Category: CFPs

Global Modernism and Civil War

(CFP for ‪#‎msa17‬)

Wyndham Lewis’s Blast is perhaps the most famous modernist declaration of civil war: “We set Humour at Humour’s throat. / Stir up Civil War among peaceful apes.” Lewis himself was named after an eccentric English mercenary who fought in the U.S. Civil War (by his American father, a veteran of the same war), and he returns to the trope in his 1937 autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering: “You will be astonished to find how like art is to war, I mean ‘modernist’ art…I have set out to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d’etat dovetail into each other.”

This panel proposes extending recent interest in the Spanish Civil War to a comparative, structural, and intertextual analysis of internecine modernism. How does sectional conflict reframe our understanding of nationalism and world war? Papers could return to well-known national narratives, identify less familiar histories of schism, or develop new transnational or inter-historical approaches.

Read more: http://bit.ly/modcivilwar

Contact Ryan Weberling (ryanweb@bu.edu) to discuss possibilities for the panel, or send a 300-word paper proposal by April 10.

Please consider submitting an abstract for “Media and the Unconscious,” MLA 2016

The T. S. Eliot Society is sponsoring a panel on “Eliot, Media, and Material Culture”at the January 2016 MLA convention in Austin, TX.  If you are interested in presenting a paper on any aspect of this theme, please send a proposal of 250 words or less, together with an abbreviated CV or short bio, to tseliotsociety@gmail.com by March 17.

Please consider submitting an abstract for a special session at MLA 2016, “Playful Modernism”:

Inviting abstracts for papers on the ludic aspects of modernism, including toys, games, the aleatory, uselessness, frivolity, wastefulness, the illogical and the irrational. 300 word abstract by 15 March; Michael Opest (opest@wisc.edu)

http://www.mla.org/cfp_detail_8147

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 1915. 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.

Conference details will be updated regularly on the website: http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/messines-symposium-2015/

Please consider submitting an abstract for this special session at the 2016 MLA (in Austin, TX):

Is tone an independent feature of verse, working against the speaker’s or poet’s ostensible intent? Are tone and voice always analogous or synonymous concepts? 300-word abstract by March 10 to magdakay@uvic.ca.

In critical appraisals of Imagism, the early 20^th century movement has often been portrayed as “revolutionary,” especially in terms of form and technique. In 1963, William Pratt described the emergence of Imagism in England and America as a “battle for a new poetic style” and Helen Carr’s 2009 history of the movement takes its title from the often invoked epithet of the Imagists: The Verse Revolutionaries; however, this panel seeks to interrogate just how revolutionary Imagist practice was in relation to contemporaneous poetry and poetic practice.

Possible topics include:

• The novelty and/or originality of Imagist poetry/poetic practice.
• The variety and diversityof Imagist practices.
• Rereading Imagism.
• The difficulty in delimiting and defining Imagist practice.
• The influences and/or legacies of Imagism.
• Imagist practice beyond the 1910s.
• The possible relationship between Imagist austerity or “hygiene”, as Hugh Kenner terms it, and revolutionary violence and war, what Marinetti refers to as “the world’s only hygiene”.
• Translating cultures through Imagist practice. (E.g. Greek in H.D., Japanese in Lowell and Pound, etc.)
• Imagism and potential appropriative violence.
• Imagism as an avant-garde.
• The “verse revolution” as expressed through Imagism.

Please send proposals (up to 300 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to John Allaster (john.allaster@mail.mcgill.ca). We welcome proposals on any topic that relates to the revolutionary nature of Imagism. Submissions must be received no later than April 10^th, 2015.

Conference Location: Boston, MA, USA
Conference Starts: November 19, 2015
Conference Ends: November 22, 2015

(guaranteed session)

Earth

Literature/art/culture and geology, geography, sea-levels, climate, crystals, fossils, landforms (islands, volcanoes, reefs). Theoretical approaches welcome: material feminist, LGBTQ, phenomenological, Anthropocene, geo-ecological, psychological, linguistic, global.

250 wd. proposals by 28 March to Cassandra Laity

claity@utk.edu