Category: CFPs

Call for Papers 5^th Bi-annual EAM Congress (European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies) University of Rennes, France, June 1-2-3, 2016

The fifth EAM congress invites scholars to consider the coupling of the notions of quest and investigation in works of art or movements of the avant-garde or neo-avant-garde, or of the various forms of modernism, even though modernism and the avant-garde seem often to have been constructed in opposition to the spiritual or scientific heritage suggested by these two terms. The notion of quest suggests a metaphysical beyond informed by mysticism, implying the absence of an end or of a conclusion, whereas the notion of investigation implies a totally rational conception of reality and a process likely to bring a definite result and reach a conclusion. Coupling the two notions, quest/investigation, is therefore an invitation to overcome an initial paradox: the endlessness of the quest as opposed to the fixed scope of the investigation. The co-articulation of the two notions may shed some light on marginal or neglected works. It may also question the dialectical relationship between modern and anti-modern, between avant-garde and rear-guard, between insistent innovations and archaisms, acknowledged or disguised.

Whether dialectical or dynamic, the approach we suggest applies to all the fields or domains of research in the Arts, literature, aesthetics, cinema, photography, drama, T.V. or digital media, architecture, music, design…

As a guide to researchers, we suggest four possible approaches:

1 A genetic approach: this would deal with the process of creation itself as quest or investigation (artistic protocols, the work as investigation, models or projects designed as research, studies, excavations, exploration, etc.)

2 A formal approach: to identify the motifs, terms, or forms of the quest or investigation in works of art, fiction and/or documentary (e.g: works of mystical inspiration, the reintroduction of the sacred; or the schematic models for a project, the presence of user manuals, guidelines, etc.)

3 An approach in terms of reception: the place or the role of the spectator or reader confronted by an open/closed work, the state of completion or incompletion of the work (is the finitude or completeness of the work put into question by new technologies? do these technologies enable a new appropriation of the work?)

4 An epistemological or meta-discursive approach: dealing with historiography and historicity, new modes of research, new technologies (restoration of paintings, collaborative creations, databases, etc.). This approach considers the way in which the quest/investigation of the researcher and the artistic quest or investigation itself mutually inform or act on each other.

The submissions should explicitly mention which of the four approaches is primarily involved.

The scientific committee invites proposals for panels of three or four speakers, or for double panels of up to eight speakers. Individual proposals are also accepted. Panels may not consist only of graduate students. All submissions must contain a title (for each paper and for the panel), a 300-word abstract (of the individual paper or of all the papers of the proposed panel), the name and qualifications of the author(s), the language in which the paper(s) will be read (English, French, German, Spanish). Proposals must be submitted in a Word, Times New Roman 12 format (no PDF) before September 1, 2015 to the following address: EAM.rennes2016@gmail.com

Answers will be sent by October 1st 2015.

Rebecca Walsh and Celena Kusch, co-chairs of The H.D. International Society

Katherine Mansfield, Leslie Beauchamp 

& World War One

An international symposium to be held at
Mesen/Messines, Belgium
26 – 27 September 2015

Keynote Speakers: Professor J. Lawrence Mitchell 

and Dr Gerri Kimber

Call for Papers

Leslie Heron Beauchamp lost his life in Ploegsteert Wood, close to Messines, on October 6 2015. The young Second Lieutenant serving with the South Lancashire Regiment was just 21 when he was accidentally killed by a malfunctioning grenade while teaching his men how to throw these “bombs”. “Chummie”, as he was known to his family, had just spent two weeks with Mansfield and John Middleton Murry at their home in St John’s Wood, London, while on an army course, ironically on the use of hand grenades. The death of her much-loved younger brother would go on to have a significant impact on Mansfield’s writing, unleashing memories of New Zealand and their shared childhood, which she now felt compelled to record.

This symposium in Messines, commemorating the centenary of Leslie’s death, and close to where he died, aims to encourage a discussion of his life, his relationship with his sister Katherine, and how her own writing was transformed by his untimely death.

The symposium will take place in the theatre on the second floor of the Old Town Hall at Messines over the weekend of September 26 and 27 and will include a visit to Leslie’s grave. Keynote speakers include Dr Gerri Kimber of Northampton University, UK, and Professor J. Lawrence Mitchell of Texas A&M University, USA. The organisers are grateful for the support of the Katherine Mansfield Society, the Mesen/Messines Council and the New Zealand Embassy in Brussels.

