Category: CFPs

The Afterlives of Eve

9-11 September 2016 at Newcastle University and Durham University

Keynotes: Sandra M. Gilbert (UC Davis), Wendy Furman-Adams (Whittier), John Bothwell (Durham)

From Genesis to mitochondrial Eve, the idea of a single common foremother has occupied a crucial space in the Western cultural imaginary. Eve, whether as bringer of sin, as life-giver, as burden, curse or saviour, functions as a commentary on maternity, sexuality, creativity and power. This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference will be an opportunity to explore the impact of her varied representations through the centuries and across different genres and media. How has this archetypal figure been revised and revisited by conservative and radical thought? What personal, polemical and/or creative uses have been made of the figure of Eve? What persists and what changes in her depictions across time and geographical space?  How have women and men negotiated their shared and different relationships to Eve? How has Eve been appropriated, neglected or rejected as a foremother? How does she speak to fantasies of masculine or feminine self-sufficiency? What cultural, political, literary and/or theological spaces does she occupy now? Topics might include, but need not be limited to:

Origins of/Sources for Eve                                                                                                                                 Other Eves                                                                                                                                                            The absence of Eve                                                                                                                                            Representations and Transformations of Eve                                                                                                         Eve as Over-reacher

We welcome papers from all disciplines in arts, humanities and sciences and covering any historical period. We also welcome panel proposals including PGR panel proposals. Titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words per speaker should be sent to Ruth Connolly (ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk) and Mandy Green (mandy.green@durham.ac.uk) by 12 March 2016. Panel proposals should also include a title for the panel’s programme. Speakers will be notified by March 21^st.

We gratefully acknowledge support from MEMS at Newcastle (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/), Newcastle University’s Academic Conference Fund and also from IMEMS at Durham University (https://www.dur.ac.uk/imems/research/).                                                                                                             (A limited number of PGR bursaries may be available. Please indicate when sending your abstract whether you would like to be considered for a bursary.)

This panel seeks papers on the convergence of 20th-century American regionalism and modernism, especially in a transnational sense, for the MSA 18 conference, 17-20 November 2016, in Pasadena, California (https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa18/).

In his essay for The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism entitled “Regionalism in American Modernism,” John N. Duvall concedes that efforts “to link regionalism to American modernism may seem, at first blush, a perverse enterprise” (242). Indeed, modernist studies scholars have commonly considered “modernist” and “regionalist” contradictory terms. Even as important efforts have been made recently to mediate these terms, including a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to “Regional Modernism,” scholarly work that brings the discourses of modernism and regionalism into closer conversation remains urgent. This panel seeks attempts to map out a space for early-20th-century American regionalist fiction within modernist studies while exploring the transnational possibilities of “regional modernism.” More than just the quaint local-color fiction of a previous generation, the regional modernist fiction of the early 20th century might be understood, like the more celebrated globe-trotting international modernism, as an attempt to reject the nation-state as the normative organizational unit for American community.

In the recent “spatial turn,” with its transnational aspirations, modernist studies have at times idealized the trans- without fully considering the national. Modernist fiction, as Jon Hegglund asserts, does not simply transcend this national attachment in the 20th century, rather it continually mediates the scale of the national. Instead of putting forward another spatial scale that outflanks the nation-state, what might be gained by turning to modernist writing that negotiates national attachment and seeks to think transnationally through the sub-national scale of the region? Can we understand “regional modernism” as an attempt to imagine America beyond the territorial nation-state, not through the globe-trotting internationalism more commonly associated with modernism, but according to its intra-national and sub-national distinctiveness? How might such a regional modernism connect local communities beyond national boundaries to non-US “American” spaces like those of the Caribbean, or Central and South America?

Please send abstracts of 500 words or less and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Jace Gatzemeyer (jpg224@psu.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).

Keywords: regional modernism, American regionalism, American modernism, transnationalism

Keynote Speakers: Laura Peters and David Floyd

In 1975, Nina Auerbach commented: “Although we are now ‘all orphans,’ alone and free and dispossessed of our past, we yearn for origins, for cultural continuity. In our continual achievement of paradox, we have made of the orphan himself our archetypal and perhaps only ancestor” (1975 p 416).

