SCOTTISH NETWORK OF MODERNIST STUDIES

Modernism at War 

University of Glasgow, Saturday 18 October 2014

Keynote speakers:  

Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), ‘War Modernism as Commemorative Trauma’

Randall Stevenson (University of Edinburgh),”Hoarse Oaths that Kept Our Courage Straight”: Language and War, Modernism and Silence’

The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be holding a one-day symposium entitled ‘Modernism at War’ at the University of Glasgow on 18 October 2014. Proposals are invited from academics and post-graduates for 20-minute presentations on any topic addressing war in modernist writing and art (including film and other media), the aesthetics and politics of commemoration, trauma and reconstruction, war elegy, anti-war and anti-art, war and the avant garde, war and the archive, war and pedagogy, methodologies for studying war and modernism, or any other related issues and approaches.

Short proposals for papers, expressions of interest and queries should be sent to Vassiliki Kolocotroni  (Vassiliki.Kolocotroni@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 5 September 2014.

Call for papers for a major conference

Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century

Institute of Historical Research, London 22-24 April 2015

Engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of “Being modern”, across culture in Britain and the western world in the years around the First World War. Today, historical studies of literature, art, design, lifestyle and consumption as well as of the human sciences are exploring intensively, but frequently separately, on that talk of “science”. Historians of science are exploring the interpenetration of discourse in the public sphere and expert communities. This pioneering interdisciplinary conference is therefore planned to bring together people who do not normally meet in the same space. Scholars from a range of disciplines will come together to explore how the complex interpretations of science affected the re-creation of what it was to be modern.

Please see the website for more details: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/being-modern/

Submissions for four types of presentation and discussion are sought:

1. disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
2. cross-disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
3. Focus on research presentations of 5 minutes plus two minute discussion each will provide opportunities particularly for graduate students
4. Poster sessions

Closing date 19 October 2014. Get in early – competition will be strong!

Submissions to: research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

Enquiries to: Robert.bud@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

CFP: Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Issue #88, Fall 2015: Virginia Woolf in the Modern Machine Age

The Virginia Woolf Miscellany invites submissions of papers that address the role of everyday machines in the life and/or works of Virginia Woolf. From typewriters and telephones to gramophones and the wireless; from motor-cars and combat aeroplanes to trains and department store elevators; from cameras and film projectors to ranges and hot water tanks, the commonplace technologies of the modern machine age leave their trace on Bloomsbury. To what extent are these and other machines represented, hidden, implied, avoided, embraced, or questioned by Woolf and her circle and characters? What is the place of labour and mass production, or the role of the handmade or bespoke object, in the context of such technologies and the desires with which they are implicated? What are the ramifications for the individual’s everyday navigation of modernity, domesticity, and/or community? Alternatively, what is the influence of everyday technologies in our own interactions with Woolf and her writings? Please submit papers of no more than 2500 words to Ann Martin (ann.martin@usask.ca) by 31 March 2015.

Call for Manuscripts

Special issue on “The Banalization of War” 

Issue editors: Graham MacPhee and Angela Naimou

War both establishes and destabilizes the fundamental distinctions between civilian and combatant, compatriot and alien, and the lawful and the illegitimate. Yet arguably there is another set of distinctions whose fragility has been exposed by the new modes of military violence emerging post–9/11, namely that between emergency and routine, crisis and continuity, the spectacular and the prosaic, the extraordinary and the banal. Military violence, traditionally justifiable only as the temporary suspension of the norms of civility in a state of exception, seems to be becoming increasingly routine and everyday as evidenced by a broad range of tendencies: from securitized responses to political dissent and the deployment of military technologies in law enforcement, border surveillance, and corporate activity to the transformation of combat weapons into consumer goods and the proliferation of war-simulation computer games. This banalization of war is dramatically illustrated by the spatial and temporal condensations of drone warfare. For the drone operator based in a suburban command center, the locus of military agency lies deep within the domestic space and “wartime” is woven into the fabric of everyday temporality, while the globe is reimagined as a battlefield.

Attention to the banalization of war in the post-9/11 period provides an opportunity to rethink conceptions of “wartime” as integral and discrete across wider historical and geographical parameters. In fact, the imbrication of war and everyday life has long been a structuring principle for the Atlantic slave trade and for colonial societies, while in the present it is experienced in very different ways—from service workers and translators whose labor facilitates war and occupation, to refugees, undocumented migrants, and those whose deaths would constitute “collateral damage.” This special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies invites essays that explore both the long histories of “wartime” and its differential meanings in the present—as mediated through literature, culture, and society, and as experienced along axes of immediacy and distance, urgency and banality, bodily violence and the pleasures of spectacle. This special issue is especially interested in contributions that interrogate and complicate the historical and geographical parameters of war across national, international, and transnational contexts.