Please send 200 word abstracts to Martin O’Connor, symposium organiser at:

words@telenet.be 

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 31 July 2015.

In addition to the symposium, an optional battlefield tour is offered on Friday September 25

A tour of main World War One sites on the Ypres Salient will be run for those attending the symposium, on Friday September 25. This is optional only and the charge per person is 85 euros (€50 for students / unwaged). The price includes the guide, lunch and transport.

Your transport will leave at 8.30 am from the coach park at the front of the Cathedral in Ypres (behind the Cloth Hall).

We will visit the Messines battlefield of June 7 1917, including the Pool of Peace, the preserved crater of one of the massive British mines exploded that day. We will then move on to Ypres and the Menin Gate.

We will drive over the Passchendaele battlefield and visit Tyne Cot, the largest of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission’s cemeteries. We will then visit the Memorial Museum Passchendaele before ending the day at Essex Farm, the site where John McCrae wrote the iconic poem “In Flanders Fields”. Lunch will be provided en route.

Should time permit we will also visit the German Cemetery at Langemark and the area of the frontline where the Germans launched the first gas attack in April 1915.

New Zealanders who are visiting for the symposium may wish to do a tour focused on the New Zealand Division. This can cover Flanders, The Somme, Arras and Le Quesnoy depending on how much time is available and can be made prior to or after the symposium. Anyone who is interested should contact Martin O’Connor at:  words@telenet.be

On the weekend following the symposium a major New Zealand event which will be announced shortly will take place on Saturday October 3 at Zonnebeke (Passchendaele). Memorial services are planned for Sunday October 4 in commemoration of The Battle of Broodseinde in which the New Zealand Division with the Australians to their right made a first successful push towards Passchendaele. Eight days later as they made the push for the village itself, the New Zealanders suffered their worst day in history losing 840 dead in just four hours.

Call for Papers for a University at Buffalo English Department Poetics Program conference. This conference will be preceded by a Friday April 8 Robert Creeley Lecture. This is the inaugural lecture in what will become an annual lectureship in poetry and poetics, and in 2016 will include a community celebration and presenters on Creeley’s translation into and reception by the French. More information about these events (free and open to the public) will be forthcoming at a later date. Please feel free to circulate the Call for Papers.

Call for Papers “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years” Conference,  April 9-10, 2016 

The Poetics Program at the University at Buffalo invites the submission of papers or workshop topics for a conference marking its 25th anniversary and looking toward the future of the field. “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years” convenes an occasion for intensive reflection on the possibilities and agencies poetry and poetics bring to bear on trajectories of the now and histories-to-be. We envision a conference that consists primarily of discussion: papers will be short (10-12 minutes); there will be no plenary speakers and no introductions. Seminar workshops will enable intensive conversation on particular topics in small groups. Panel presentations will propose material and ideas for continuing discussion with all participants.

Among other topics, we hope to engender conversation on://

Poetry/Poetics as interdisciplinary exploration (eco-poetics & bio-politics; poetics of the political economy of affect)
Poetry/Poetics as trans- and cross-cultural, including poetry in alternate writing systems
Poetry/Poetics and media technologies, including history of the book
Poetry/Poetics and contemporary events, subjunctive histories
Poetry/Poetics as investigation of social difference and hierarchy, especially as produced, policed, and undone by language
Poetry/Poetics as (in)comprehension of planetary crisis

You may submit an individual *paper (250-word proposal) or a topic for a **seminar-workshop (350-word proposal).
*Seminar topics and paper proposals due: September 1*
*Papers: 10-12-minutes, each panel with 4-5 speakers, to be followed by 30-50 min. discussion

**Seminar-workshops: brief (5-7 page) papers will be circulated in advance of the conference; there will be no formal presentations during the seminars, which will consist of discussion among participants. Seminar participation will be limited to 15, although the coordinator at discretion may allow up to 5 guests who do not contribute papers.

Anyone who submits a paper proposal that is accepted but cannot be accommodated into a panel slot will be invited either to participate in a proposed seminar or to lead a seminar on the topic of the proposed paper.
Submitters will be informed of acceptance either as seminar leaders or paper presenters by October 1. A call will then go out for proposals to participate in the seminars: proposals due November 1; submitters will be informed of participation by December 1.

Associazione Italiana di Studi Nord-Americani/Italian Association for North American Studies

23rd AISNA Biennial Conference, Naples 24-26 September 2015

“Harbors: Flows and Migrations of Peoples, Cultures, and Ideas. The U.S. A. in/and the World.” 

