Author: modernistudies

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Registration open

Registration now open: The Languages of Literature: Attridge at 70

The Languages of Literature, a three-day conference hosted by the Department of English and Related Literature at York, will celebrate the contribution of Professor Derek Attridge to literary criticism.

The conference will take place between 22 and 24 May 2015 in the Berrick Saul Building at the University of York.  Speakers will give lectures and papers on topics relating to Professor Attridge and his work.  In addition, poets and novelists including Emma Donoghue, Tom McCarthy, Paul Muldoon, Don Paterson, Zoë Wicomb and John Wilkinson will be attending the celebration and reading from their work.
Derek Attridge is one of the foremost critics and theorists of literature working today. He came to York from Rutgers University in the USA in 1998 as Leverhulme Research Professor, and in 2003 became Professor of English. His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. Derek is the author or editor of twenty-one books on literary theory, poetic form, South African literature, and the writings of James Joyce. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Camargo Foundation and the Leverhulme Trust, and is a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015 Derek will publish The Work of Literature (OUP) and The Craft of Poetry (Routledge, with Henry Staten).
To register for the conference, please go to the registration page and pay via Paypal or card. Further details not covered on this site can be obtained by emailing the organisers at attridge70@gmail.com.

Website: https://attridge70.wordpress.com

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CFPs Postgraduate

Mapping Identities in the Modern World, 1830-present

The 5th Annual Postgraduate Symposium of the Centre for Modern Studies,

University of York

Keynote: Marius Kociejowski, ‘Forager’s Harvest: A Writer’s Travels through People.’

Taking place on 2nd June 2015 at the University of York, 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.

The modern world has been continuously characterised by identity crises, from the shifting borders and boundaries of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the experimental approach to selfhood of modernism in the world of literature and art. This event seeks to explore and challenge the associations and assumptions that have come to coalesce around questions of identity and space, facilitating a broad approach to issues of self-identity, ‘otherness’ and spatial identity.

Potential topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:
− Cartography and the shaping of geographical boundaries;
− The construction of selfhood and the ‘other’;
− Contested identities, spaces and territories;
− Nationalism and racism 1830-present;
− Travel-writing/travelogues, voyages of self-discovery;
− The overlap of identity and culture;
− Spaces and places of identity in literature;
− Artistic representations of the self;
− Cultural identities;
− (De)constructing identity in the humanities;
− Philosophies of self;
− Alienation and/or isolationism.

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be sent to cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk by 5pm on 29th March 2015. Successful applicants will be informed in early April, and the conference will be free to attend with lunch and refreshments provided. More info: http://www.york.ac.uk/…/summer-2015/pg-forum-symposium-2015/

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CFPs

CFP: Exploring queer cultures and lifestyles in the creative arts in Britain c.1885-1967.

London College of Fashion, Saturday 12th March 2016

Convenors: Reina Lewis, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and Andrew Stephenson, University of East London.

On 27 July 2017, it will be fifty years since the passing of the Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales for consenting male adults. As Lord Arran declared, it was ‘an awesome and marvellous thing’ and it repealed the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed in 1885, that made homosexual acts between consenting male adults illegal. As is well documented, it was the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895 that generated publicity about the ‘illicit’ nature of male homosexuality and exposed its thriving subcultures in London. Following his conviction, Wilde’s dandified style and witty bravado became the dominant paradigm for the homosexual artist-genius. Homosexual subcultures were widely linked to the fashionable world of the creative arts – from fashion, interior decoration, theatre and music, to fine art, design, photography and film.

Taking the period from c.1885 to 1967 as our loose historical frame and seeking to expose the complex forms of queer identity and self-fashioning emerging in these decades, this conference will explore the varied cultures and lifestyles of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans artists, designers and creative individuals working and thriving in Britain in this period. Pushing beyond well-rehearsed urban stereotypes and current categories for understanding sexuality, papers are invited to address a broad range of creative practices and representational strategies to signal how the fabric of culture in Britain, its communal spaces and geographies and its same-sex group identities (actual or imaginative) were being modernised and updated according to shifting social, sexual and emotional imperatives.

Given the number and range of queer artists, designers and creative professionals active in this period, this timely conference will demonstrate for the first time how these homo-, bi- or trans-sexual experiences, lifestyles and forms of sexual desire flourished in Britain whilst, at the same time, being under the threat of scandal and criminal prosecution.

Keynotes:
Laura Doan, University of Manchester
Christopher Breward, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Closing date for proposals: 31st May 2015
Please send abstracts (300 words) to reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk and a.p.stephenson@uel.ac.uk

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CFPs

Association of Print Scholars (APS) professional session at the CAA Annual Conference

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) is currently accepting submissions for its 1 1/2 hour professional session at the 2016 College Art Association Annual Conference, which will take place February 3-6, 2016 in Washington, DC. We welcome proposals on any aspect of the history, theory, or practice of printmaking from any chronological or geographic category. Preference will be given to proposals that call for a wide array of papers covering printmaking’s rich history.