The literary orphan figure occupies a liminal position in culture. Poised on the margins of the family, examining the relationship between the influence of the past and the capacity for self-fashioning in the creation of identity, orphan figures prompt important questions about the relationship between the self, the family and the wider social matrix, and self and other in especial.

Forty years on from Auerbach’s influential essay, and in the wake of important new contributions to the debate from Laura Peters and David Floyd (our keynote speakers), it is timely to consider the roles played by literary orphans, and assess the ways in which they reflect and refract the concerns of their contemporaneous cultures.

The Orphan Identities symposium will take place at the University of Portsmouth on Saturday November 12^th 2016.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

fashioning orphan identity; the liminal nature of orphan figures; orphans and transportation/colonial narratives; the orphan as scapegoat; the orphan and modernity; the orphan as dangerous supplement; the therapeutic power of the orphan; the war child/refugee

We are particularly interested in papers that deal with literature post 1800. Abstracts of around 250 words should be sent to: orphan-identities@port.ac.uk by June 10th 2016.

Hello All,

Please consider submitting an abstract to a special session I am organizing for next year’s MLA annual convention in Philadelphia:

This panel seeks papers on the ecology of home landscape and war zone representations within modernist literature for the 2017 MLA Annual Convention in Philadelphia, 5–8 January 2017 (https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_8773). The centennial anniversary of World War I has coincided with what seems a critical mass in awareness of the urgency of our sustainability as a species. In looking at the role which that war and the literature it produced has played in structuring the past to our contemporary present—a present marked by ecological instability and crisis—it behooves us to explore how literary responses to World War I employ an aesthetic which can be said to reconfigure the subject in relation to both space and time as ecological. While much discussed modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway will offer fruitful grounds for considerations of the separation and intercession of the spaces of war and home, as well as the trench poets and war memoirists of the period such as Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, the organizer especially invites inquiries into the works of less discussed authors such as Max Plowman, Rebecca West, and Robinson Jeffers.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words and a brief bio statement by March 15 to Molly Hall (molly_hall@uri.edu). (Note: this is a special session and not a guaranteed session).

CFP for an MSA 18 Panel on the topic of

Modernism and the Origin and Rise of Biofiction

MSA 18: November 17-20 in Pasadena, CA

250-Word Abstracts due March 20^th

Send cv and abstracts to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu)

In 1937, Georg Lukács published The Historical Novel, a landmark study that examines the nature and power of the literary form.  But he also discusses the biographical novel, which is a form of fiction that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure.  Many biographical novels were published in the 1930s by notable writers like Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Robert Graves, Arna Bontemps, Lion Feuchtwanger, Irving Stone, and Zora Neale Hurston.  But Lukács condemned the form as irredeemable.

I am seeking submissions for a panel about the role modernism played in the rise and legitimization of biofiction.  For instance, modernist theories of knowledge led some writers to author biblical biographical novels that challenged and debunked ideas in and approaches to the Bible.  Thomas Mann and Zora Neale Hurston wrote biographical novels about Joseph, Moses, and Herod.  Specifically which theories of knowledge led Mann and Hurston to write biographical novels about biblical figures?  How do modernist theories of knowledge impact the characterizations of the biblical figures in the novels?  How do the modernist theories of knowledge, as dramatized in the novels, force readers to rework their understanding of and approach to the Bible?  How have Mann’s and Hurston’s works contributed to the rise of the contemporary biblical biographical novels of Frederick Buechner, Anita Diamant, David Maine, ColmTóibín and Geraldine Brooks, to mention only a notable few?

A more theoretical question is: to what degree did distinctly modernist ideas contribute to the making of the biographical novel?  According to Lukács, the hero of a historical novel should be a fictional figure that functions as a historical-social type.  Thus, he condemns the biographical novel, because its protagonist is based on an actual historical figure.  Is Lukács right to condemn the biographical novel? If not, why not?  Lukács believes that the successful historical novel should give readers the objective proportions and weights of history.  To what degree and in what sense does the biographical novel refute core ideas at the center of Lukács’ work about historical fiction by centering the novel in the consciousness of a biographical subject?  What kind of history do readers get from biofiction?  And what kind of biographical subject do readers get from biofiction?

