Author: modernistudies

Finite, Singular and Exposed: Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Individual?

University of Córdoba (Spain)
30-31 October, 2014

There was a time when the individual was the central category in modernism. It was a time of quasi-blind reliance on the Hegelian oppositions self-versus-reality and self-versus-society, critical talismans tirelessly employed by Marxist critics from Lukács through Goldmann. In fact, Lukács’s censorious construal of the modernist novel as an anomalous form bound to stage the individual “confined within the limits of his own experience” remained an article of faith for various generations of critics. Admittedly, that time is up. The old focus has been replaced by a new emphasis on community and communal determinations of individuality in new Modernist studies. What Mao & Walkowitz called “the transnational turn” is an adept symptom of this critical tendency, also present in works by Jessica Berman, Elleke Boehmer, Kim Worthington, Laura Doyle, and Walkowitz herself. This new turn is, moreover, inextricably involved with postcolonial and feminist approaches to Modernism, and expands the traditional psychoanalytic perspectives on the modernist self as an isolated mind. What is at stake is no longer the anti-social de-affiliation of the male Western subjectivity (Marcel, Joseph K., Lord Jim, Leopold Bloom, Gustav von Aschenbach), but rather the compensatory affiliation of repressed minorities (gendered, racial, sub-national, artistic) within a differential spectrum of communal possibility.

And yet, we believe, the ghost of the individual has never been fully exorcised. The Lukacsian dialectical operators remain, often latent, in most current accounts of high and late modernist fiction. We believe that this latency is dangerous, for it promotes an a-critical resumption of the notion of the individual, shorn of its dialectical—and potentially metaphysical—valences. In the context of the recent wave of dialectico-metaphysical approaches to subjectivity and individuality encouraged by thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou, a fresh re-definition of the modernist individual is manifestly in order, a re-definition that is likely to enrich the psychoanalytic scope recycled by trauma-studies for modernist studies. We thus propose a tentative return to the theoretical articulation of modernist individuality. This return is not to be conceived as an antagonistic response to community-oriented approaches to modernist fiction, but rather as an attempt to complement it through a dialectical counterweight.

The organizers welcome proposals for 25-minute papers in English on canonical Modernist authors (Conrad, James, Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Lawrence, Mansfield, Stein…) as well as on non-canonical and late Modernists. Although our main focus will be on English-speaking writers, comparative approaches exploring the work of non-English speaking Modernists will also be welcome.

Suggested paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Jean-Luc Nancy’s metaphysical categories of individuality: singularity, finitude, exposure.
– Alain Badiou’s faithful subject. Slavoj Zizek’s ticklish subject.
– Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. Judith Butler’s precarious life.
– Attridge’s singularity and the otherness of modernist writing: implications for a re-reading of the modernist subject.
– Individual, subject, character: Displacements and re-evaluations.
– Individuality and “life-writing.”
– Traditional communal determinations of individuality: Race, gender, class, nation as categories of communal affiliation.
– Enfranchisement, citizenship and national/sub-national/transnational affiliation.
– The artistic subject: The myth of bohemia and the Künstlerroman.
– Displaced subjects: Exile, migration and deterritorialization.
– Regressive subjectivation: Archaic utopias and pastoral communities.
– The singularities of Modernism.
– The Modernist body: Vulnerability, precariousness, corporeity and finitude.
– The Modernist mind: The ‘inward turn’, introversion and dehumanization.
– The isolated subject: Immunity and risk societies.
– The cosmopolitan subject.
– Subject to sacrifice: The Modernist scapegoat.

Please submit your 400-500 word abstracts by June 15th, 2014 to Julián Jiménez Heffernan (jsjimenez@uco.es) and Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (gerardor@ugr.es). Abstracts should include a short biographical note.

Selected papers will be considered for publication.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)

Deadline: June 15th, 2014.

Registration fee: 35€

Organizers: Julián Jiménez Heffernan, María Jesús López, Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Pilar Villar Argáiz, Mercedes Díaz Dueñas, Juan Luis Pérez de Luque.

