3rd-5th February, 2016

The University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji 

Keynote addresses from Prof. Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Prof. Elizabeth DeLoughrey (University of California, Los Angeles)

Roundtable with Pacific writers, including Vanessa Griffen and Satendra Nandan.

In recent decades critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Arjun Appadurai, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Simon Gikandi, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have reassessed the temporalities, spatialities and formal components of modernism and modernity. While hegemonic power structures in politics and literature played often decisive roles in shaping global modernisms, lines of influence predicated on models of core/periphery have been recognised as reductive. Previously dominant models of reception grounded on mimicry or delayed adoption are increasingly understood to devalue the creative agencies of global modernists. Instead, new frameworks of alternative modernities, multiple modernities, modernity at large, new world modernisms, geomodernisms, and transnational modernisms are enabling exploration of the multiplicity of modernist experiences, histories, and form.

When South Pacific writers such as Albert Wendt, Subramani, Vincent Eri, Satendra Nandan, Konai Helu Thaman, and Vanessa Griffen forged a new literature of Oceania, they gave voice to the lived reality of transnational Oceanic modernities by opening local narrative traditions to the experimentations of global modernisms. Their innovations and compromises created a writing of Oceanic modernity that disrupts reductive models of periodisation, influence or imitation, evincing relations that are, as Andreas Huyssen writes, ‘reciprocal though asymmetrical’. Recognising the multiplicity of responses to the ruptures and relations of modernity, and the importance of local contextualisation in comprehending global modernisms, this symposium is devoted to Oceanic Modernism, and the relationship between modernities and modernisms in the South Pacific.

This symposium brings together regional and international scholars to work towards an understanding of Oceanic Modernism that is detailed and coherent, without being uniform or conformist. In particular, the symposium seeks to examine the relationship between Oceanic works – literature, art, dance, architecture and so on – and the modernities from which these emerged, and the relationship between Oceanic works and other modernisms, however so defined. We invite papers on South Pacific works that address these and other related issues, and/or the relationship between Oceanic Modernism and the following:

• Nationalism
• Indigenisation
• Form
• Postcolonialism
• Appropriation
• Independence
• Politics
• Tradition
• Location
• Time/Space
• Contingency

We welcome proposals for papers (not exceeding twenty minutes) and panels (maximum three speakers). Please submit your title and a proposal of 300 words to oceanicmodernisms@gmail.com by 1st October, 2015.

CALL FOR PAPERS

VIRGINIA WOOLF AND HERITAGE

The 26^th Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf

Leeds Trinity University, UK – 16-19 June 2016

Virginia Woolf was deeply interested in the past – whether literary, intellectual, cultural, political or social – and her writings interrogate it repeatedly. She was also a great tourist and explorer of heritage sites in England and abroad. As the first Annual Virginia Woolf Conference to be hosted in England for 10 years, and located in Yorkshire, an area rich in cultural links for Woolf (not least the Brontë Parsonage at Haworth, the subject of her first published article), this conference will explore how Woolf engaged with heritage, how she understood and represented it, and how she has been represented by the heritage industry.

Papers are invited on topics including (but not limited to):

• Woolf’s representations and constructions of the past and her responses to her own heritage, such as:
  • intellectual traditions and the history of ideas
  • feminist readings of history
  • queer and lesbian histories
  • the literary past
  • family histories
  • her responses to the Victorian and/or Edwardian eras
  • Englishness and national identity

• Woolf’s experiences of the heritage industry, for example: her use of libraries, museums, art galleries, authors’ houses, artists’ houses, stately homes, gardens, London’s heritage sites, and tourist sites in Britain and abroad.

• Ways in which Woolf has been represented and/or appropriated by the heritage industry and the creative and cultural industries, for example in:
  • virtual and physical exhibitions and digital archives
  • libraries, archives and collections
  • plaques, memorials, and statues
  • National Trust properties and other sites, including Monk’s House, Knole, and Talland House
  • film, television, radio, poetry and fiction, theatre, dance, multimedia and performance

• Woolf’s legacy to future generations in a wide range of cultural settings. This may include approaches from translation studies, reception history, comparative literature, editorial scholarship, pedagogy and literary theory.