CFP: Modernism and its Italian Harbors

I wanted to be sure to reach you;

though my ship was on the way it got caught

in some moorings. I am always tying up

and then deciding to depart. In storms and

at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide

around my fathomless arms, I am unable . . .

Frank O’Hara, “To the Harbormaster”

Modernism means a lot more than early twentieth-century  artistic experiments. Rediscovered in its planetarity (Friedman 2010),  the idea of modernism today conjures a kaleidoscope of possible connections, potential transits, actual displacements. The New Modernist Studies gives us a  geo-cultural concept  that extends in space and time (well beyond the reified divide between European modernism and creative production originating beyond Europe, as well as the standard chronological period between 1890 and 1945), points to an incessant movement of transnational circulation and translation (Mao & Walkowitz 2008; Berman 2012; Doyle 2005; Hayot 2012; Gallo 2010), and  reintroduces us to neglected intimacies between the aesthetic practice of the historical avant-gardes and contemporary philosophical-critical schools like theory (Ayers  2008; Ross 2008).

What is the role of Italy in this rich web of flows and migrations? What becomes of English-speaking modernism in/through Italy? Contributions are invited which explore  the possible Italian harbors of modernism’s migratory, transformative, and diasporic course. The term “harbor” here, in its literal and metaphorical meanings, is used to encourage  multiple venues of inquiry: a place, an idea, an author or a cluster of authors, an artifact, or anything which might provide a point of anchorage for  Anglophone  modernism, enabling it to circulate, produce, and thus appear anew and re-emerge– displaced– under the guise of  other and unforeseen forms, moods, affects,  movements, or ideas.

Please send 250 word abstracts, along with a brief biography,  to  the panel organizer:  mmitrano@luc.edu,  or mena.mitrano@tin.it  by June 3, 2015.

This panel has been approved. I’d love to hear from you!

Mena Mitrano

Adjunct Professor, Loyola University Chicago,  Rome Center

Editorial Board RSA Journal (Rivista di Studi Americani)

Via Massimi 114/A

00136 Rome, Italy

+39-335-667-1682

University of Rennes, France, June 1-2-3, 2016

The fifth EAM congress invites scholars to consider the coupling of the notions of quest and investigation in works of art or movements of the avant-garde or neo-avant-garde, or of the various forms of modernism, even though modernism and the avant-garde seem often to have been constructed in opposition to the spiritual or scientific heritage suggested by these two terms. The notion of quest suggests a metaphysical beyond informed by mysticism, implying the absence of an end or of a conclusion, whereas the notion of investigation implies a totally rational conception of reality and a process likely to bring a definite result and reach a conclusion. Coupling the two notions, quest/investigation, is therefore an invitation to overcome an initial paradox: the endlessness of the quest as opposed to the fixed scope of the investigation. The co-articulation of the two notions may shed some light on marginal or neglected works. It may also question the dialectical relationship between modern and anti-modern, between avant-garde and rear-guard, between insistent innovations and archaisms, acknowledged or disguised.

Whether dialectical or dynamic, the approach we suggest applies to all the fields or domains of research in the Arts, literature, aesthetics, cinema, photography, drama, T.V. or digital media, architecture, music, design…
As a guide to researchers, we suggest four possible approaches:

1 A genetic approach: this would deal with the process of creation itself as quest or investigation (artistic protocols, the work as investigation, models or projects designed as research, studies, excavations, exploration, etc.)

2 A formal approach: to identify the motifs, terms, or forms of the quest or investigation in works of art, fiction and/or documentary (e.g: works of mystical inspiration, the reintroduction of the sacred; or the schematic models for a project, the presence of user manuals, guidelines, etc.)

3 An approach in terms of reception: the place or the role of the spectator or reader confronted by an open/closed work, the state of completion or incompletion of the work (is the finitude or completeness of the work put into question by new technologies? do these technologies enable a new appropriation of the work?)

4 An epistemological or meta-discursive approach: dealing with historiography and historicity, new modes of research, new technologies (restoration of paintings, collaborative creations, databases, etc.). This approach considers the way in which the quest/investigation of the researcher and the artistic quest or investigation itself mutually inform or act on each other.

The submissions should explicitly mention which of the four approaches is primarily involved.

