead portrays it as an event rather than a condition with psychological impact which could be an integral part of the narrative.
Through a one-day conference entitled ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity,’ we want to consider the interplay between celebrity and life-writing. The conference will explore ideas of image, persona and self-fashioning in an historical as well as a contemporary context and the role these concepts play in the writing of lives. How does the story (telling) of a historical life—of Cleopatra or Abraham Lincoln, for instance— alter when we re-read it in terms of celebrity? What is the human impact of being a celebrity— in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘part of the coinage of every day speech’? And how does this factor in when we use archival materials related to celebrities, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews, press accounts, oral histories, apocryphal tales, etc.? Furthermore, what are the ethical responsibilities of life-writers when approaching such famous stories?
Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:
Celebrity in the fields of literature, politics, entertainment and public life
Historical reevaluations of celebrity from earlier periods
The celebrity as life-writer (i.e. celebrity memoirs, etc.)
Using celebrity lives in historical fiction
The celebrity and identity
Showmanship, freak shows and the circus
Identity, power and violence in lives of the famous
Images and the press
Writing celebrity lives from below
We also welcome papers on any issues arising from these questions and disciplines.
The conference organizers invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations/papers or panel proposals. Presenters should submit abstracts of 300 words by 15 May 2015 to Nanette O’Brien (nanette.obrien@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) and Oline Eaton (faith.eaton@kcl.ac.uk). Please send your abstract as a separate attachment in a PDF or Word document, and include on it your name, affiliation, and a brief bio.
The T. S. Eliot Society will again sponsor a session at the annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, to be held at the University of Louisville, February 18-20, 2016. Abstracts for 20-minute papers on any subject related to Eliot are invited, but those drawing on volume one of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition are particularly welcome. This first volume, Apprentice Years, 1905-1918, includes Eliot’s juvenilia, his graduate essays in philosophy and the social sciences, and his early journalism. There will be a talk on Eliot’s philosophical papers by Jewel Spears Brooker, co-editor of the volume, at this year’s session. The online edition of Complete Prose is available in many libraries and by individual subscription on the Project MUSE website at Johns Hopkins (http://muse.jhu.edu/about/reference/eliot/). For further information on the 2016 conference, please visit the website: www.thelouisvilleconference.com.
Those interested should send a 300-word abstract to Anita Patterson (apatters@bu.edu) no later than September 10, 2015. Please include your academic affiliation (if applicable) and a brief biographical note with your abstract.
We’re actively seeking manuscripts and proposals for a prospective new series with Bloomsbury Press, “Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics.” Please find the series rationale below, and send all queries to d.katz@warwick.ac.uk
This series will publish books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a primary focus on texts written in English, while remaining open to work from other languages along with questions of translation, correspondence, and exchange. If the main period under consideration will be 1945 to the present, we recognise the inherent untimeliness of poetic discourse, and are also interested in studies that move beyond this time frame in order to locate recent and contemporary situations. Of special interest to us is how poetry and poetics have moved themselves to the forefront of many of the most fraught and complex theoretical discussions of the post-war era. Here, the intersection of poetry with philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, political and economic theory, various protest or liberation movements, as well as other art forms, including prose, are of particular concern. Despite or by virtue of its largely marginalised position, post-war poetry has been a focal point of dissidence, resistance, and challenge to many of the dominant discourses—political, social, erotic, and aesthetic—of the age. We are particularly keen to publish work that examines the paradoxical force of poetry and poetics in these respects, while engaging productively with the specifities of the medium and its diverse histories. We are also eager to publish work by specialists in other areas of inquiry (philosophy, psychoanalysis) for whom poetry has become a vital element in their thinking.
Daniel Katz, Series Editor
Co-Director, Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
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