27-28 June 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London.
CFP deadline: 10 March 2014.

The third annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. It aims to provide opportunities for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests.

Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration.

The conference is divided into thematic streams, each coordinated by different researchers and with separate calls for papers, included in this document. We welcome paper proposals that respond to the particular streams below. In addition, papers may be proposed as part of a general stream, i.e. with no specific stream in mind. Spanning a range of broad themes, these streams provide the impetus for new points of dialogue. Read the full call for papers here.

Aesthetic Refusals: Oppositional Citizenship and Public Culture
Conceptions and Practices of Critical Pedagogy
Critical Approaches to Care Relationships
(Dis)orders of Migration
Dissenting Methods: Engaging Legacies of the Past, Defining Critical Futures
‘entitled’
‘everyday political’
How Does One Think Difference?
Legal Critique: Positions, Negotiations and Strategies
Moving Through the Intersection? Interrogating Categories and Postintersectional Politics
Philosophy and Critical Thought Inside and Outside The University
Pragmatism and Critical Traditions
Sounding the Counterfactual: Hyperstition and Audial Futurities
Strategies of Silence
Street Level: Towards a Critical Discourse on Urban Aesthetics
Subjects in Space(s): Navigating Multiplicity
The Critical Brain
The Human After Anthropocentrism? Life. Matter. Being.
Time Discipline
What is the Question of Critique?

Please send paper/presentation proposals with the relevant stream indicated in the subject line to paper-subs@londoncritical.org. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by the 10th March 2014.

Participation is free (though registration will be required).

http://londoncritical.org

Inventing Urban Modernity: Building the Present by Constructing the Past

The modern city is the site of continual destruction and construction, disintegration and renewal, death and rebirth, an environment endlessly productive of new ‘presents’. But where in these transient moments might we locate the city’s past? Does it reside in the palimpsest of archaeological remains buried beneath our feet? In monumental form, as statues, memorials, graves? In representations of the city, cartographic or artistic? And how might we understand the modern city as growing out of and/or in relation to this past or ‘pasts’? Does the present reify and repeat the past? Does it reimagine and reinvent it? Or does it obscure and efface it? Featuring keynote addresses from Professor Patrick Wright (KCL), Professor Peter Mandler (Cambridge), and Dr Matthew Beaumont (UCL), this symposium seeks to open conversations between different disciplines within the humanities and across historical and geographical parameters. As well as traditional panels the day will culminate in a roundtable discussion between the keynote speakers and the audience, and is being held in association with the Centre for Modern Literature’s launch project ‘Inventing the Modern’.

The organisers invite proposals for either individual twenty-minute papers or alternative contributions. These may address, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:

• Ruins and ruination

• Urban archaeology

• Afterlives

• Monuments, memorials and remembrance

• Reconstruction

• The colonial and/or postcolonial city; the centre and periphery

• Proto-modernisms, late modernisms, contemporary modernisms, postmodernisms

• Urban regeneration

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Jo Robinson (joanna.robinson@kcl.ac.uk) by Friday 14th March 2014.

Women Modernists and Spirituality: a Symposium – University of Stirling, 22-23 May 2014

Recent criticism in modernist studies indicates a growing interest in the relationship between spirituality (broadly understood to include religious structures and practices as well as less traditional engagements with the sacred) and modernist discourse. This symposium aims to bring modernism and spirituality together with research on women modernists, many of whom still call for greater critical attention. It will focus on women modernists and foreground gender in analysis of modernism and spirituality in order to highlight and problematise issues including the relationships between spirituality and embodiment, authority, domesticity, the public sphere and creative practice. From Edith Sitwell’s incarnational poetics to Mary Butts’s pagan landscapes; from Elizabeth Smart’s engagement with the King James Bible to Dorothy Richardson’s interest in Quakerism, the symposium seeks to address spirituality in all its guises in the work of modernist women. Papers are not limited to literary criticism; the symposium invites papers that consider a range of modernist fields, including art, film, music, philosophy, etc.

