Author: modernistudies

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Seminars

Reading Ulysses in the Little Review – Tuesday 28 April

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will take place at 6pm on Tuesday 28 April, in room G34 (ground floor) of Senate House, London.
We are delighted to welcome Clare Hutton, who will be delivering a paper on James Joyce’s Ulysses and The Little Review. Please see below for further details.
The seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism and/or periodical studies. For more information, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com or visit http://modmags.wordpress.com​
We look forward to seeing you in two weeks.
With best wishes,
Charles Dawkins (University of Oxford)
Aimee Gasston (Birkbeck, University of London)
Chris Mourant (King’s College London)
Natasha Periyan (Royal Holloway, University of London)
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CFPs

CFP: T. S. Eliot Society (St. Louis, Sept. 25-27)

The 36th Annual Meeting of the T. S. Eliot Society
St. Louis, September 25-27, 2015

The Society invites proposals for papers to be presented at our annual meeting in St. Louis. Clearly organized proposals of about 300 words, on any topic reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical sketches, should be emailed by June 13, 2014, to tseliotsociety@gmail.com, with the subject heading “conference proposal.”

The 2015 T. S. Eliot Memorial Lecturer will be Jed Esty, University of Pennsylvania. For complete information, please see our website (http://www.luc.edu/eliot).

Peer Seminar:  Prufrock One Hundred Years Later
Seminar Leader: Cassandra Laity

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” first appeared in print 100 years ago, in Poetry magazine, June 1915.  Our 2015 peer seminar with Cassandra Laity will recognize this centennial with a focus on “Prufrock” then and now. Please see our website (http://www.luc.edu/eliot) for further information on participating in the seminar, including how to sign up.

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CFPs

Call for papers: MODERNIST DISASSOCIATIONS

Characterized by collectives, avant-garde alliances, salons, magazines, manifestos, mergers and ruptures, the modernisms of the first half of the 20th century were an associative affair. The exemplary “moderns,” however eclectic a group, joined in revolt against the forms and pieties of the 19th century, spurring aesthetic innovation and energizing modernity’s political, cultural, and technological revolutions.

But what about those who – whether by choice, ignorance, or circumstance – disassociate? What does it mean to be a dropout, dissenter, or dilettante estranged from (or a stranger to) modernism? In order to broach these and other questions, this panel seeks papers on writers, artists, and musicians whose work, intentionally or not, snubs groupthink, possibly turning against the progressive, political, technological and revolutionary attitudes we tend to associate with modernism.

Papers might address:

-Notions of anti-modernism, noncommitment, being apolitical
-Acts of disavowal or demission vis-a-vis a larger goal or project
-Figures of dilettantism, unproductivity, inaction, or backwardness
-Technophobia or anti-materialism (in all senses of the term)
-Failure, inadequacy, loneliness, and impotence
-Lack of context and alternative methodologies for reading modernism

Please submit a 300 word proposal to Andrew Dubrov at asd323@nyu.edu before April 15th, 2015.

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Call for submissions

CfP: “Art and Arts”, Nouvelle Revue d’Esthétique, April 20

Please find in attachment a call for papers for a special issue of La Nouvelle Revue d’Esthétique, Vol. 16 (Presses Universitaires de France).

We welcome contributions in English—although accepted papers will be published (and translated) in French.

The deadline has been extended to April 20 for potential contributors to submit abstracts (5000 characters, including spaces) to the editorial board. Full-length papers are expected by June 1.

The call for papers can be found here: http://www.fabula.org/actualites/l-art-et-les-arts-nouvelle-revue-d-esthetique-n-16_66938.php

With all best wishes,

Cécile Guédon

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Events

Exhibition on Octave Uzanne (“Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism: 1895 to 1945” Conference, London)

I am happy to announce that my exhibition on Octave Uzanne will be shown at Senate House, London to accompany the conference Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism: 1895 to 1945 (Friday 17 and Saturday 18 April 2015).

Octave Uzanne was a French bibliophile, writer and publisher whose work shows that Aestheticism and Decadence were anchored in the modern age.