Modernist writers did much to challenge and deconstruct traditional versions of subjectivity, especially those based on strict binaries.  How have modernist theories of the subject contributed to the formation and valorization of biofiction?  And, is it a coincidence that so many contemporary biographical novels have been written about famous or important modernists, including Leo Tolstoy, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Egon Schiele, Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Mansfield, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Robert Frost, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Einar Wegener/Lili Elbe, Sergey Nabakov, Frid Kahlo, and Walter Benjamin, just to mention only a notable few?

As you can see, the questions are endless.  For those interested in this panel, send a cv and a 250-word abstract to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu) by March 20^th.

Call for Papers

Political Demonology:

The Logic of Evil in Contemporary Literature and Theology

Day Conference – Friday, 20 May 2016

Worcester College, Oxford

This conference is intended to bring theologians, philosophers of religion, and literary scholars together to frame approaches to the problem of political evil—a project one might call ‘political demonology’—for our contemporary political and cultural crisis.

What or who is the political enemy? What is political evil or sin? If we are living in the age of ‘the complete triumph of the individual’ (Giles Châtelet), then the status of ‘individuality’ ‘subjectivity,’ and ‘soul,’ must be attended to in this context. But if individuality is coming to some kind of end (post-modern, post-capitalist, post-material, or otherwise), what moral-political regime is, or should be, appearing on the horizon? And what, then, is the meaning, place, and aesthetic of evil as a political phenomenon? Would the transformation of the individual mean liberation, oblivion, or even imply new forms of violence? And what is the role of statehood or the social? Through this interdisciplinary dialogue we seek to reformulate our own definitions, even as various contemporary crises violently reformulate them for us.

We seek 20-minute papers on any topic relating to ‘political demonology’—broadly defined as the genesis, location, logic, categorization, or implementation of political evil. Participants are encouraged to approach the topic from any angle. While we address ourselves to the present, historical approaches that illuminate the contemporary moment and our current conceptions are very welcome.

Questions to be considered might also include:

–      How might we define ‘political demonology’? What inheres in the act of pursuing, however speculatively, a political ‘demonology’? Is the concept of evil valuable to a political project?

–      From what point does evil arise in states and communities? What is its metaphysical horizon? How does it afflict political systems? Is it a personal, a systemic, or a substantial category? According to which logic does evil unfold? And what are the remedies—if they exist?

–      How might a contemporary understanding of political evil allow us to take a stance against the disposability of human beings, against self-reductionism and the privileging of self-management over creativity?

–      What are emerging metaphors and genres in the field of theological and literary hamartiology?

–      What might be the implications of the state of exception (Carl Schmitt) – reactionary, radical, or otherwise? Is transcendence an option or fiction? Can we talk about ‘radical evil’ or ‘radical good’?

Please send your abstract (200 words) to: demonologyoxford2016@gmail.com

by 20 March 2016

The conference is organized by the Political Demonology Working Group, initiated by Therese Feiler (Postdoctoral Researcher, Faculty of Theology and Religion) and Michael Mayo (Junior Research Fellow in English, Worcester College).

CFP Political Demonology 20 May 2016

Call for Papers: IVWS Panel, MLA 2017

Title: Virginia Woolf Scholars Come to Their Senses

I offer two possible approaches for the International Virginia Woolf Society’s 2017 MLA panel: (1) papers addressing sense modalities in Woolf’s writing.  How and to what end does Woolf evoke sensory experiences of smell, touch and taste in her writing?  Or, (2) papers offering or debating “corrective” readings of Woolf that suggest some kind of “progress” in Woolf criticism. Have earlier readings, such as poststructuralist or lesbian, been supplanted by contemporary approaches, or do we need a model other than “progression” to address Woolf’s critical heritage? Abstracts (250-500 words) by March 21^st to Pamela Caughie at pcaughi@luc.edu (please note the “e” is dropped in Caughie).  Participants must be MLA members by April 7, 2016.