Papers are not limited to literary criticism; the symposium invites papers that consider a range of modernist fields, including art, film, music, philosophy, etc.
Abstracts of 250-350 words are invited for twenty minute papers on any aspect of the symposium’s theme. Papers may consider (but are not limited to) the following:

spirituality and embodiment
spirituality and feminism
spirituality and form
spirituality and the everyday
spirituality and material culture
religion, gender and authority
modernism and the occult
the feminine divine
religious conflict or dissent
modernist syncretism
spirituality and domesticity and/or the public sphere
modernism and sacred texts
mysticism
engagement with institutional religion
transnational modernism and spirituality
modernism and pilgrimage
spirituality and creativity
religious communities and networks
religious hermeneutics
minority (religious, racial, etc.) voices

Please send abstracts to Elizabeth Anderson (sarahelizabeth.anderson@stir.ac.uk) by 3 March 2014.

The Symposium is held in association with the Scottish Network for Modernist Studies (SNoMS); the Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies, University of Stirling; and the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling.

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public
Friday 9 May 2014
Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent decades modernist studies has seen an explosion of scholarship undermining the myth of modernist isolation from commercialised literary production, with critical attention focused largely on the engagement of modernists with mass markets and popular cultural forms. Less attention has been given to how mass culture itself responded to and approached modernism. This one-day symposium seeks to explore the two-way relationship between artists and popular audiences; how modernists found a public and how the public also took ownership of modernism. While modernist writers and artists played with or actively assimilated mass market tactics, the mass markets themselves played with or actively assimilated high modernist techniques. As mass audiences became increasingly aware of the modernist revolution, modernism not only found its public face, but also met a public increasingly active in refiguring modernism’s profile. This symposium aims to bring together scholars interested in debating alternative methods of approaching and interpreting interactions between mass markets, popular culture and modernism.

We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers, which might address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:
– Approaches to modernism in mass market periodicals
– Individual modernist writers and the commercial press
– Mass market publishing and modernist outputs
– Advertising and modernist design
– Modernism and celebrity
– Modernism and fashion
– Middlebrow culture
– Methodological issues arising from the study of modernism in mass culture

Please send abstracts with a brief biographical note and full contact details to the symposium organisers, Dr Rod Rosenquist (rod.rosenquist@port.ac.uk) and Dr Alice Wood (alice.wood@port.ac.uk), by 21 February 2014. Participants will be notified by 1 March 2014. Any queries may be directed to either of the email addresses above.

LAST CALL!

The fourth international conference of EAM
The European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies
University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 29.-31.8.2014

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CLOSED PANELS
(Scroll down for the full calls for papers and chairs)

UTOPIA
Modernism and Avant-gardism are artistic languages of rupture. Both were directed against traditional ways of conceiving art, often assuming an antagonistic position in relationship to existing cultural and social institutions and relationships. This conference explores the utopian alternatives which Modernist and avant-garde artists offered to existing society. This was not always simply a question of taking an outside position: for example, the Russian avant-garde was co-opted by the early Soviet state in an uneasy – and temporary – alliance to give birth to the New Man. The 2014 EAM conference in Helsinki commemorates the centenary of the break-out of the First World War by taking as its starting point the many utopian dreams within European literature and arts as well as their collapse in the face of the horrors of war. The effects of the War lasted throughout the century, and the conference will also explore the utopian dimensions of the neo-avant-garde, be it that of the West which dreamed alternatives to conformism and consumer society, or of the East which sheltered alternatives to socialist dystopia. We thus invite proposals for contributions that deal with the alternatives that modernism and the avant-garde offered to existing reality: utopias; chimeras; dreams; abstractions; desires; myths; dystopias; cityscapes or impossible landscapes; politics or anti-politics; the body freed or harnessed; erotic or amatorial liberation; the retreat into private worlds or the mapping of bold alternatives; the avant-garde as alternative to or embodiment of the state; the utopian moment in the nihilistic or rebarbative art-work. We welcome contributions across all areas of avant-garde and modernist research or practice: art, literature, music, architecture, film, artistic and social movements, lifestyle, television, fashion, drama, performance, activism, design and technology.

