Author: modernistudies

The State of Fiction: Don DeLillo in the 21st Century

10 June 2015, University of Sussex

Writing also means trying to advance the art. Fiction hasn’t quite been filled in or done in or worked out. We make our small leaps. Don DeLillo, 1982

This one-day conference will address the state of fiction in contemporary American culture by focusing on the extensive oeuvre of Don DeLillo, from the 1970s to the present day and beyond. DeLillo commented shortly after the publication of The Names that fiction had not yet been ‘filled in,’ ‘done in,’ or ‘worked out.’ How do we read this thirty years later, in the shadow of not only DeLillo’s major works but also the events that have characterised our move into the Twenty-First Century? How have DeLillo’s small leaps between the New York of Players (1977) and the New York of Falling Man (2007) ‘filled in’ fiction? Has DeLillo’s pervasive influence across contemporary American culture ‘done in’ postmodernism? Is the novel in the Twenty First Century already ‘worked out’?

Proposals for presentations of 20 minutes or for pre-formed panels of 1 hour are invited; topics, which should be rooted in the work of DeLillo, may include but are not limited to:

·       The novelist in contemporary (American) culture: canonicity, influence, consumption

·       New contexts: 9/11, Occupy, neoliberalism, globalisation

·       ‘The Power of History’: the state and the shadow-state, popular culture, paranoia

·       New realisms: crisis, terror, apocalypse, childhood, metafiction

·       Language: the individual and the crowd, the everyday and the event, ekphrasis

·       New forms: genres, adaptations, translations, multilingualism

·       The ends of postmodernism? Forebears, afterlives, lateness

·       Environment, global warming and waste

Submissions that are interdisciplinary in nature are particularly encouraged. Abstracts of up to 250 words in length and a brief biographical note should be submitted at delilloconference2015.wordpress.com by 19 March 2015.

To be held at the University of Reading, Special Collections, Friday 10^th July 2015

“We are thinking of starting a printing press, for all our friends stories. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” (Virginia Woolf to Lady Robert Cecil, October 1916. Letters 2:120).

Much scholarship has been undertaken in recent years on the “institutions”, producers, and materialmakers of literary modernism. Such work has aided our understanding of the cultural and textual production of modernist writing and has been particularly prominent with regards to the important role played by periodicals and small and little magazines. The Modernist Journals Project http://modjourn.org/ is one example among many of the dynamic research taking place in this area.

This one-day symposium, taking inspiration from such scholarship, will offer an opportunity to focus on the publishers and publishing houses who also helped to make and produce modernism. Papers are invited from scholars and groups of scholars working on any global publishing house related to modernist writing – from Faber & Faber to Mills & Boon, from Chatto & Windus to the Gregynog Press, from Grant Richards to Tauchnitz. We hope that the day will offer an opportunity to explore some of the multifarious connections between these publishing houses and the writers, illustrators, press workers, managers and editors with whom they were associated. The day is being organised to coincide with the launch of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP, funded by SSHRC 2013-15) which we hope, through working with other teams, to expand from the Hogarth Press as case study into the wider publishing landscape of the period.

Papers might explore themes and concepts such as:

–       Publishing and textuality

–       Publishing history and the history of reading

–       Publishing books and the little magazines

–       The roles of publishers, editors, press workers

–       Censorship and innovation

–       Editing

–       Digital initiatives in book and publishing history

Please submit abstracts for papers (300 words max) to Dr Nicola Wilson, n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk no later than Friday 8^th May.

Further information about the symposium can be found at https://publishinghistory.wordpress.com

Co-organised by Dr Nicola Wilson and Dr Claire Battershill, University of Reading and MAPP

www.modernistarchives.com

‘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://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 tosensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 15 April 2015.