Relevant topics would include (but are not limited to):

• Literary and/or filmic representations of the militarization of everyday life
• Cultural histories of the banalization of “wartime”
• The militarization of visual experience in gaming, virtual environments, film and television
• Military/non-military distinctions and the construction race
• Discursive strategies for the normalization of militarized violence
• Narratives of survival and resistance at the intersection of “wartime” and the everyday
• Gendering and re-gendering wartime/conflict zone and the domestic and the everyday
• Humanitarian law, human rights, and the porosity of wartime/war space
• The racialization of “violence” and “civility”
• The fate of civility, normativity, and exception under the routinization of violence

Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the issue editors at the email address below to discuss potential contributions: please include an abstract (c.500 words). Manuscripts should be double-spaced and between 8,000 and 12,000 words. For further details on manuscript submission and preparation see: http://www.wcupa.edu/_academics/sch_cas.lit/submissionGuidelines.asp

Contact: collit@wcupa.edu

Submission date: December 31, 2014

International Symposium ‘Time and Place in T. S. Eliot and His Contemporaries’. Promoted by Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation, 18-21 January 2015, Florence, Italy

Call for Papers

Time and place have huge symbolic significance in Eliot’s work and that of his contemporaries. Space and time exist as symbolical, religious, philosophical, historical, political and personal ‘nodes’ in Eliot’s writings. This conference wants to explore these ‘nodes’ in greater depth — where they exist, how they interact with other nodes and themes in Eliot’s writing, and how they intersect with the aesthetic and philosophical thinking of Eliot’s contemporaries.

The symposium topic is focused on, but not limited to, T.S. Eliot and Modernism, and may include such topics as:
– Evocations of time and place in Eliot’s writing or that of his contemporaries
– The preoccupation with space, place and (dis)location
– Modernism and the uses of time, ‘time past’, and timelessness
– Eliot, Modernism and history
– Eliot, Modernism and contemporary scientific and philosophical views on space and time
– Eliot’s place in the tradition, the canon, Modernism, and world literature

Papers that explore the connections between England and Florence or England and Italy in the context of Eliot and his contemporaries are also welcome.

Proposals of 100 to 250 words or completed papers may be sent as email attachments to any of the three co-organizers by 1 October 2014:
Prof. Temur Kobakhidze (temur.kobakhidze@cantab.net),
Dr. Wim Van Mierlo (Wim.Van-Mierlo@sas.ac.uk),
Dr. Stefano Maria Casella (stefanomaria.casella@alice.it).

For more information and registration please visit http://www.lifebeyondtourism.org/evento/522/International-Symposium-%22Time-and-Place-in-T.-S.-Eliot-and-His-Contemporaries%22%2C-18-21-January-2015%2C-Florence%2C-Italy.

The Katherine Mansfield Society Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Conference, held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

29 January 2015

University of New South Wales

Keynote Speaker: Emeritus Professor Angela Smith (Stirling)

When Wyndham Lewis described Katherine Mansfield as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’ in September 1922, it was not meant as a compliment. Yet this disparaging remark gives a hint as to what makes her such a fascinating figure today. In the context of the recent scholarly extension of modernism’s borders in terms of geography, gender, class, and time, as well as such diverse new interests as the roles of literary networks, periodicals, and popular and material cultures, Mansfield is more important than ever.

These developments encourage new approaches to Katherine Mansfield, new ways of reading her not only as a short-story writer but as also an editor, a literary critic, a translator, and a poet. Recent criticism has also turned to considering Mansfield as a transnational modernist, whose antipodean origin influenced and affected her even after she emigrated to Europe, and whose legacy continues to inspire succeeding generations of writers and artists in New Zealand and beyond.

This, the third annual Katherine Mansfield Society postgraduate and early career researcher conference, aims to explore the place of this complex literary figure in terms of both modernist and antipodean writing: the ways that she and her works have crossed national, professional, and linguistic boundaries.

Proposals are invited, on these topics or any other topic related to Mansfield, from postgraduate students and early career researchers. Please submit abstracts of 250 words with a brief biography of 50 words to mansfield.unsw@gmail.com by 29 September 2014.