Category: CFPs

Grupo Poéticas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Research Seminar

Smallness: Myths, frames and avatars of the late modern

In an effort to reach beyond the conspicuous, the large and clearly visible, the spectacular and magnified, this seminar is an invitation to read, watch and assess smallness, detail, imperceptibility, following Virginia Woolf’s direction: “let us not take for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small” (“Modern Fiction”). Physical smallness comes to be explored, thematised and staged in different genres and formats, from literature to art, from tiny everyday materiality to the most peculiar oddity. Beyond the material and the metaphysical, this seminar also aims at exploring other notions around littleness, such as brevity, lightness, paucity, miniature.  By examining the practice of writers and artists whose work has used small-scale methods or gravitated upon minuteness, concision and the virtually unnoticeable, we are ready to revise and rethink aesthetic and  literary categories investigating the social and symbolic stature that smallness can engender.  

From Emily Dickinson’s “We should not mind so small a flower” to Louise Glück’s “small chips of matter”, from Deleuze and Guattari’s and Pascale Casanova’s “minor (or small) literature”, to Sianne Ngai’s revisions on the “cute,” and Mandelbrot’s elaboration on “fractals,” we aim at reflecting upon smallness, the infinitesimal and the microtextual. In view of our ongoing interest in myth, this seminar will open up a space for reflection on small or minor myths, in relation to larger founding societal and cosmological narrative frames.  Presentations should focus on any recent literary or artistic practice in order to reassess its value against large-scale ways of reading and interpreting reality in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We are seeking 350 w. abstracts (with 3 keywords) by June 30, 2021

Please, send us your short bio (150 w.) and affiliation

Proposals should be sent to Professor Esther Sánchez-Pardo (esanchez_pardo@filol.ucm.es).        

Our seminar will be held both online and face-to-face at U. Complutense

Structure: Two keynotes and a number of selected presentations

Notification of acceptance: July 23, 2021

The Writer as Psychological Warrior: Intellectuals, Propaganda, and Modern Conflict

Online conference, hosted by Durham University12-16 July 2021

The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it.
George Orwell, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1943)

Writing in 1943, George Orwell reflected upon the challenges posed for both governments and intelligentsia by the rapid growth in wartime propaganda production. If the British government had begun the war ‘with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it […] after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC’. As Orwell recognised, the recruitment of cultural actors by government information and psychological warfare departments changed both spheres, since the ‘tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda’ were ‘modified’ by the new entrants – a negotiation known all too well to Orwell himself due to his own role as a propagandist during the war.

At a moment when disinformation and ‘fake news’ are of pressing political concern, this conference aims to understand these debates as part of a longer history of propaganda across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, decades in which new military and media technologies raised political warfare to the status of the ‘Fourth Fighting Arm’ of the state and consequently made cultural figures integral actors in modern conflict. Organised by the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda, and British Culture’, this event invites papers from a range of disciplines, periods of study, and global perspectives, with topics that might include:

• Revaluation of writers and organisations in the light of new or overlooked propaganda archives
• Study of the evolution of propaganda techniques and cultural modes between conflicts or between competing states
• Narratives disseminated through historical disinformation campaigns: what traces of these remain in cultural discourse? How have they been contested or countered? How do they compare to contemporary narratives?
• Cultural representations of propaganda service
• The impact of technological change on the form, content, dissemination or influence of propaganda (radio/film/television/social media)
• Life as a propagandist: how did intellectuals combine their official duties with their personal and cultural spheres? What forms of propaganda service have been marginalised or overlooked in archival records or later histories?
• Material and visual culture of propaganda (leaflets/posters/ephemera)​

We invite proposals for papers of between 10-20 minutes. Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic this event will take place entirely online: speakers will be asked to record their papers as sound files, to be circulated to conference participants in advance of online panel discussions.
We plan to produce an edited collection drawing on selected contributions to the event.
Please send proposals (max. 300 words) together with a short biographical note to Guy Woodward at guy.t.woodward@durham.ac.uk by 19 March 2021.

For a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform, we seek proposals for original essays that analyze the role of art and culture in building modern worlds in the aftermath of revolutions. Situated within the discourse of global modernisms, the transdisciplinary cluster probes whether there is something intrinsic to the post-revolutionary reconstructive moment that can be teased out through focused studies on contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political around the globe during the twentieth century.

Demands for revolution emerge whenever the status quo makes an existing social order no longer tenable for a significant portion of the population. Revolution is often understood as a force from below, one in which a group exerts its will against an established governmental or political order. But revolutionaries usually have as their ultimate goal the establishment of a new social or political system—a new normal—rather than a perpetual state of upheaval. They envision new possibilities, and different worlds. The production of culture in various forms—fine art, literature, music, performing arts, visual culture, philosophy, and so on—are essential to their success, both in consolidating the revolution’s narrative, and in producing as well as sustaining the resultant new realities. Indeed, the expectation of their role as spearheads in revolution is embedded in the very phrase “avant-garde.”

If not an exclusively modernist phenomenon, localized revolutions in the modern era have been characterized as affirmative responses to Enlightenment values such as liberty and equality, and have frequently sought to overthrow absolutist, autocratic, and colonial rule. The establishment of new forms of government are often the result. But radical change is by no means guaranteed to be emancipatory, liberal, and egalitarian in character, nor is it always successful. As evidenced by Italian fascism, the so-called “conservative revolution” in Germany during the interwar-period, or the Chinese “Cultural Revolution,” a revolution might well slide into dictatorship, create a power vacuum in which multiple agents claim control, or engender oppressive political systems. Similarly, avant-garde art and culture are not immune from stifling and perverting critical, transgressive impulses. Indeed, their post-revolutionary impact has sometimes been framed as “propaganda,” or as “selling out” to become palatable to “the masses.”

Taken together, the articles chosen for this cluster will map out parallels as well as divergences in “avant-garde” or otherwise transformative cultural attempts to displace “old” worldviews, institutions, and forms of coexistence by asking questions such as “What political developments affected cultural production and vice versa, particularly in their contact with ideological shifts and technological innovations?”, “What factors and conditions enabled new cultural practices and perceptions to take root?”, or “What transnational mechanisms were at work in cultural attempts at building modern worlds?”.

Offering an alternative understanding of revolutionary worldbuilding through culture from the vantage point of an era that is itself characterized by a multiplicity of crises and by profound, though not always progressive transformations, this cluster aims at challenging the once widespread perception of the “failure” of twentieth century revolutions and, with that, of the “death” of the avant-garde.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to theoretically-driven case studies from:

–       The Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian avant-garde

–       The 1911/Chinese Revolution and end of the Qing Dynasty

–       The German or November Revolution and the Weimar Republic

–       The Mexican Revolution and cultural renaissance

–       Societal transformation in Japan during the late Taishō period and the Mavo art movement

–       Postcolonial/independence movements in the second half of the twentieth century from Cuba to Iran

The cluster seeks to bring into dialogue regionally-specific scholarship in the humanities, especially in the arts and design, in literary and film studies, and in aesthetic and political theory, to foster a global perspective. We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform. For recent examples of essay clusters, see https://modernismmodernity.org/about.

Abstracts of 250 words accompanied by short biographies are due February 28, 2021. A total of five to seven proposals will be accepted; completed essays of approximately 3,000 words will be due June 30, 2021. Once essays are submitted, the entire cluster will undergo peer review. Please submit abstracts and inquiries to Monica Bravo (bravo@cca.edu) and Florian Grosser (fgrosser@cca.edu).