For more information about the exhibition, visit my website: http://www.lisejaillant.com/2015/04/octave-uzanne-between-reaction-and.html 

The programme of the conference can be found here: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-conferences/ageofmodernism

—
Dr Lise Jaillant
Lecturing Fellow | University of East Anglia | School of Literature, Drama & Creative Writing
Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow | Universität Leipzig | Buchwissenschaft
SHARP Liaison Officer to MLA
Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon in The Modern Library Series, 1917–1955 (Pickering & Chatto, 2014). http://www.pickeringchatto.com/modernlibrary 
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CFPs

FINAL cfp: Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible

Druskininkai, Lithuania July 18-25, 2015

PARTICIPATION FEE REDUCED; SCHOLARSHIP APPLICATION DEADLINE 15TH APRIL

CALL FOR PAPERS

The summer symposium “Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible,” including a seminar “The ‘dailiness’ of everyday life”

Nordic Summer University, Heterologies of the Everyday research circle

18-25 July, 2015, Druskininkai, Lithuania.

Keynote speakers: Ben Highmore and Roberta Mock.

 

Everyday space is a space of relational practices, where lives unfold within the fluid relationscapes of spaces, things and others around us. These everyday relationscapes are grounded by material and historical circumstances within the ideological landscape of a body-politics. This symposium considers political dimensions of the everyday and aims at imagining a new “aesthetic politics of the ordinary” (Ben Highmore). According to Jacques Rancière, “Human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together; and politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’.” This symposium will consider new possibilities for political and aesthetic renewal.

 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to

–          sensation and togetherness as the connecting links between small events of the everyday and the life of the polis;

–          heterological, differential moments of the everyday;

–          everyday aesthetics as a ground for art, but also for politics and social life;

–          artistic representations of the everyday in the context of the polis.

–          the single day as an entry point to understanding the everyday; dialogues between a single day and the everyday as such.

 

Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and a short bio to Epp Annus, by 1 May 2015 (annus.1@osu.edu). If you wish to participate without giving a paper, kindly send a short (150-300 word) description of yourself and your interests, also by 1 May 2015. Later submissions may be considered, should there still be available places.

 

The symposium also includes a seminar “The ‘dailiness’ of everyday life”. Potential participants will be invited to submit a short position paper (2-3,000 words) on the topic in advance of the seminar. These papers will be circulated among participants in advance of the session and will form the basis of the seminar discussion. The seminar will be limited to 12 participants, but auditors will be welcome. Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and a short bio to Bryony Randall, by 15 April 2015 (Bryony.Randall@glasgow.ac.uk). Proposals are invited on any aspect of the single day and the everyday, but participants may wish to consider the following questions as part of their contributions:

What does a focus on the ‘dailiness’ of everyday life, its daily temporality, bring to our understanding of contemporary literature, culture and society? How does this intersect with key issues of class, race, gender and sexuality that underpin experiences of the everyday? Or put another way, how can the data, narratives, experiences and affects captured in a single day be mobilised to help us understand and transform the ’distribution of the sensible’? And how do recent discoveries and preoccupations that form the epistemology of our times affect the space that dailiness and the day occupy in representations of contemporary life? (for example information surfeit; preoccupation with loss of memory; new understanding of the plasticity of memories).

 

 

The symposium “Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible” is organized by the research circle Heterologies of the Everyday, which is part of the Nordic Summer University network. This circle aims to address what is most relevant and unavoidably present for every human being: everyday existence. This is an interdisciplinary project that works at the intersection of cultural studies, philosophy, literary criticism, art criticism, film studies, urban studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

The 2015 Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University will take place in Druskininkai, Lithuania, in a 19th century spa resort.

 

The total cost of the session (including accommodation and all meals in a four star Hotel Druskininkai) ranges from 261 euro to 407 euro, depending on the kind of accommodation you choose: http://w2015.nsuweb.org/?page_id=59

 

NSU will offer scholarships for students and grants for others in need of a subsidy. The application period is from 1st April to 15th April. For more information: http://nsuweb.org/w2014/application.

PhD students are eligible for up to five ECTS points.  

Childcare is provided for children starting from age 3.

Questions: annus.1@osu.edu

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CFPs

Extension to CFP deadline – ‘Perfectly phrased and quite as true’: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890–1950

