Category: CFPs

Modernist Paratexts (CFP for MSA 18, 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California)

In Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette posed a rhetorical question about a canonical modernist text to highlight the functional importance of the then largely ignored paratext: “reduced to its text alone and without the help of any instructions for use, how would we read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?” Genette undertook a synchronic structuralist account of the paratext, the body of productions, such as the title, author’s name, preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, or dedicatory letter, that constitutes the zone of transition and transaction surrounding a text and presenting it as a text.

CFP for MSA 18 (November 17-20, Pasadena, CA)

B*tch Modernism: The Bette Davis Roundtable

This roundtable takes advantage of MSA 18’s Southern California location and its theme of Culture Industries to explore this iconic film star as a modernist artist. We are looking for contributors to join us in talking about all things Davis, from the industries that created her, to the actress herself as an industry, one that remains emblematic of both the historical moment and the aesthetic practices we describe as modernist. What would it mean to read Bette Davis as modernist? How does Davis operate as a node that allows us to think about the reach of mass culture in shaping (and historicizing) early twentieth century conceptions of femininity, sexuality, embodiment, and agency?

While there is a significant body of work on Davis in film and media studies, she has only made a few appearances in literary and cultural studies, primarily in feminist and queer discussions of this period, as in Lauren Berlant and Teresa de Lauretis’s readings of Now, Voyager. But Davis continues to be significant for her centrality in the film industry during Hollywood’s Golden Age, not only as an actress unafraid to play unlikeable women, but also as a woman who regularly wrested directorial and production power away from men.

Possible topics include

Smoking (as an industry/as an aesthetic/as a politic)

Theatricality/Realism

Psychoanalysis

Modern femininity

Bitchiness

Davis and/as drag

Davis and literary/theatrical adaptations (Wharton, von Arnim, Maugham, Strachey, Prouty, Ferber, Hellman, du Maurier, etc.)

Davis on Broadway (Ibsen, Williams, Sandburg)

The artist vs. the contract system

Gay iconicity

Melodrama and the woman’s film

Material artifacts—publicity materials, costumes

Immaterial artifacts: the persistence of Davis in the internet age

Davis’s make up artists/costume designers (Edith Head, Orry-Kelly, Perc Westmore, etc.)

Davis’s directors (William Wyler, King Vidor, Irving Rapper, Joseph Mankiewicz, etc.)

Send proposals of approximately 150 words to Melissa Bradshaw (mbradshaw@luc.edu) and Allan Pero (apero@uwo.ca) by March 25, 2016.

 

This proposed special session will explore how the transnational turn in literary studies has impacted the ways we research and write about the New Negro Renaissance. Publications like Escape From New York: The New Negro Renaissance Beyond Harlem and the 2013 special edition of Modernism/modernity “The Harlem Renaissance and the New Modernist Studies” (20.3) have pushed us to expand the boundaries of the New Negro Renaissance. As a result of works like these, scholars have begun to accept that what we call the “Harlem Renaissance” was not limited to Harlem’s urban locale; the term signifies a global uptick in black cultural production encompassing the Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.

This panel invites papers that explore how this new, transnational perspective on the Harlem Renaissance has impacted the ways we research and write about black cultural production during this era. What new approaches has the transnational turn invited? How has viewing the Harlem Renaissance as a global phenomenon forced us to adopt new methods, questions, and/or materials?

Please send a 250-word abstract and 1-page CV to Kelly Hanson (hansonkr@indiana.edu) by March 10, 2016.

The Historical Novel as a Generic Hybrid
MLA Special Session

This panel welcomes reassessment of the historical novel from literary scholars working in a wide range of historical periods and geographic regions.  While the classic historical novel is often thought of as a literary genre in its own right, many historical narratives are actually generic hybrids comprised of other genres.  What is the significance of these generic elements?  Does the historical novel contain certain essential features or is the term merely a placeholder for fictions about the past?  How has its definition changed over time, and how might we wish to alter it today?