The scientific committee invites proposals for panels of three or four speakers, or for double panels of up to eight speakers. Individual proposals are also accepted. Panels may not consist only of graduate students. All submissions must contain a title (for each paper and for the panel), a 300-word abstract (of the individual paper or of all the papers of the proposed panel), the name and qualifications of the author(s), the language in which the paper(s) will be read (English, French, German, Spanish). Proposals must be submitted in a Word, Times New Roman 12 format (no PDF) before September 1, 2015 to the following address:

EAM.rennes2016@gmail.com

Answers will be sent by October 15th 2015.

We are delighted to announce the call for papers for the inaugural MONC conference.

Literature at War: H. G. Wells, Ford Madox Ford and their Contemporaries in and around the First World War

Saturday 19 September 2015, at King’s College London, Waterloo Campus, London SE1

Sponsors:

The H. G. Wells Society

Ford Madox Ford Society

Centre for Modern Literature and Culture, King’s College London

Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London

This year sees the centenary of two major literary events, the publication of Ford’s The Good Soldier (‘the saddest story I have ever heard’), and of Wells’s Boon, the cantankerous literary satire that terminated his friendship with Henry James. Both works can be read as offering, though in very different ways, a kind of final verdict on British Edwardian culture; and both can also be seen to reflect their authors’ growing sense of the apparent impotence and irrelevance of the literary and artistic worlds in time of war. Yet 1914-18 and its immediate aftermath was also a time of extraordinary cultural vibrancy, in which the war novels of Wells and Ford – Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and Parade’s End (1924-8) – would play their part. Henry James, in his famous defence of his art in reply to Boon, wrote of ‘the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift’, a credo that could have been echoed by Wells, Ford and many of their contemporaries despite their sharply conflicting understandings of ‘life’ and its relation to literature.

This one-day conference invites papers reflecting the contrasting views of literature and the First World War in the writing of Wells, Ford and their contemporaries. A variety of approaches will be welcomed, including perspectives on life-writing, propaganda, satire, utopia and the writing of history.

Enquiries to: max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk or j.p.parrinder@reading.ac.uk

Proposals for 20-minute papers (250-word abstracts) should be sent to ahri@kcl.ac.uk by 11 June 2015.

AHRI

ahri@kcl.ac.uk

About the Conference

Beckett and Modernism
The Second Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society

The year 2016 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Journal of Beckett Studies (JOBS), founded in 1976 by James Knowlson and John Pilling. To celebrate this occasion, we are proud to announce both of them as keynote speakers at the second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society, dedicated to Beckett and Modernism. Sometimes referred to as ‘The Last Modernist’, Beckett has also been situated within the postmodern canon. After a long critical debate, the term ‘modernism’ has recently been reframed by a vibrant field of what is sometimes called the ‘new modernist studies’, and the term ‘Late Modernism’ seems to be gaining currency in Beckett studies.

At the same time, several critics have called into question not only the criteria underlying these labels but also the act of categorization itself, the danger being in ‘the neatness of identifications’, as Beckett warned his readers from the start. Therefore, with this second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society, we would like to move beyond the point of labelling and examine the different ways in which Beckett interacted with the broad intellectual and artistic climate commonly referred to as ‘modernism’, taking Susan Stanford Friedman’s ‘definitional excursions’ into account: ‘Modernism requires tradition to “make it new”. Tradition comes into being only as it is rebelled against. Definitional excursions into the meanings of modern, modernity, and modernism begin and end in reading the specificities of these contradictions.’

Keynote Speakers

• James Knowlson
• John Pilling

Call for Papers

Beckett’s formative years coincided with the first publications of several modernist masterpieces. While the importance of Joyce and Proust for Beckett’s work has been widely recognized, his dislike of T. S. Eliot has perhaps been taken too much at face value. One aspect of Eliot’s poetics that Beckett would have agreed with is the importance of the literary tradition for modern writing. As his lectures on ‘The Modern Novel’ at TCD, his early essays and the hundreds of books in his personal library confirm, authors from the previous centuries were central to his twentieth-century poetics. One question to ask is how Beckett used that literary tradition to ‘make it new’, not only in his novels, but also in his plays and poems. Even though Virginia Woolf is entirely absent from his work, he did share her interest in the mind. How different is Beckett’s approach from Woolf’s attempt to ‘look within’, and how does his own exploration of the mind relate to the ‘inward turn’ generally associated with Modernism, and to the recent revision of this concept by David Herman (2011)?