For individual papers, send a 250-word proposal. For panels of three or four people, please send a proposed panel title and a 250-word proposal for each paper.

Please e-mail the proposal in a Word document to woolf2016@leedstrinity.ac.uk by 25^th January 2016. Proposals should be anonymous, but please provide names, affiliations and contact details for speaker(s) in the e-mail message.

www.woolf2016.com

 

I want to draw your attention to a CFP for a 2016 ACLA seminar. The seminar is on “Networking Modernisms” and is open to modernist-focused papers working across national, temporal and media boundaries. We are interested in the ways in which definitions or our understandings of “modernisms” and “networks” converge. You will find the CFP here: http://www.acla.org/seminar/networking-modernisms. Abstracts are due Sept. 23. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at mdinsman@nd.edu.

Please find below the CFP for the seminar on Serial Forms I am
organizing at ACLA 2016 (March 17-20 at Harvard). Abstracts are due
September 23 (apologies for the short notice). Feel free to email me
with queries at gibsona@duq.edu

In response to an echoing call for a renewed attention to form, this
seminar will examine a particularly rich formal classification: the
serial. Conceiving of serial form broadly to encompass a variety of
sequential and collected narratives, from installments and episodes to
versions, revisions, witnesses, releases, copies, variations,
collections, and cycles, we will ask how narratives in parts challenge
and invigorate our critical approaches to narrative form. While
criticism of serial form tends to center on Charles Dickens and look
forward to twentieth-century radio and television, the formal
conventions of seriality – the sequence and collection of narratives –
extends far beyond this fictional field. We find seriality across
literary periods and genres, from The Arabian Nights to the comic
strip, from medieval manuscripts to contemporary poetry collections,
from broadsides to blogs, from The Canterbury Tales and The Decameron
to the Serial podcast and House of Cards. How, then, do we draw formal
connections between such varied instantiations of seriality? And how
does attention to seriality require us to move beyond conventional
approaches to literary form, which have tended to sidestep or elide
narrative temporality, authorial process and publication, reading, and
revision?

At the heart of this seminar will be the relationship between form and
sequence. Questions for consideration include: What challenges does
the extension of production and reception in parts over time pose to
our understanding of the “whole” text? Do we have to choose between
treating a serial text as parts within a whole (many within one) or as
the succession or progression of a series (one after another after
another)? Does each new part revise or extend previous parts? And what
can attention to seriality teach us about narrative form in general?

Papers will examine serial form within or across any literary
period(s), place(s), or genre(s), and might consider the following
topics, as well as others not listed:

– Connected versus disconnected narratives
– Progression, revision, extension
– Versions and variations
– Parts and wholes
– Instances and responses
– Sequence and collection
– Serial temporality and spatiality
– The production, circulation, and reception of serial texts
(manuscripts, printed texts, audio or visual media)
– Teaching serially; teaching serial texts

More information and submissions at: http://www.acla.org/seminar/serial-forms

International D.H. Lawrence Conference St Ives Cornwall 12-14 September 2016

“Outside England…Far off from the world”: D.H. Lawrence, Cornwall and Regional Modernism

Organised in association with the University of Exeter Penryn Campus, this conference will be held at the Tregenna Castle Hotel St Ives to commemorate the centenary of D.H. Lawrence’s move to the nearby village of Zennor.

In the midst of the Great War, Lawrence arrived in Zennor following a brief stay in Porthcothan in North Cornwall. His description of Porthcothan as “Outside England…Far off from the world” shows the impression this place made on his imagination, but his reaction to Zennor was even more remarkable: “When we came over the shoulder of the wild hill, above the sea, to Zennor, I felt we were coming into the Promised Land. I know there will a new heaven and a new earth take place now: we have triumphed…this isn’t merely territory, it is a new continent of the soul”.

