Author: modernistudies

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Seminars

Northern Modernism Seminar

Because the event takes place the day after the General Election, we are starting a little later than usual at 12.00.

BLAST 1915-2015: Celebrating the ‘War Number’ of BLAST

Friday 8 May 2015

University of Nottingham

12.00     Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham): Welcome

12.15     Kate Armond (University of East Anglia): ‘BLAST 2: Vorticism and Unofficial Germany’

13.15     Lunch

14.30     Ivan Phillips (University of Hertfordshire): ‘A Vital Little BLAST: The War Number as a Key to Wyndham Lewis’s Thought’

15.30     Rob Spence (Edge Hill University): ‘“To show modernity its face in an honest glass”: Lewis as Self-Conscious Innovator’

16.30     Tea/Coffee

17.00     David Wragg (Independent Scholar): ‘The Reflexive Turn: Hermeneutic In/Consistency and the War Number ofBLAST’

18.00     Close

The event is free, but please let Nathan Waddell know if you are coming.

For further information contact Nathan Waddell: Nathan.Waddell@nottingham.ac.uk

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CFPs

CFP: REMAKING TRADITION

EXTENDED DEADLINE UNTIL APRIL 15

2nd International Conference of the University of Banja Luka (BiH) in cooperation with Institute of English Studies, University of London (UK)

CELLS – CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY STUDIES

Present-day Perspectives on Language, Literature and Culture.

Banja Luka, June 12th and 13th, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of English, at the Faculty of Philology, University of Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (United Kingdom) are pleased to announce second conference on English language and literary studies CELLS: Remaking Tradition: Present-day Perspectives on Language, Literature and Culture.

The aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences across the fields of English language and literary studies, with particular emphasis on cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues raised in the fields of literature, culture, linguistics, translation studies and applied linguistics. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • the study of globalisation, acculturation and migration in contemporary studies of language, literature and culture;
  • juxtaposition and interdependence of tradition and contemporariness in ideology, tradition, customs, norms, routines, etc.;
  • literature and economics/the economy;
  • tradition in translation studies: mediating between source and target language cultures and languages;
  • the place of mono/plurilingualism in contemporary approaches to the study of language, literature and culture;
  • rewriting of basic postulates in approaches to foreign language teaching.

The official language of the conference is English. 

PLENARY SPEAKERS

– Wim Van Mierlo (Acting Director of Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK)

– John Frederick Bailyn (Professor and Doctoral Program Director at Stony Brook University, New York, USA and Director of SUNY Russia Programs Network)

Guest Lecturer to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Department of English:

– Dijana Jelača (Adjunct Assistant Professor at St. John’s University, New York, USA)

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS

Please send an abstract of up to 300 words (MS Word 2003-2007) to the following e-mail address: cells@unibl.rs

Abstracts should be anonymous containing only the name of the paper, the body of the abstract and references.

Please send the following information in the body of the e-mail:

  • Title of the paper
  • Name of the author(s)
  • Affiliation of the author (s)
  • Key words
  • E-mail address
  • Bio note (no more than 100 words)

IMPORTANT DATES

20th April, 2015                     Deadline for Submission of Abstracts

30thApril, 2015                      Notification of Acceptance

5th May, 2015                                    Registration

CONFERENCE FEE

The conference fee is 60 Euros. The fee includes:

  • conference pack
  • conference break refreshments (lunch, snacks and beverages)
  • conference dinner
  • publication of selected papers in the conference proceedings

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodation can be arranged by the organisers upon request.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

All the details and important information can be found at the conference website.

www.cellsbl.com (active from January 25th, 2015)

A selection of papers will be published after the conference.

CONTACT:

E-mail: cells@unibl.rs

We look forward to your proposals.

Organising Committee:

Dr Željka Babić, University of Banja Luka, BiH

Dr Wim Van Mierlo, University of London, UK

Dr Tatjana Bijelić, University of Banja Luka,BiH

Dr Petar Penda, University of Banja Luka, BiH

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Uncategorized

CFP: Everyday politics – reminder and update

This is a reminder of the CFP for this international event in Lithuania, updated with details of fees and scholarships:

cfp: Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible, Druskininkai, Lithuania July 18-25, 2015

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:http://www.groupeuropa.com/europa_royale/hotel_druskininkai/about_hotel_druskininkai/
The total cost of the session (including accommodation and all meals in a four star Hotel Druskininkai) ranges from 368 euro to 536 euro, depending on the kind of the accommodation you choose: http://nsuweb.net/url/?id=261.

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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Uncategorized

Registration open: Avant-Gardes Now!

Friday 1 May 2015, 1-7pm, Oxford Brookes University

John Henry Brookes Building 204, Gipsy Lane Campus
A poster is attached – please display it where possible!