Please submit a proposal of approximately 300 words and one-page CV to Benjamin D. O’Dell atbdodell2@illinois.edu.  The deadline for submissions is Tuesday, March 15th, 2016.

We are seeking papers for ‘Editing Modernism/Modernist Editing’, a one-day conference to be held at Edinburgh Napier University (Merchiston Campus) on Friday the 13^th of May 2016. The conference invites scholars to share their research about and methodologies for textual editing of modernist literature. ‘Textual editing’ broadly refers to developments in the traditional research and practices involved in discovering, contextualising, and preparing literary works for publication, for both scholarly and other readers. However, it also concerns problems and methods inherent to the production and dissemination of modernist digital editions and digital archives. We welcome proposals in any area of modernist scholarship that engages with ‘editing’, the archive, and editorial practice.

This conference will speak to the recent resurgence in interest in the modernist text as editorial object and the various platforms through which readers encounter modernist text. In modernist studies, several large-scale editorial projects are currently underway, including the Dorothy Richardson and the Wyndham Lewis Editions projects, and last year saw the Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: Vol. II win the Modernist Studies Association book prize. These are paralleled in recent digital archives and editions such as the Modernist Versions Project and Infinite Ulysses. The question of how contemporary editorial practice can draw on modernist practice is of keen interest, as textual editing was often a key self-reflexive concern for modernist authors, many of whom were publishers and editors themselves. From the collaborative editorial practices that underpinned such works as T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood to the production of modernist little magazines, innovative modernist editorial practices continue to interest scholars as they take on the role of contemporary editors to texts such as these.

The conference will feature a selection of panel papers; a roundtable discussion joined by Dr Bryony Randall (University of Glasgow), Dr Jason Harding (Durham University), and another guest TBC; and two keynote speakers:

Professor Scott McCracken (Keele University) will present a talk about the scholarly edition as cultural production. Prof McCracken is the Principal Investigator for the Richardson Editions Project, which is funded by the AHRC and which is leading to the publication of scholarly editions of Richardson’s 13-volume Pilgrimage with Oxford University Press.

Dr Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) will present a talk titled ‘Problems, Possibilities, Polemics: Taking the Arrows of Wyndham Lewis’. Dr Waddell is on the Editorial Board of the Oxford University Press Complete Edition of Wyndham Lewis’s fiction and non-fiction.

For panel paper consideration, please submit a 200-word abstract and brief biography to Tara Thomson at t.thomson2@napier.ac.uk by the 1^st of April.

The day’s programme will be followed by a wine reception. Registration will be limited, so we ask that all participants register in advance at http://editingmodernism.eventbrite.co.uk.

Please send any inquiries to Tara Thomson at t.thomson2@napier.ac.uk.

Modernist Paratexts (CFP for the Modernist Studies Association Conference [MSA 18], 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California)(https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa18/)

 

In Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette posed a rhetorical question about a canonical modernist text to highlight the functional importance of the then largely ignored paratext: “reduced to its text alone and without the help of any instructions for use, how would we read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?” Genette undertook a synchronic structuralist account of the paratext, the body of productions, such as the title, author’s name, preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, or dedicatory letter, that constitutes the zone of transition and transaction surrounding a text and presenting it as a text.

 

This proposed panel, Modernist Paratexts, seeks papers working from the diachronic angle: What was happening to the paratext in the modernist period? Which paratextual forms proliferated, which declined, and why? To what uses was this “privileged site of a pragmatics and a strategy” put? In what ways was the paratext used by authors and their agents “in the service, well or badly understood or accomplished, of a better reception of the text and a more pertinent reading” of it? While Genette’s work productively frames this panel’s inquiries, all theoretical and critical approaches to the paratext are welcome. In keeping with the conference theme “Culture Industries,” papers might consider the new modes of cultural production and consumption announced or invited by the paratext in the modernist period.