In seeking to highlight the significance of Lawrence’s fascination with Cornwall, this conference will use his response to that place as a way into looking at broader issues in his work and, more widely, the position of place in British modernism. In the context of Lawrence’s utterances about the Midlands, which have attracted much critical attention, it will probe Lawrence’s use of the term “outside England” to describe his response to Cornwall that, by comparison, has been largely overlooked. Whilst this conference seeks to bring together scholars and postgraduates to focus on the role of place in the work of D.H. Lawrence, it will also consider the significance of peripherality and localism, creative responses to marginalisation, the expression of disparities between imagined and familiar locations and the legacy of pastoral experience in modernist literature. In interrogating these ideas, it intends to contribute to broader discussions about the complex and interrelated relationship between place and the literary imagination.

Whilst we particularly welcome abstracts that consider all aspects of D.H. Lawrence’s—often fluctuating—responses to place, either pastoral or city and especially to Cornwall, we also invite papers on other related topics that focus on the significance of place in the modernist period, which may include but are not limited to;

Consideration of how perceptions of particular places can alter in reaction to traumatic events such as war

The construction of place as the Other

Differences between literary interpretations of place and the lived experience of the inhabitants of that place

The conflict between the pastoral and the city in modernist experience and writing

The impact of outsiders into rural communities

Groupings of literary, political or cultural figures that were encouraged by specific locations or any consequences of these associations

The relationship between place and the literary form

The tensions between class/race/gender and pastoral/city places

Literary interpretations of the connections between history and place

The relevance of place in attempts to find a more hopeful future

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for proposed 25 minute papers to

dhlcornwall@btinternet.com

cfp deadline: 1 December 2015 successful applicants will be notified by 1 February 2016.

There will be an opportunity for selected papers to be published in a special conference edition of the journal of the D.H. Lawrence Society.

The conference will be held at the Tregenna Castle Hotel St Ives which is within walking distance of this artistically alluring seaside town that Lawrence knew well. St Ives can be reached by train from London Paddington (changing at St Erth).

Further information regarding the conference is available at

www.lawrencecornwall.wix.com/conference

September 2015

Call for Papers

CONFERENCE:           CONTEMPORARY POETRY: THINKING AND FEELING

MAY 20^th-22^nd 2016

ORGANISERS:             ANTHONY CALESHU AND MANDY BLOOMFIELD,

PLYMOUTH UNIVERSITY

This conference is dedicated to exploring the interplay and divide between thinking and feeling in poetry. In what ways might poetry embody a process of thinking? What’s the role of emotion in recent poetry? Can thinking be divided from feeling? Does a poetry of the head preclude a poetry of affect, and vice versa? Are these the terms of competing antagonisms or productive dialogues? What’s the relationship between the intellect and affect?

Poetry has long explored these questions, but this conference dedicated to 20th and 21st century work, asks what ‘new’ developments are shifting the terms of debate and practice? Issues we hope to explore include the role and use of autobiography, imagination, sexuality, race, gender, faith, the lyric voice, narrative, conceptualism, history, eco-poetics and poetic materiality.

We welcome papers on 20th/21st century poets or poetries which might exist in that liminal space in between the thinking/feeling binary, or which might privilege either side of the divide. Within this broad rubric, we invite discussion of poets and poetries of the page, spoken-word, digital mediums, 3D design, hybrid constructions etc.

Scholars and creative practitioners alike are welcome.

Plenaries will be given by:   Redell Olsen

Keston Sutherland

Matvei Yankelevich

Emily Berry, Sam Riviere, and Jack Underwood

Please submit proposals by email in the form of 100-200 word abstracts for 20 minute long panel papers by 1^st December 2015. We also welcome proposals for pre-formed panels of 3 x 20-minute papers.

The conference will be held at Plymouth University, in the port city of Plymouth, Devon, in the Southwest of England.

Anthony Caleshu

anthony.caleshu@plymouth.ac.uk

Mandy Bloomfield

mandy.bloomfield@plymouth.ac.uk

Seminar: “World Novels and 21st-Century Media”

http://www.acla.org/seminar/world-novels-and-21st-century-media

2016 Annual meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association

Harvard University

March 17-20, 2016

Abstracts due September 23, 12am PST; submit through the ACLA online portal at http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper.

