Author: modernistudies

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.

This special session takes the 2015 PAMLA conference theme of “Literature and Time” as an occasion for reconsidering a topic that has interested Faulkner critics for as long as there has been Faulkner criticism.  We invite papers that explore the continuing relevance (endurance?) of time as a conceptual framework (formal, historical, psychological, philosophical, ecological, etc.) for understanding any aspect of Faulkner’s work, life, or reception, as well as Faulkner’s relevance for new critical models for thinking about time.  Please send questions to kfujie@lclark.edu and submit 250-word abstracts and a brief bio via the online system at pamla.org by May 15, 2015.

The 2015 PAMLA conference will be held at Portland State University and the Hilton Portland in Portland, Oregon, on November 6-8.  All special session panel participants must join PAMLA by June 1, 2015 and must register and pay for the conference by September 15, 2015.

Please note the revised date for this symposium. Please do feel free to get in touch if you’re thinking of submitting a paper or if you have any questions.

Apologies for any cross-posting. An updated link to the conference website can now be found below.

‘Sensory Modernism(s)’, seeks to address the interrelationship of modernism with sensory perception. The spirit of the conference is interdisciplinary, and invokes characterisations of modernism derived from a wide range of discursive domains. The one-day conference will be held at the University of Leeds on Thursday May 21.

Keynote Speakers: Dr Richard Brown, Dr Christina Bradstreet, Caro Verbeek
http://modernismsenses2015.weebly.com/

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers which address the theme of modernism and the senses. Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following topics and their relevance to the general scope of the conference:

Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Cinematography
Radio
Medicine
Anthropology
Aesthetics
Linguistics
Literature and the marketplace
Animals
Sexuality

Abstracts of 200-300 words, with a brief bio of no more than 200 words, should be emailed to sensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 15 April 2015.

The study of H.D., the many other modernist figures in her orbit, and the many modes in which she worked has often focused on aesthetic revolution (language, form, genre) and cultural revolutions (gender/sexuality, and lately national identity). This panel seeks to build on and expand the revolutionary frame by inviting papers that either re-evaluate this existing terrain or shed new light on H.D. and/or her circle by considering transformations in technology, science, media, culture, translation, notions of history or of the everyday, and/or in particular literary movements or genres. Each paper ideally will thus link H.D. and/or those in her circle to at least one other modernist phenomenon. Send brief bios and 500 word abstracts by April 15 to Celena Kusch (ckusch@uscupstate.edu).

The 2015 MSA Conference will be held in Boston, Nov. 19-22, 2015. For more information, see:https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa17/CFP.html

University of Notre Dame London Centre,
1-4 Suffolk Street, London, SW1Y 4HG, United Kingdom
25-26 September 2015
Keynote Speakers: Professor Richard Canning, University of Northampton; Professor Martin Stannard, University of Leicester; Professor Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Loyola University Chicago
For Full CfP visit: www.avantgardecatholicism.org
Deadline for submissions: 11 May 2015
Proposals should be emailed to: avantgardecatholicism@gmail.com

In Jacques Maritain’s endnotes to his Art et Scholastique, citations from Thomas Aquinas sit side-by-side with extracts from Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and accounts of Cezanne. Yet, this creative tension has proved difficult to reconcile with existing assumptions about the avant-garde: religion can be construed as one more bourgeois prejudice from which the artist needs to free him or herself; or else artistic productions can be accorded a quasi-religious reverence that circumvents the need for institutional religion. Failing that, and thanks to the unacknowledged influence of various secularisation theories, one might think it impossible to be forward-thinking and yet hold religious views.

The key historical event around which these ideas coalesce is the 1907 Papal Bull, Pascendi Dominici Gregis which condemned a range of new intellectual movements under a single heading: “modernism”. While apparently inauspicious for the creative tension this conference plans to examine – one recent critical study has suggested that literary modernism took its impetus from a positive appropriation of the term from Catholic discourse – attempts to steer clear of suspicious topics gave rise to wide-ranging discussion of aesthetics within Catholic circles.

Viewed more widely, there are numerous instances in English and French decadence, the artistic communities centred on Eric Gill at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin and the crop of post-war British Catholic novelists – alongside the work of figures such as Pasolini, Gaudí and Marechal – where artistic experimentation has become manifest as an outpouring of intense Catholic renewal. Recognition of this phenomenon demands a far-reaching revision to the narratives told about twentieth-century artistic endeavour and, indeed, a re-consideration of the way in which Catholicism has come to position itself in relation to society.

This two-day conference will initiate this revisionary process by foregrounding the stimulus Catholic thought has provided for artistic experimentation, across the globe, from the 1890s onwards.

Saturday, 19 September 2015

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
• Royal lives
• The politics of writing celebrity lives
• The psychology of celebrity
• Fame, famousness, fandom, stardom, myth and/or iconicity
• 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.