Hosted by the Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre, and formulated in part as a more specific response to the 2014 BAMS Conference ‘Modernism Now!’, ‘Avant-Gardes Now!’ will address topics which are relevant both to interdisciplinary and international avant-garde studies and creative practice, and also to the UK research and funding environment.

Keynote speaker:
– Professor Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), ‘Breton & Soupault’s Les Champs Magnétiques and the First World War’

Speakers:
– Professor David Cottington (Kingston University), ‘The avant-garde’s alternative professionalism’

– Professor Martin Iddon (University of Leeds), ‘Outsourcing Progress: on conceptual music’
– Dr Julia Jordan (University College London), ‘Accidental Narratives: Remaking the 60s Avant-Garde’
– Dr Sam Ladkin (University of Sheffield), ‘Avant-gardes against value’
– Dr Nikolai Lübecker (St. John’s College, University of Oxford), ‘Into the Dead End: Korine’s Trash Humpers (2009)’
– Dr Claire Warden (University of Lincoln), ‘Can the avant-garde be performed?’

Oxford Brookes respondents:
Professor Nathalie Aubert, Professor Alex Goody, Professor Paul Whitty

Featured poetry reading by Peter Manson, followed by a wine reception.
The Symposium is free to attend, but registration is essential. To register your place, e-mail Dr Eric White (ewhite@brookes.ac.uk) no later than Thursday 2 April.
Postgraduate students are warmly encouraged to attend. If you live outside the Oxford/London area and wish to be considered for a travel bursary, please include a short (2-3 sentence) description of your Master’s or Doctoral project with your registration e-mail by the deadline.
The Symposium organizers are Dr Eric White and Dr Niall Munro.
Categories
CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Critiquing Criticism: From the Ancient to the Digital

Deadline: 24th April 2015

Contributions are now invited for the 2015 volume of the MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, an international, refereed online journal aimed at postgraduate and early-career researchers.

Acts of criticism are all-pervasive in our online culture: through social media, blogs, and comments sections we author critiques, rating and disseminating with ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.   Boundaries are blurred and redefined by the ever-increasing presence of online academic journals and magazines, the popularity of academically-informed cultural commentary online, and a growing demand for university departments to engage with the Digital Humanities. As new and aspiring academic critics we must critique our own changing field, finding our place within it; an appraisal of criticism itself forms thus a crucial area for investigation.

Drawing comparisons between various acts of criticism raises questions of the differing and developing aims, roles, and methods of critical texts: should criticism judge, describe, translate, or interpret? And if interpretation is the critic’s task, then to what extent is criticism creative? How do the critic and the author interact, and what responsibilities do critics have to readers? Can fruitful links be drawn between the activity of online criticism, the reviews of critics in the media, and academic criticism?

Working Papers invites articles addressing and further exploring these questions and concerns across the humanities, treating works of criticism as primary texts. Suggested themes include, but are in no way limited to:

·         Changing aims, roles, and methods of criticism

·         Academic criticism vs popular readings vs newspaper critics

·         Reception studies

·         Digital Humanities

·         Criticism online – academic journals and magazines, blogs, comments, trolling

·         Literature as criticism, and criticism as literature; criticism as a creative act

·         The artist as critic, or critic as artist

·         The interaction of criticism and the text or work it critiques

·         The ethics and/or politics of criticism

·         Critical theory and theoretical criticism

·         Criticism or theory as represented within literary works

·         Book prizes, writing prizes, arts prizes

·         The figure of the critic

Abstracts, in English, of 300-500 words in length are invited from any field in the ‘modern humanities’, as defined as the modern and medieval languages, literatures, and cultures of Europe, including English and the Slavonic languages, and the cultures of the European diaspora. History, library studies, education and pedagogical subjects, and the medical application of linguistics are excluded.

Proposals and informal enquiries should be directed to the editors at postgrads@mhra.org.uk by 24th April 2015. Those selected for further consideration will be required to produce their article, of no more than 4000 words, by mid-July 2015. These articles will then undergo peer review, and the volume will be published online at the end of the year.

Categories
Events

Pointed Roofs Centenary Event

Pointed Roofs Centenary Event

The Dorothy Richardson Society invite you to an event in Bloomsbury to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Pointed Roofs the first volume of Dorothy Richardson’s novel cycle Pilgrimage.

Time: 17.00-19.00
Date: Friday 15 May 2015
Place:

The Court and Jessel rooms
Institute of English Studies
University of London
Senate House
Malet Street
London WC1E 7HU
17.00 Lecture: Deborah Longworth (University of Birmingham), Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs.

17.45 Panel discussion: Laura Marcus (University of Oxford), Jo Winning (Birkbeck College), Scott McCracken (Keele University), Deborah Longworth.