 

Organizers: Annie Galvin, University of Virginia (ahg8cy@virginia.edu) and Jap-Nanak Makkar, University of Virginia (jkm5ar@virginia.edu)

As Jessica Pressman and Sven Birkerts have noted, digital media technologies challenge the cultural priority we give to book-bound texts. To a reader of a novel, the book is just one reading format among others in our twenty-first-century media landscape. At the same time, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, John Johnston and Daniel Punday have considered the fate of literary fiction in a cultural environment saturated by a variety of visual media, including television, film, the internet, surveillance apparatuses and video games. These latter scholars suggest that novels compete with other media to remain a culturally significant conveyor of meaning and narrative. Challenges have been issued to both the novel’s materiality and its representational strategies in the contemporary media ecology.

But rather than accept their inevitable displacement or even expiration, novels respond by incorporating, using or refusing new media. Certain texts that exhibit an awareness of twenty-first-century media have done so while intervening in global political conditions, mobilizing the form of the novel while incorporating visual media as part of their narrative and representational approaches. Texts by authors including Ruth Ozeki and NoViolet Bulawayo, among many others, render our new media environments an issue of world politics. Other authors, such as Jonathan Safran Foer and Ali Smith, respond to our media-rich environment by exploring new storytelling potential within the medium of the book, their stories often hinging on the materiality of the object in the reader’s hands.

This seminar invites reflection on the capacity of novels to narrativize, use, or otherwise represent the contemporary media ecology. We welcome papers that address the following questions or pursue any related lines of inquiry:

• How do novels represent concerns of digitization, “informatization,” big data, and new media ecologies?
• How does the materiality of the book—or the materiality of information—become a resource for invention and innovation in a digital age?
• How do global novels contend with an expanding media environment, now constituted by old media forms (print, film, photography, radio) as well as newer media (Internet content such as blogs, email, video games, SMS)—an environment which is inherently global in nature?
• Are new forms such as electronic literature, the hypertextual novel, and print/digital hybrids fundamentally superseding the form of the print novel, or is there more to be said about the respective places that all of these forms might hold in our culturally mediated future?
• Might concepts such as “world literature” or “global literature” provide a strong conceptual foundation for considering literature’s relationship to digital media?
• Given the novel’s capacity for generic cross-pollination, how can the form incorporate adjacent media in addressing global conditions such as poverty, war, migration, or inequality, which are by nature difficult to apprehend, represent, or visualize?
• What theoretical approaches might prove useful in analyzing the increasingly complex imbrications of verbal literature, visual media, and global politics?

Please submit abstracts through the ACLA online portal, which opens September 1 and closes at 12am PST on September 23rd: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper. Submitters are advised, also, to familiarize themselves with the unique structure of the ACLA conference by visiting http://www.acla.org/annual-meeting. Please contact the seminar organizers with questions or concerns.

“Psy-” Elsewhere

ACLA Seminar, 2016

Harvard: March 17-20

Organizer: Cate I. Reilly, Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

I am putting together a seminar entitled, “ ‘Psy-’ Elsewhere” for the 2016 American Comparative Literature Association annual meeting. A description of the seminar can be found below, as well as on the ACLA website at http://www.acla.org/seminar/%E2%80%9Cpsy-%E2%80%9D-elsewhere

If interested, please send a 350-word abstracts to cireilly@princeton.edu no later than September 23.
I look forward to hearing back from you.

Cate I. Reilly

Seminar Description:

Since Freudian psychoanalysis first posited a topographical model of the mind, the notion of an elsewhere in the “psy disciplines” (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology) has often been associated with either the realm of the unconscious or the totemic objects connected to the archeological structure of psychic processes. From Freud’s collection of Persian rugs and Far Eastern, Greek, Egyptian and Mexican artifacts to Jung’s commentaries on the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching, the “psy disciplines” have long turned to non- Western sources as both interpretive points of reference and a reservoir of purported wisdom. Yet as these disciplines expanded transnationally, driven by professionalization, the need to standardize treatment practices, and reach new patient populations, they grew increasingly attentive to geo-political elsewhere(s). As Derrida points out in his assessment of “geopsychoanalysis,” the transposition to non-European locations was as much shaped by actual geography as by an institutional imagination of what did (and did not) constitute global reach.