Details:

  • Individual or co-chaired sessions are welcome
  • Proposals should include a title for and a short description of the session (no more than 500 words)
  • Chairs and co-chairs must include CVs with submission
  • Chairs and co-chairs must be active members of CAA and APS at the time of the annual conference.

Deadline for proposals: May 1, 2015

To ask questions or submit a proposal, please email info@printscholars.org.

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CFPs

CFP: Modernism and Medicine

Despite modernity’s rapid medicalization of life, medicine plays a
surprisingly minor role in most histories of modern art. But attention
to modernism’s embodied forms raises intriguing questions about modern
art’s medicalized creators, patrons, and viewers. This session invites
papers that interrogate the creative connections between modernism and
medicine in order to contest, expand, and transform our understandings
of the nexus between art and medicine in the modern period. In
particular, we welcome papers that consider artists’ new representations
of the body and bodily functions in terms of medicine’s new
epistemological models, therapeutic regimes, and techniques for
producing and disseminating knowledge. Topics might include artists’
depictions of medical subjects and experiences of illness and disease;
relationships between artists and doctors; medical patronage; public art
and medical institutions; the use of medical discourse in art criticism;
the architecture and design of private clinics and public hospitals.

Please send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced), a Letter of
Interest, a Submission Form and current CV by May 8 to: Gemma Blackshaw,
gemma.blackshaw@plymouth.ac.uk, and Allison Morehead,
morehead@queensu.ca. For more information, please see:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf
<http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf>

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Studentships

CDA PhD studentship at QMUL and the Geffrye Museum

The deadline has been extended to 13 April 2015 for the AHRC CDA PhD studentship on ‘New spiritualities and domestic life, c.1855-1939’ (see attached). This is one of four AHRC CDA studentships on ‘Home and religion: space, practice and community in London from the seventeenth century to the present,’ in collaboration between Queen Mary University of London and The Geffrye Museum of the Home. The PhD will be supervised by Rhodri Hayward (History, QMUL), Suzanne Hobson (English, QMUL), Emma Hardy (Geffrye Museum) and Janice Welch (Geffrye Museum). Interviews will be held on 29 April. You’ll find further details on the attached poster.

Please could you pass on this information to any current or past MA students who might be interested in applying.

CDA PhD studentship

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: ‘There and back again’: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop on Travel

The Landscape, Space, Place Research Group at the University of Nottingham is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for its ninth annual postgraduate workshop.

‘There and back again’: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop on Travel

Monday 22nd June 2015

University of Nottingham

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

To travel is unavoidable, whether as part of the everyday or the exceptional. It can be political or leisurely, routine or unexpected, real or imaginary. Travel can create different spatial, bodily, and object identities, as (un)familiar places and landscapes are negotiated, and borders and boundaries are crossed and re-crossed. It can have multiple implications and legacies and can be represented and documented in diverse, sometimes surprising, ways.

This workshop aims to emphasise and explore the richness of travel in its multivalent forms, from antiquity to modernity and beyond. We will consider travel in relation to social, political, cultural, and environmental forces, as we ask how it is interpreted across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Papers are invited on – but are by no means limited to – the following themes:

  • The narration and representation of travel
  • Journeying in/through the landscape
  • Spatial identity and place
  • Travel and temporality
  • Modes and methods of transport
  • Home, abroad, belonging, displacement
  • Departures and arrivals
  • Origins, destinations, and the in-between
  • Crossing borders and boundaries
  • The implications and legacies of travel

This is a one-day, interdisciplinary workshop that seeks to offer postgraduate students an opportunity to present related work at any stage of their research within a friendly, supportive and stimulating environment. It is the ninth annual postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group and hosted by the Schools of English and Geography at the University of Nottingham.

We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers from all current postgraduate students. Please send, along with a short biography, to lsp.pgworkshop@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 8th May 2015.

 

Organising Committee:  Alexander Harby, Alice Insley, Hollie Johnson, Mark Lambert, Xiaofan Xu & Emma Zimmerman

 

Further details can be found in the attached CFP.

Visit the LSPRG website: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/lsprg/index.aspx

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CFPs Postgraduate

Call for Papers: “Music and Literature: Critical Polyphonies”

Thursday 2 July 2015, Durham Castle, Durham University

Keynote speaker: Dr. Ian Biddle, International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University

‘Music means exactly the way everything else does and at the same time may not mean at all and at the same time means in ways that nothing else can.’ (Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (2011))

This one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference seeks to explore the myriad ways in which literature and music interact to construct meaning. In recent years, musicology has embraced new critical approaches, not least from literary theory and criticism, in order to understand music as constitutive of identity – gender, sexuality, nationality, race – and suggest radical ways in which music signifies through language and metaphor. These developments suggest that literary studies can continue to inform analysis of music in productive ways, while approaches from musicology can also stimulate fresh perspectives on literary works by prompting a reassessment of the way in which music functions in relation to the literary text.