18.15 Questions and discussion.
18.45 Wine Reception
Dinner

The event is free, but if you wish to come please please inform Tracey Harrison t.l.harrison@keele.ac.uk

‘In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end. ‘ May Sinclair, The Egoist (1918)

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Uncategorized

CFP: Dramatic Influences

Part of the Novel Playwrights Project

Bath Spa University, Corsham Court Campus

3rd and 4th 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/

Categories
Events Postgraduate

LitVisCult: Dr Catherine Gander on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings (9 April)

The next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will take place on Thursday 9th April from 6.00-8.00pm at Senate House, London, room 261.

We’re very pleased to have Dr. Catherine Gander join us to give a paper entitled, “‘Twenty-six things at once’: Pragmatic perspectives on Frank O’Hara and Norman Bluhm’s Poem-Paintings”

Abstract:
Created over a couple of Sunday mornings in the Fall of 1960, the twenty-six collaborative Poem-Paintings of the artist Norman Bluhm and the poet Frank O’Hara represent what Bluhm later called a spontaneous ‘conversation’ between the painter and the poet. In this talk, Catherine Gander adopts a number of pragmatist positions to reconsider these overlooked works as essential examples of verbal-visual interaction that extend their ‘conversation’ to greet and involve us in a relationship that is at once interpersonal, integrated, and embodied. The works, Gander argues, constitute what John Dewey terms ‘art as experience’; in their back and forth exchange of verbal and visual gesture, abstraction and denotation, the Poem-Paintings are the ‘cumulative continuity’ of ‘the process of living’, dramatizing the shifting, spontaneous and multiple dimensions of interpersonal conversation, and in so doing, indicating a new path toward interconnective and equal exchange between word and image.

Catherine Gander is a lecturer in American Literature and Visual Culture at Queen’s University Belfast. She has published widely on the subject, and her monograph Muriel Rukeyser and Documentary: the Poetics of Connection (Edinburgh, 2013) won the biennial IAAS (Irish Association for American Studies) monograph prize.  Her latest book Mixed Messages: American Correspondences in Visual and Verbal Practices (with Sarah Garland) will be published by Manchester University Press later this year, and she is currently at work on another book, Pragmatic Perspectives on American Avant-Gardes.

For more details and for information about other sessions, see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com. You can also follow us on Twitter @Litviscult.

We hope to see you at the seminar on 9 April.

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver

(Royal Holloway, University of London)

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CFPs

Local Modernisms: 1890-1950

Modernism – cosmopolitan and international in its connections and networks – found its home in cities, regions and locales. And yet provincialism and localism are still dirty words in criticism surrounding literary and artistic responses to modernity: they remain tinged with the reactionary and the conservative. Many narratives of artistic culture of the period 1890-1950 maintain that advanced aesthetics move from core to province, losing vitality as they become part of a supposedly ‘middlebrow’ culture. But what if the current were reversed? What if the local, the regional, the provincial, the civic and the municipal were the sites of artistic energy rather than cultural backwaters? Terms such as ‘local’ and ‘regional’ have more recently been animated by the reaction against financial and consumerist globalisation, but a glance backwards reveals that artists and writers of the modernist period were engaging with ideas of the local too, and that many of them were located far away from the metropolitan ‘centre’.

This two-day conference on 22nd-23rd June 2015, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at the University of Birmingham, invites academics, postgraduate students, curators and other arts and heritage professionals to come together to discuss the many ways in which our current literary and artistic maps of modernism might be redrawn so that proper attention can be paid to local cultural nodes and networks. The organisers are looking for papers on any aspect of the topic. Potential speakers might talk about such issues as the following:

  • Literary and artistic responses to civic, local, municipal, regional and provincial modernity
  • Local, civic, municipal and regional activities, groups, coteries and enclaves
  • Rural modernisms
  • The concept of the ‘region’
  • Rejections/reformulations of internationalism
  • Town planning and urban design
  • Public art
  • Contemporary re-imaginings/re-workings of the spaces and places of civic modernity

Papers should be 20 minutes long. For further information about the conference, or to submit an individual or panel proposal, contact Dr Daniel Moore (d.t.moore@bham.ac.uk). The deadline for proposals is Monday 18th May.

Categories
CFPs

CFP: MSA17: Modernism and Wonderland

In the context of modernism, we often think of “revolution” in terms of rupture and rejection, stylistic advances, and the wholesale dismissal of the past in favour of the mandate to “make it new.” However, “revolution” also refers to “a convolution; a twist; a turn; a loop” or a “cyclical recurrence” (OED). Our sense of modernist rupture must necessarily be formulated alongside this notion of cyclicality. This panel aims to explore the ways in which modernist writers play with and borrow from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, in all its convolutions, twists, turns, and loops, with the aim of examining how this intertextuality can be interpreted as a form of revolution. Proposals for papers on modernist reworkings of wonderland are very welcome and might also be considered for an edited collection.

Please send abstracts of 250-300 words and a short bio to Michelle Witen (michelle.witen@unibas.ch) by April 8th.