 

Potential paper topics include but are not limited to:

• The fate and/or uses of

o   one or more paratextual forms, such as the preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, and dedicatory letter

o   authorial or non-authorial paratexts

o   original, subsequent, or belated paratexts

• Paratexts mediating different reading publics
• The paratext and new communication or media technologies
• The paratext in periodicals or little magazines
• The paratext and small printing presses
• The paratext in other art forms or media

 

Please send an abstract of 350-500 words and a brief bio-bibliographical statement by March 15 to Sarah Copland (coplands2@macewan.ca).

Simone de Beauvoir saw old age as a category of unrecognized but radical difference, a situation of being “outside humanity.” The old, Beauvoir argues, are foreigners, even to themselves. Ann Kaplan has similarly theorized old age as an experience of ideological trauma, while Kathleen Woodward shows that the old, and old women in particular, are incompatible with psychoanalytic models of the subject. For all of these theorists, old age is a troubling site of psychic violence, where our understandings of identity, subjectivity, and humanity come under pressure. This proposed panel for the 2016 conference of the Modernist Studies Association poses the question of what old age meant to modernism. In Beauvoir’s historical narrative, the question of old age became particularly urgent in the early and mid twentieth century, which witnessed a shift in the culture of aging: age seemed to become the condition of all humanity, not its outer limit. Human civilization itself took on the mantle of the old person, as human knowledge, rather than accumulating and growing, instead became obsolete. This panel takes up Beauvoir’s interest in both historicizing and theorizing aging in modernism, that literary period known for its investment in the new.

 

Papers might consider:

·      The old body in modernism

·      Aging and memory or time

·      The narrative function of age in modernist texts

·      Texts centered around old people (Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Ronald Firbank’s Valmouth, Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington, Barbara Pym’sQuartet in Autumn, Doris Lessing’s Diary of Jane Somers)

·      Mythic old age (Tiresias, the sibyl, the crone)

·      Modernist writers in their own old age

·      Generational divides in modernism

·      The modernist grandparent

·      The aged person vs the aged civilization

·      Old age in/and the culture industry

·      Age and celebrity culture in the early 20^th century

Conference: MSA 18, Pasadena, 17-20 November 2016

 

Please send 250 word abstracts along with brief biographical notes to Heather Fielding athfieldin@purdue.edu by March 25, 2016.

* CALL FOR PAPERS NOW OPEN *

One-Day Conference

May 27^th 2016

University of Sussex

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kate McLoughlin (Oxford)

This conference invites participants to think broadly about the term “hospitable” and the different ways that hospitality could be at work in modernist texts.

Existing scholarship into “modernist parties” invites further consideration of hospitality as the gracious welcoming of guests, usually within the home of the host or hostess. Food, drink, and entertainment are all suitable topics of discussion for this conference. Thinking about the environment in which hosting occurs could motivate explorations of the hospitable places that exist beyond the private home, such as the varying salons of modernism. Discussion of the figure of the host or hostess, aristocratic or otherwise, could generate literary, social, or economic discussions of hosting and of hospitality. More generally, the bodies that appear within modernist texts could be examined in the ways that they function as hospitable spaces.

Derrida’s work on l’hospitalité in the context of l’étranger extends the idea of hospitality across new thresholds. In this light, hospitality can lead into discussions of nationalism and of “host” countries. Xenophobia, fascism, or patriarchy could all be regarded as inhospitable applications of the laws of hospitality. War might be considered as a catalyst for hospitable or inhospitable relations. The slipperiness of the terms host / guest may generate discussions of the uncanniness and / or the reversibility at the centre of hospitality. “The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte). These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality”.

Finally modernism itself may be considered as hospitable or inhospitable in terms of the relationships that appear between modernist texts and writers. Subjects that may be considered in this vein include: to whom does modernism extend its cordial invitation? What could be defined as the hospitable spaces of modernism? Who is turned away from the modernist party and why?