We invite submissions on any period or any literature in English or other modern languages, and from those using methodologies drawing on literary criticism and musical analysis. Theoretical contributions and submissions incorporating elements of musical performance are also welcome.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • Music and literary form (e.g. leitmotif, serialism, minimalism).
  • Musicians in literature (e.g. George du Maurier’s Trilby, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu).
  • Poetry set to music (e.g. the Medieval Lyric, Goethe, Stéphane Mallarmé, A.E. Housman).
  • Lyrics as literature (e.g. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen).
  • The libretto as work of literature (e.g. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W.S. Gilbert, W.H. Auden).
  • Musical performances in literature (e.g. the piano in Jane Austen, opera in E.M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst).
  • Music and song in dramatic performance (e.g. lyric and aurality in Medieval and Early modern drama and masque).
  • Musical adaptation of literary works (e.g. operas on Medieval Romance, Shakespeare or Pushkin, symphonic poems on Shakespeare or Dante).
  • Allusions to musical works in literature (e.g. T.S. Eliot and Wagner, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, folksong in Lorca).
  • Musical notation or illustrations incorporated within literary texts (e.g. Medieval manuscripts, Ingeborg Bachmann’sMalina).
  • The relationship between ‘New Musicology’ and contemporary literary theory.

Abstracts of up to 300 words for papers of 20 minutes should be sent to musicandlit2015@gmail.com by 5pm on 8 May 2015. Please also include full contact details and a brief biographical note, and specify any audiovisual equipment you will require.

Contributors to the conference will be invited to submit their work to an upcoming volume of Postgraduate English, a peer-reviewed online journal based at the Department of English Studies, Durham University.

For further information please see: https://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/events/?eventno=23906

You can follow the Conference on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/musicandlit2015/

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP ‘Dissidence’ – UCL English postgraduate conference

———UCL ENGLISH GRADUATE CONFERENCE, FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2015————

Dissidence < Latin dissidēntia, < dissidēre to sit apart, disagree

featuring guest speaker Prof. Stefan Collini and second speaker to be announced

“The stories we are told today have stopped making sense” — Adam Curtis

As Britain staggers towards another General Election, the question of dissidence is more pressing than ever: drifting inertly in the face of unprecedented changes to higher education and our public sector, and after the convulsions of 2008 and 2011, have we as a society lapsed into indifference?

The 2015 UCL English Graduate Conference invites proposals for 20 minute papers on the theme of dissidence.

If literature has always provided a forum for dissent, rebellion and resistance and, as such, has frequently acted as a catalyst for change, how might models from the literary-historical past provide a framework for thinking about resistance in the present? Can we keep going as we are? Do we simply need “stories we can believe in”, or do we need to cultivate new methods of critique? And if so, how might literature or literary studies show the way?

This conference will therefore not only address the place of dissidence in literature, but also the place of culture in society and its potential as a site for critique. What kind of space for resistance can be opened up by literature and culture, and what does literary scholarship have to contribute? Are we, as scholars, dissidents – or were we ever?

The aim of this conference is to provide an opportunity for postgraduates working across the UK and internationally to present their own work – and to frame it within a wider conversation about the place of humanities in the twenty first century. Papers can address the topic of dissidence in any period of literary history, consider texts from any country, and originate from any theoretical perspective.

Proposals are particularly welcomed along the following strands, although other interpretations will be gladly received:

* Social/Political Dissidence — outsider figures / models of resistance / commitment

* Aesthetic Dissidence — generic shifts / cultures of dissent / outsider & oppositional aesthetics / canonical re-orientations / new media and literature / modernism’s afterlives

* Textual Dissidence — divergent readings / the readerly & the writerly / hermeneutics of suspicion

* Sexual Dissidence — queer voices / feminism / gender identity politics

* Spatial/Temporal Dissidence — subversive literary spaces / the space of literature / exile / diaspora / history / utopias / dystopias

Please submit 300 word proposals, accompanied by brief biographies, to dissidence.ucl.english@gmail.comby Friday 17 April.

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Postgraduate

LitVisCult: Prof. Laura Marcus, this Wednesday (18 March)

This is just a reminder that the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will take place this Wednesday (18th March), 6.00-7.30pm, Senate House, London, room 261.

We’re very pleased to have Professor Laura Marcus join us to give a paper entitled, ‘Silence, sound and city films and fictions of the 1920s and 1930s’.

Abstract:

This talk uses examples of late silent and early sound films (including F.W.Murnau’s Sunrise and Paul Fejos’s Lonesome) to explore the relationship between the visual and the aural in the cinema of the period, and the charged role played by representations of urban modernity in this context. It closes with brief discussion of novels (including works by Woolf, Graham Greene and Patrick Hamilton) in which relationships between silence and sound are played out in literary terms.

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. Her book publications include The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). Current research projects include a study of the concept of ‘rhythm’ in interdisciplinary contexts (with a focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and a book on literature and the cinema, which looks in particular at the relationship between writing and the silent/sound transition in film.

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 Wednesday.

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver

(Royal Holloway, University of London)