We are extending the deadline for submission of abstracts for the conference, ‘”Perfectly phrased and quite as true”: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890–1950’, to 1st May 2015 to enable anyone who narrowly missed the deadline to submit their proposal. 
We invite proposals that explore aphoristic and epigrammatic writing from any number of diverse perspectives, from the theoretical to the literary-historical, the political to the playful. The periodization should be considered a broad template rather than a strict delimitation – we are happy to consider papers on writers whose work falls slightly outside this bracket. Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent toaphoristicmodernity@gmail.com
The full call for papers is reprinted below. We look forward to receiving more marvellous proposals!
‘Perfectly phrased and quite as true’: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890–1950
4th of July 2015, King’s Manor, University of York
Plenary speakers:
Dr Mark Sandy, Durham University
Dr James Williams, University of York
‘You cut life to pieces with your epigrams’, says Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Lord Henry. His statement is itself an adept epigram, encapsulating a particular kind of aphoristic writing which is pointed and authoritative, yet retains a hint of frivolity. Although aphoristic and epigrammatic writing hails from antiquity and has always been a diverse and popular literary genre, the final years of the Victorian era saw a surge in the popularity of the aphorism. As the rhythms of life and industry accelerated, along with the consumption of information, aesthetic fashions followed suit, and the aphorism came to encapsulate the condensation, spontaneity and fragmentation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. As Henry James’ epigrammatic assessment of the Victorian novel implied, ‘loose, baggy monsters’ were out, economy of language was in, and the art of aphorism was revivified.
 
Along with its subgenera, such as the epigram, the witticism, and the apophthegm, the aphorism expresses the kernel of a truth in surprising ways, while playfully destabilising it – a duality embodied by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (1878), one of the first modern works to undermine the systematised nature of western philosophical thought by employing aphoristic writing. On a more quotidian level, with advances in modern media drawing the cult of celebrity into the literary world, modern and modernist writers became celebrated for their bon mots. Accordingly, the nimble one-liner popularised by Wilde and Mark Twain was taken up and turned to different purposes by later public figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, T.S. Eliot, and Dorothy Parker. As this diverse company suggests, the aphorism can assume as many styles and modes as possible themes, while its airtight economy squeezes and condenses meaning rather than whittling it. Like a quaint contraption ingrained with cryptic clues that slowly spool out meaning, the modern aphorism is ‘neither a truism on the one hand, nor a riddle on the other’, as the late-Victorian journalist, John Morley put it.
 
This one-day conference aims not only to showcase the distinctive character of aphoristic writing in modernity, but also to rehabilitate the critical status of this miniaturised, ephemeral literary genre. We invite 20 minute papers and panel proposals on any of the following variations upon this theme (although respondents should not consider themselves restricted to these topics):
·         Aphoristic subgenres (epigram, apophthegm, maxim, proverb, sententia, etc.)
·         Aphorisms and politics
·         Celebrity and sound-bites
·         Paradox and/or self-contradiction
·         Technical ingenuity and/or innovation of thought
·         Aphorisms and modernism
·         Aphorisms and decadence
·         The stylistics of aphorisms
·         Witticisms and quips
·         Earnestness and irony
·         Quibbling and wordplay
·         Management of meaning: ambiguity, multiplicity, denseness
·         fel vs mel epigrams
·         The practice of quotation
·         Epigraphs, dedications and other paratextual fragments
·         Aphorisms implanted within larger texts
·         Aphorisms and literary theory
·         Modern aphoristic writing as influenced by antiquity and the Renaissance
·         Anti-aphorisms: platitudes and commonplaces
·         Anti-aphorisms: parody and nonsense aphorisms
·         Conversational and anecdotal aphorisms
Panels will follow the format of three 20-minute papers followed by questions. Abstracts of no more than 250 words are invited by 1st May 2015. Please email submissions to aphoristicmodernity@gmail.com
Categories
CFPs Events

H.D. Conference Updates (Deadline Extended)

The English Department at Lehigh University is delighted to announce that H.D. will be awarded a posthumous honorary degree at the spring commencement ceremony. One of H.D.’s relatives, Beth Wolle McKay, who was herself among the cohort of first women at Lehigh in the 1970s, will accept the degree on H.D.’s behalf. We look forward to celebrating this honor at the “H.D. and Feminist Poetics” conference in September. The official announcement can be found here: http://www1.lehigh.edu/news/honorary-degree-recipients-named-0
We continue to update the conference website (https://english.cas2.lehigh.edu/node/185), which now contains information regarding registration fees and hotel rates. Also, please note that we have extended the deadline for submitting proposals to Saturday, April 25.
In the meantime, feel free to contact me with any questions.
Best wishes,
Jenny Hyest
Conference Coordinator
jehc@lehigh.edu
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Uncategorized

Writing Literary History: Europe 1900-1950

14-16 September 2015, University of Leuven

www.writingliteraryhistory.be

INVITED SPEAKERS: Michael North – Marjorie Perloff – Gilles Philippe – Gisèle Sapiro – Ted Underwood

This conference is an initiative of the MDRN research lab at the University of Leuven (www.mdrn.be), which focuses on European literature from the (long) first half of the twentieth century. Recognizing that (modern) literary history is currently one of the main sites of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies, the conference aims to take stock of recent scholarship and to investigate how literary historical research has modified our understanding of writing between 1900 and 1950. We welcome proposals for papers which consider the following overall research questions and perspectives:

–          Many crucial notions in literary studies have been revalued in recent years in the practice of literary history. These include archive, period, book, event, media, genre, generation, objects, style and the senses. How exactly has this conceptual revaluation affected our view of literature’s and writers’ complex dynamics and functions between 1900 and 1950? What aspects and notions of writing require further attention in future literary histories?