Subjects to be considered may include but are not limited to:

• Modernist party-going and party-giving
• Literary and artistic salons
• Food and drink in modernism
• Dancing / musical modernism
• Hosts / guests in modernist literature
• The body as a hospitable space
• Friendliness / generosity / animosity
• Inhospitality in modernism
• Elitism
• Host as enemy / host as ghost
• Derridean hospitality – l’hospitalité / l’étranger
• Hospitable / inhospitable borders
• Nationalism – “Host” countries
• Hospitable modernist families – literal / textual / intellectual
• Literary hospitality

Proposals are encouraged from all researchers working in modernist studies with abstracts from graduates and early-career researchers particularly welcome. Preference will be given to papers that foster interdisciplinary exchange. Abstracts of 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers.

Please send abstracts along with a brief biographical note to hospitablemodernismconference@gmail.com by 1st April 2016.

This event is sponsored by the Centre for Modernist Studies, Sussex.

 

Irish Caribbean Connections: An Interdisciplinary Conference

University College Cork

22-23 July 2016

CALL FOR PAPERS

Irish Caribbean Connections is an interdisciplinary conference that seeks to explore synergies between Ireland and the Caribbean islands.  This event follows the vibrant  Caribbean Irish Connections conference held at the University of the West Indies, Barbados, in 2012.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

LORNA GOODISON

INTRODUCED BY JAHAN RAMAZANI

We welcome proposals for papers across the range of disciplines, including but not confined to the following areas:

• the performing arts, drama, music, literature, and the visual arts
• cultural studies, postcolonial and transnational studies
• the Black and Green Atlantic
• diaspora, exile, migration, slavery, colonialism
• antislavery movements, revolution
• the Irish in the Caribbean
• travel writing
• Ireland and the Francophone and Hispanophone Caribbean
• history; geography; politics; archaeology; sociology; sociolinguistics; religion
• digital humanities; international digitization projects

Organisers: Lee Jenkins (University College Cork); Melanie Otto (Trinity College Dublin)

Abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers should be emailed to Lee Jenkins at l.jenkins@ucc.ie by 31st March 2016.

Irish-Caribbean Connections takes place just before the 2016 conference of IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature), to be held at University College Cork on 25-29 July. For details, visithttp://iasil2016.com/

 

Irish-Caribbean Connections is supported by the University College Cork Strategic Research Fund

 

 

 

“First Encounters: Early Cinema and American Modernism”
Over the past few decades, important scholarship under the rubric of the New Modernist Studies has unearthed the tensile relationship of film and literary modernism. This scholarship has, by and large, focused on the cinematic qualities of the work of certain modernists such as Virginia Woolf and John Dos Passos. A related body of work has examined, usually anecdotally or biographically, the careers of modernists like William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald who tried their luck in Hollywood during the 1930s. As rewarding as this work has proved to be, scholars of modernism have seemed less interested in considering just how literary culture more broadly responded to the motion picture at the very moment of – and in the immediate aftermath of — its emergence.
This panel takes as its starting point the quite radical transformations in American cultural life of the early twentieth century – in particular, the increasing interdependence of writing and film cultures. As Marsha Orgeron has noted, “something in the culture of authorship was changing, and the shift was at least in part a result of the demands and operating principles of the motion picture industry” (“Rethinking Authorship” 2003). This panel aims to move the discussion of modernism and cinema beyond a focus on aesthetics, and beyond – or, in advance of – the 1930s to consider the interactions of cinema and writing cultures more broadly. And, while scholars have largely framed this relationship in terms of a rivalry, we would like to consider the opportunities the upstart medium might have provided for modernist communities, institutions and practitioners.
In sum, we hope to expand the chronology as well as the ways in which we conceptualize modernist literary culture’s relation to cinema. We particularly invite papers that examine archival materials, copyright laws, subsidiary rights, motion-picture tie-ins, celebrity and fan-magazine culture, studio attempts to lure authors out West, and so forth, in order to produce a fuller account of a modernist literary culture deeply entangled with – indeed, perhaps inseparable from – early cinema culture.
Please send abstracts of 350-500 words, and a brief bio statement, by March 15 to Sarah Gleeson-White: sarah.gleeson-white@sydney.edu.au