That Beckett was fascinated by the material traces of cognitive processes is shown by his careful preservation of drafts, notebooks or marginalia, and we are still learning how these reading and writing traces in turn continued to shape his own thinking. Beckett was not only interested in the mind and the self, as his psychology notes confirm, but also in the nature of representation. While his familiarity with Mauthner’s Beiträge has received much attention, the influence of Sartre, Bergson, Husserl, Heidegger, Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein on Beckett’s notion of linguistic skepticism and phenomenology still deserves more attention. His work is also informed by his familiarity with numerous other cultural aspects: for instance, his knowledge of the visual arts, both modern and classical, acquired especially during his German trip in the late 1930s and through his friendship with Duthuit and his work on transition; the importance of early cinema, attested by Beckett’s reading of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film in 1936, cannot be ignored; the non-visual medium of radio is another modern artform that he explored, around the same time when he listened to dodecaphonic music with Avigdor Arikha.

Like many of the Modernists, Beckett asked himself what it meant to write in a modern sense, as a young TCD lecturer in 1930. He pondered the question for the next sixty years in his writing, and this conference aims to distill answers from the rich body of work he left behind.

The CFP for the second conference of the Samuel Beckett Society invites abstracts that could focus on, but do not need to be limited to, topics such as:

• Modernist Minds
  o Phenomenology and representation (Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, …);
  o Analytic philosophy and language (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, …);
  o Psychology and the self (psychoanalysis, Gestalt psychology, …).
• Modernist Poetics
  o Beckett’s Manuscripts
  o Linguistic scepticism
  o Beckett and the ‘Modernists’ (Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Eliot, Flann
  O’Brien, …)
  o The modern novel
• Modernism and Literary Tradition
  o Intertextuality
  o Beckett’s reading traces (library, notebooks, etc.)
  o ‘Make It New’
• Modern Art
  o Early cinema, radio broadcasting, technological revolution
  o Painting and sculpture
  o Experimental music
  o Theatrical innovation
• Modern Times, Modern Spaces
  o Beckett and politics
  o Cosmopolitan/metropolitan Beckett

Abstracts (max. 300 words) should be sent to olga.beloborodova@uantwerpen.be

Deadline: 15 September 2015. Notification of decisions by 30 October 2015.
For more information about the conference contact dirk.vanhulle@uantwerpen.be

Call for Papers: 

After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity

Saturday, 19 September 2015

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College, Oxford

With funding from the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London (CLWR)

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

In the last decade, the fields of life-writing and celebrity studies have separately gained traction as areas for provocative critical analysis, but the significant connections between them have been overlooked. In celebrity studies, stories about individual people are examined through national, cultural, economic and political contexts. The function of the person’s image is considered rather than the life from which that image was/is derived. Conversely, life-writing does not always take into account the impact of celebrity on the life, and instead portrays it as an event rather than a condition with psychological impact which could be an integral part of the narrative.

Through a one-day conference entitled ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity,’ we want to consider the interplay between celebrity and life-writing. The conference will explore ideas of image, persona and self-fashioning in an historical as well as a contemporary context and the role these concepts play in the writing of lives. How does the story (telling) of a historical life—of Cleopatra or Abraham Lincoln, for instance— alter when we re-read it in terms of celebrity? What is the human impact of being a celebrity— in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘part of the coinage of every day speech’? And how does this factor in when we use archival materials related to celebrities, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews, press accounts, oral histories, apocryphal tales, etc.? Furthermore, what are the ethical responsibilities of life-writers when approaching such famous stories?

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Celebrity in the fields of literature, politics, entertainment and public life
• Historical reevaluations of celebrity from earlier periods
• Royal lives
• The politics of writing celebrity lives
• The psychology of celebrity
• Fame, famousness, fandom, stardom, myth and/or iconicity
• The celebrity as life-writer (i.e. celebrity memoirs, etc.)
• Using celebrity lives in historical fiction
• The celebrity and identity
• Showmanship, freak shows and the circus
• Identity, power and violence in lives of the famous
• Images and the press
• Writing celebrity lives from below

We also welcome papers on any issues arising from these questions and disciplines.

The conference organizers invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations/papers or panel proposals. Presenters should submit abstracts of 300 words by 15 May 2015 to Nanette O’Brien (nanette.obrien@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) and Oline Eaton (faith.eaton@kcl.ac.uk). Please send your abstract as a separate attachment in a PDF or Word document, and include on it your name, affiliation, and a brief bio.