–          Recent decades have seen an explosion of new or revised approaches in literary history. These include digital humanities, media archaeology, cognitive approaches, evocriticism and literary Darwinism, ecocriticism, object-oriented theories, affect theory and many more. Which of these are of special value to the history of literature from the modernist period and why?

–          Our understanding of literature’s ‘context’ has gone through drastic changes in the past decades. Once universally understood as the immediate institutional, economic or political constellation surrounding a text, ‘context’ in present-day literary studies means a lot of things, from the ‘brain’ (in cognitive studies) to the ‘universe’ (in so-called Big History). How can these drastic redefinitions help us to reconceive the history of literature between 1900 and 1950?

–          Place and space always have been said to be of significance to the historical development of European literature. What new approaches to space and place (from translation studies and memory studies to post-socialist research and geologically inspired methods working with concepts like deep time) allow us to reread the regional, national and transnational circulation of European writing during this half century?

–          Which new forms of reading to have gained weight in recent years (from distant reading and uncritical reading to non-reading and beyond) are of relevance to the historiography of literature from the modernist period? Similarly, what new or hitherto neglected aspects of the materiality, reception and production of texts can help us to cast new light on the writing in the period?

–          The first half of the twentieth-century saw the rise of many historiographical methods (from Formalism and early structuralism to neo-Marxism and early Critical Theory) that went on to play a crucial role in literary history. What aspects of these methods still hold potential today? Are there perhaps other approaches in literary history developed during the period that have remained largely neglected but still hold promise?

Proposals for 20-minute presentations + a short CV are welcome before 4 May 2015 and can be sent to: mdrn.wlh@gmail.com. Case-based contributions that can help us to revisit the writings from the modernist period will be considered, but our principal aim is to foster methodological and conceptual debate and to enhance the dialogue between the major literary and historiographical research traditions within Europe and beyond. For that reason proposals on general theoretical and methodological topics in the field of literary historiography (always with an emphasis on the period 1900-1950) will be favored. A selection of papers will be published after the conference.

For more information, visit www.writingliteraryhistory.be.

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CFPs

Remote Control: Modernism’s Surveillances (MSA2015)

This panel investigates the relationship between global modernism and surveillance by studying how new optical technologies developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries engaged with changing conceptions of embodiment, self-perception, subjectivity and virtuality in ways that continue to resonate with contemporary concerns over remote monitoring. The present-day explosion of surveillance mechanisms across the planet, such as drones, body scanners, CCTV, webcams, dataveillance tools and biometric devices; alongside automated forms of inter-personal interaction (telemedicine, robot caregivers) raise new questions surrounding privacy, identity, self-regulation and the reach of disciplinary power in the operations of daily life. Writers such as Foucault, Debord, and Baudrillard have stressed the importance of the disciplinary apparatus and its uncanny ability to both permeate and constitute the perceiving subject, in part through the flow of commodities. By contrast, modernism has often been seen as undoing these forms of control, engaging in an anarchic or revolutionary overthrow of norms in the scopic regime. Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and the Frankfurt School’s critiques are paradigmatic in this regard. Yet these critiques also highlight the liminal position of the modern subject: at once observing and observed by the surrounding world.

We invite proposals that explore modernism’s fraught, multidimensional relationship to surveillance around the world, whether in literature, literary theory, visual culture, film studies or the performing arts. At what points and to what ends does modernism establish its own rituals and technologies of observation? How are these articulated? Are there ways in which modernism thinks surveillance outside the domain of optical power relations? Or is the human gaze always already inscribed in the system of visual prosthetics? What is the relationship between modernism, surveillance and the development of the concept of the human machine? Of particular interest are papers that take into account a hemispheric, transnational, post-colonial or global approach and that place modernism in conversation with contemporary surveillance practices worldwide.

Please send a 250-word abstract and brief professional biography (2-3 sentences) to Cate Reilly at cireilly@princeton.edu by April 13. We also welcome interested moderators and presiders.