This seminar asks: What is the nature of the “elsewhere” both created by these disciplines but also seen in excess of them? How does it reflect back on these disciplines’ own definition? How is this elsewhere generated, sustained and responded to? When and how is affirmed or resisted? By whom or by what?

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the “psy disciplines” in contexts beyond Western Europe and the continental U.S., by both looking to narrative works that thematize these intersections and by bringing literary tools to bear on clinical scenarios. The seminar invites papers dealing with authors and theorists whose work reflects on the ambiguous, fraught and politically resonant configurations that resulted as European “psy disciplines” negotiated new local sites of practice and vice versa. Possible topics include, but are not limited to: colonial psychiatry and racism (e.g. Memmi, Mannoni, Fanon, Girindrasekar Bose, Ashis Nandy) problems of translation and the clinic (Lacan and beyond); abuses carried out under the Soviet system; contemporary psy-ops military strategies; psychoanalysis in/and Latin America; the growth of country specific manuals of psychiatric disorders; debates surrounding biopolitics (Hardt and Negri, Agamben, Mbembe, Esposito); global affect management and the relevance of these disciplines for politics (as in Said’s Freud and the Non-European).

Presumed Autonomy:

Literature and Art in Theory and Practice

10–13 May 2016

Department of English, Stockholm University, Sweden

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy.

The four-day conference seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to assess, from the perspective of the present, the historical trajectory of autonomy as it has been conceptualized, recognized, assumed, deployed, and questioned by critics and practitioners of art, and to explore artistic, philosophical, cultural, and institutional negotiations of art as embedded in and entangled with the multiple heteronomies of market, state, religion, education… (a list that cannot be complete). As there are important intersections between various definitions of autonomy as well as artistic practices, several methodological and thematic strands will be brought together in four streams:

–Autonomy and the Avant-garde

–Theories of aesthetic autonomy

–Fields, markets, capitals, commodities and autonomy

–Autonomy and the body

The conference organizers invite contributions that address the issues indicated in the rubrics above. You can choose either to earmark your abstract for one of the streams, or send it in for general consideration. The list below can be taken to indicate the scope of those particular and general concerns, while not necessarily restricting the possibilities. Proposals for presentations should address the problematics of autonomy in relation to one or several of the following thematic headings:

• aesthetic codings of the modern: myths, styles, temporalities, and techniques
• affect
• the architecture of thought
• biopower and control
• capitalism
• the commodity
• contemporary critical efforts to re-theorize form
• the debate between activist and normative formalisms
• early twentieth-century theorizations of literature and modern art
• ecologies
• fields of cultural production
• education, the university: formation, reproduction and defense of autonomy
• forms of capital
• global modernisms
• the historical avant-garde
• inaesthetics
• institutions
• living materialities
• national, transnational, and postnational frameworks
• object-oriented vs. becoming-oriented paradigms
• politics
• the (post)human body
• spaces, territories, place
• the state as the source of autonomy or heteronomy
• “world literature,” the postcolonial condition, and economic globalization

For more information about the conference, please visit our website: presumedautonomy.se

Confirmed Keynotes: Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London), Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Nicholas Brown (University of Illinois, Chicago), Anne A. Cheng (Princeton University), Peter Kalliney (University of Kentucky), Gisèle Sapiro (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris), and Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist University).

Please submit your paper abstract (about 500 words) and a brief biographical note either by email to autonomy@english.su.se, or by using the ‘Proposal Submission’ tab on the conference’s website page “Call for Papers” for online submission.

Conference organizers:

Gül Bilge Han

Bo G. Ekelund

Marina Ludwigs

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson

Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva