Author: modernistudies

*** REMINDER ***

The deadline for abstracts and proposals for the following conference is 28 April 2015.

What Ever Happened to the Working Class?
Rediscovering Class Consciousness in Contemporary Literature

An International Symposium at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House.
17 September 2015

Between Ed Miliband’s squeezed middle and tabloid diatribes against the underclass, the working class has seemingly disappeared from critical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Nevertheless issues of class, class consciousness, classlessness, and new configurations of class such as new affluent workers, the emergent service sector, and the precariat continue to form a rich source for novelists, poets and dramatists.

This interdisciplinary and international conference aims to bring together researchers and academics working in the fields of the literature and culture of the working class.

After the heyday of working-class literary studies in the 1950s to the 1980s with critics and theorists such as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukàcs, and Raymond Williams helping to reconfigure the canon, working-class writing as a literary category seemed to slip from critical analysis. In its wake a series of critical paradigms around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postcolonialism, postmodernism, ecocriticism, and disability studies, important as they have been, have tended on the whole to shift class contexts from centre stage.

The rich period of working-class fiction, drama and poetry during the same period has perhaps been underplayed in the following decades. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, and poetry by Tony Harrison, Tom Leonard and Barry Tebb now appear as works from a golden age in the exploration of working-class life. However, a significant number of writers continue to locate plots and characters in working-class contexts. In fiction, novelists such as Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Bernardine Evaristo, James Kelman, Andrea Levy, Courttia Newland, David Peace, Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith, Alan Warner, Sarah Waters, Alex Wheatle, and Jeanette Winterson have continued to explore, construct and represent working-class life. Simon Armitage, Jackie Kaye, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Philip Levine and John Cooper Clarke have maintained the legacy of working-class poetry in differing ways, while dramatists like Caryl Churchill, David Eldridge and Roy Williams have developed approaches that develop the ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of the 1950s and 60s.
One of the aims of the conference is to bring together those working to reintegrate and re- articulate class back into the fields of literary studies and cultural politics more broadly, with the aim of establishing a new set of critical approaches that foreground issues of class.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute individual papers, or 1-hour panels, from academics and researchers working primarily in the fields of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and culture who have research interests in exploring issues of class. Papers may be on broad topics or on individual authors, and although the focus of the conference will be on contemporary literature and culture, we also welcome proposals that offer contemporary re- assessments of working-class literature from all periods.

Although many of the literary texts cited above have UK settings, we also welcome papers on the representation of working-class life from all parts of the world, and are indeed interested in the way in which class identities circulate internationally.
We are also open to the possibility of including a strand of creative practice into the conference, so would welcome 20-minute presentations/performances/films or displays from literary writers (fiction, poetry or drama), or film makers, photographers, visual artists, musicians or other creative practitioners.

Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length and emailed to n.bentley@keele.ac.uk by 28th April 2015.

The conference organizers are Dr Nick Bentley and Dr Beth Johnson at Keele University.

Part of the Novel Playwrights Project

Bath Spa University, Corsham Court Campus

3^rd and 4^th July 2015

‘The highest conjoint work of art is the drama: it can only exist in all its potential completeness when there exists in it each separate branch of art in its own utmost completeness.’ Richard Wagner

Keynote Speakers: Laura Rattray (University of Glasgow) and Ros Ballaster (Mansfield College, University of Oxford

Dramatic Influences is an interdisciplinary conference which will explore the connections between the novel, poetry and the stage.

Papers, short performance pieces, works of art, suggestions for literary/artistic workshops inspired by the interactions between drama and other art forms are welcomed as the catalyst for interdisciplinary discussion. Proposals for 20 min papers are invited addressing the work of novelists and poets who also wrote plays or whose forms were significantly influenced by drama and theatre.

Topics or questions may include (but are not limited to):

• the formal influence of drama and theatre on poetry and fiction
• adaptation
• ‘anxieties of influence’ (Harold Bloom)
• the problems and benefits of reclaiming lesser known dramatic works by authors better know for their other creative enterprises
• why have specific novelists and poets failed or succeeded in writing for the stage?
• The Gesamptkunstwerk
• Theatre history and the practical considerations of joining art forms together to produce dramatic productions
• The influence of drama and theatre on specific genres

250 word proposals for individual papers and/or panels due by 1st May 2015.

The proposal should include a title, name, affiliation and short biography of the speaker, and a contact email address. These will be circulated prior to the conference and will appear on the conference website. Please indicate if you do not wish these details to appear. Feel free to submit proposals presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. We also welcome practice-based research examples which demonstrate how the stage has influenced or been influence by fiction and poetry. These may include, but are not limited to performances (dance, drama, music), creative workshops, readings, exhibitions, live art, film.

Please send 250-word abstracts as Word attachments tonovelplaywrights@gmail.com

by 1st May 2015.

Who to contact:
Dr Elizabeth Wright or Annabel Wynne at novelplaywrights@gmail.com

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Novel-Playwrights/253963081467742?fref=ts

Twitter: @NovelPlaywright

To register for the conference and for further information, please visit our website: http://novelplaywrights.wordpress.com/

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, MARCH 3–5, 2016

We are constantly under pressure to define the “now.” When did it begin? What does it include? When will it end? Recent attempts to capture this moving target have offered an array of starting points–the end of World War II, 1968, the end of the Cold War, the start of the new millennium, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis. These attempts have also offered an array of periodizing concepts–postmodernism, post-postmodernism, late capitalism, neoliberalism, the anthropocene, the post-civil rights era, the post-human. We propose to respond to and circumvent this pressure in two ways. First, by creating a dialogue between our periodizing concerns and recent literature and art. Second, by contextualizing our concerns against recent developments in politics, science, technology, philosophy, and education. We aim to illuminate what makes the now new—and how and why we should study it.

“The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century” will take place from March 3–5, 2016, at Princeton University. We invite early and mid-career scholars to propose 20-minute papers that examine the culture of the twenty-first century and the question of contemporaneity itself. The conference will focus primarily on literature in English, but we are open to scholarship that addresses work in other languages and in a range of media. We hope that the conference will be a unique opportunity to discuss major issues in the emerging field of twenty-first century literature and art. The conference will feature six panels, each organized around three speakers and one respondent. Keynotes will be delivered by Johanna Drucker and Ali Smith. We plan to use the conference as the foundation for an edited volume. Accepted participants will receive a travel allowance and lodging from Princeton.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Paper proposals should include a title, 250–500 word abstract, and cover letter with institutional affiliation and contact information.

Submit to: contemporary.princeton@gmail.com

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 31, 2015
NOTIFICATION: September 1, 2015

Organized by Sarah Chihaya, Kinohi Nishikawa, and Joshua Kotin

Just a reminder that the deadline for submissions to the ‘Sensory Modernism(s)’ conference is tomorrow (Wednesday 15 April).