Author: modernistudies

Call for papers:

University College London (UCL)

Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies

HUMANITY AND ANIMALITY IN 20^TH AND 21^ST CENTURY CULTURE:

NARRATIVES, THEORIES, HISTORIES. AN INTERDISCIPLINARY CONFERENCE

15 September, 2014

This interdisciplinary conference takes up an important debate in a field of growing importance in the humanities, where animal studies, post-humanism, and eco-criticism have surged in recent years. The definition of mankind seems necessarily to pass through an understanding of what constitutes the animal. Philosophically, what distinguishes, or indeed brings together humanity and animality has been the subject of debate from Aristotle’s understanding of man as ‘zôon logon echon’ and from Kant’s view of man’s treatment of animals as an insight into the true nature of humankind, Derrida’s seminars on ‘the beast and the sovereign’, up to Agamben’s recent theory of ‘bare life’ as the breakdown of the barrier between man and animal.

Artists, authors and filmmakers, such as Kafka, Dalí, Borges, Coetzee, Primo Levi, Margaret Atwood, Karl Appel, Paula Rego, Werner Herzog (‘Grizzly Man’), and Benh Zeitlin (‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’) to name but a few, have also grappled with the significance of the divide or symbiosis of humanity and animality. Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti and Andrew Benjamin are also redefining ways in which humanity and animality can be thought together, or apart. The violent upheavals of the 20^th century, with its global wars, unprecedented genocides and totalitarian experiments led to a re-evaluation of notions such as humanism and humanity, which has made way for new hopes and anxieties relating to the subhuman and the post-human.

By hosting a varied programme of papers and debates chaired by high-profile contributors to this emerging field of inquiry, this conference aims to establish a forum for researchers throughout the UK to discuss this important theoretical issue.

Topics of discussion may include but are not limited to the following questions/topics:

• Is it possible, or even desirable to distinguish between animality and humanity?
• In which ways does the dialectic of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ shape our identities, culture and morality?
• Why is the comparison with animal world so important for our culture?
• Shame, pride, sorrow, fear, anxiety, fascination, awe: how do emotions acknowledge the relation between humanity and animality?
• How do literature, art, evolutionary theory, philosophy and other disciplines negotiate the changes undergone by the concept of the ‘human’ in the last century?
• How have our perceptions of ‘humanity’ and ‘animality’ changed in relation to violent and extreme events such as genocide, widespread atrocity, world war etc.?
• What does the persistence of the fascination with animals suggest about specific cultural and historical moments?
• Are we really a Darwinian species, or do technology, morality and creativity separate us from the rest of the natural evolution?
• How can we rethink the binary opposition between humanity and inhumanity?
• Have we entered into a post-human era?
• Evolutionary theory and the human condition
• Human-Animal studies
• Humanity and Animality in Art, Literature, Science, Philosophy, Cinema, Religion, etc.

Deadline for Abstracts: 

Please send an abstract (300 words maximum) and a short biography (50 words maximum) to s.bellin.12@ucl.ac.uk byAugust 1^st, 2014.

A selection of the papers will be published.

Confirmed speakers (other speakers will be announced soon):

Martin Crowley (Cambridge; University)

Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge University)

Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge University)

Florian Mussgnug (UCL)

Kevin Inston (UCL)

other speakers will be announced soon

Call for Papers

AMSN2: Transnational Modernisms

Australian Modernist Studies Network Conference

Hosted by the University of Sydney

15-16 December 2014

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Paul Giles (University of Sydney)

Professor Ira Nadel (University of British Columbia)

Professor Sue Thomas (La Trobe University)

The ‘Transnational turn’ in literary studies has been the focus of intense debate and sustained reflection in recent years, as have critical re-evaluations of Modernism’s transnational scope. Scholarly interventions by Paul Giles (Transnationalism in Practice), Wai Chee Dimock (Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time), Jahan Ramanzani (A Transnational Poetics), and Paul Jay (Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies), among many others, establish the viability of transnationality as a disciplinary focus. Transnational Modernismsaims to provoke fresh thinking about the particular resonances between Transnationalism and Modernism, including the ongoing critical review of Modernism’s traditional Transatlantic focus.

This broader awareness of the sites where Modernism was practiced and transnational connections were initiated (or resisted) prompts a range of compelling questions, including:

•        How might uneven flows of cultural capital between centres of Modernist practice and erstwhile peripheries be understood, accounting for the varieties of geographic and temporal displacement?
•        Must a global Modernism be co-synchronous, or did it evolve in different phases in different locales and under different socio-economic conditions?
•        What is to be made of the increasingly intensive scholarly attention given to East Asian Modernism(s) in Western scholarship, and how might this inflect more long-standing work in Asian literary, art historical and musicological studies?
•        How might an Asian-Pacific Modernism be conceived, and how might this intersect with regional scholarship in literature, visual arts, music, and dance?
•        How might, for example, Caribbean, South Asian, Brazilian, Latin American, Nigerian or Arab Modernisms be comprised, and reckoned with respect to hegemonic literary and cultural history?

This two-day conference will seek to address these and other notions of Transnational Modernisms. Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers or panels of three papers examining any relevant aspect of the conference theme across literature, the visual and plastic arts, music, theatre, and related genres. Proposals from postgraduate students are especially encouraged.

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a brief biographical note to mark.byron@sydney.edu.au by 31 August. Notification will be forthcoming by 15 September.

Registration and other information will be available soon at the AMSN website, at http://amsn.org.au/

21st-century Moore.
March 19-22, 2015, University of Houston
Call for Papers: deadline 15 July

In March 2015 the University of Houston will host the first meeting in a
decade to focus on Marianne Moore. In light of the past decade’s work on
Moore, including variorum editions of her early and middle- period work and
a ground-breaking new biography by Linda Leavell, the conference will
examine Moore’s place in the twenty-first century’s understanding of
modernism. Abstracts of 250 words are invited for scholarly and creative
presentations on any aspect of Moore’s work. Please send abstracts with
brief resumé, and MOORE ABSTRACT in the subject line to egregory@uh.edu by
15 July 2014.

Steering committee: Elizabeth Gregory, Fiona Green, Stacy Hubbard,
Cristanne Miller, Heather White.