Conference website: http://www.eam2014.com/

For all the enquiries about the conference, please contact us

eam2014@meetingsmill.fi

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CLOSED PANELS, November 1st – January 30th
All the submissions will be done with the online abstract submission form in our website: http://www.eam2014.com, bottom ”Abstracts”. There you will also find a link to the list of open panels and peer seminars. The maximum length of all the submissions is 200 words.

You can either submit

1) A CLOSED PANEL. A CLOSED PANEL consists of between THREE and TWELVE speakers. The CHAIR(s) may present a paper if desired. A closed panel may include no more than two doctoral students. These panels are ‘closed’ in the sense that they will include only the speakers whose names are submitted by the chair – they are of course presented before a conference audience. On the online abstract form the chair(s) will supply the title and a brief description of the panel, the titles of the papers that will be presented in the panel, name and affiliation of the chair(s) and all the speakers.

2) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL to join an OPEN PANEL listed on the website, http://www.eam2014.com, click on the bottom ”Abstracts”.

3) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL to a PEER SEMINAR. Please check the list of peer seminars on the website, http://www.eam2014.com, please click on the bottom ”Abstracts”. For the peer seminar, participants circulate short position papers (2000 words) one month before the seminar. The papers are discussed at the seminar. There is NO audience at the peer seminar which is closed to the rest of the conference. Doctoral students may apply to participate in a seminar and this can be a good way to get accepted to the conference for people whose work is at an early stage.

4) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL without specifying a panel and the organisers will assign your paper to a panel if accepted.
The participants will be informed about the acceptance of the papers by February 28th.

The official languages of the conference are English, French and German. Both papers and entire panels are accepted in all the three languages. A paper submitted to an open panel MUST be in the language of that panel.

Conference convenors and the EAM network chairs

Prof. David Ayers, University of Kent, UK / Dr. Marja Härmänmaa University of Helsinki, Finland

The scientific committee of the EAM 2014 conference

Professor Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki / Professor Natalia Baschmakoff, University of Eastern Finland / Professor Tomi Huttunen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Irmeli Hautamäki, University of Helsinki / Dr. Teemu Ikonen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Timo Kaitaro, University of Helsinki / Dr. Janna Kantola, University of Helsinki / Professor Pirjo Lyytikäinen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Alfonso Padilla, University of Helsinki / Dr. Riikka Rossi, University of Helsinki / Professor Pekka Pesonen, University of Helsinki / Professor Kirsi Saarikangas, University of Helsinki / Professor Riikka Stewen, Academy of Fine Arts / Professor Harri Veivo, University of New Sorbonne / University of Helsinki

BLAST 2014 Interdisciplinary Conference, Bath Spa (24th/25th July 2014)

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on any aspect of BLAST and Vorticism, and positively encourage research emanating from a diverse range of disciplines, particularly: literary criticism; cultural criticism; art; art history; history; sociology.

Please send a 250-word abstract, with title, to c.lewis2@bathspa.ac.uk by 1st April 2014.

Themes of the conference include:

– Can there be a 2014 equivalent to the Vorticist moment of 1914?

– The lives and works of individual Vorticists.

– Visual and Literary Vorticism.

– BLAST and other modernist magazines.

– Origins and legacies of BLAST and Vorticism.

– BLAST and World War One.

– The effect of World War One on the Avant-Garde

– Vorticism: Nationalist or Internationalist?

– Enemy of the Stars and Expressionist drama.

– The philosophical origins of Vorticism, and their transformation in Wyndham Lewis’s

– We also invite artists who have been influenced by (or who feel their work interacts

with) Vorticism, and we welcome suggestions for round-table discussions.

The deadline for proposals is 1st April 2014. All submissions will be reviewed in April and May and delegates will contacted by early June 2014. Please include institutional affiliations, society membership and contact details.