Category: CFPs

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism

Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism,
1895 to 1945
 
17-18 April 2015
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London.
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-conferences/ageofmodernism
 
Keynote Speakers:
Nick Freeman (Loughborough) on style and morality after Wilde
Michèle Mendelssohn (Oxford) on ‘Black Dandyism’
 
Call For Papers
This interdisciplinary conference intends to open discussions about the meaning and significance of Aestheticism and Decadence as these movements evolved between 1895 and the mid-twentieth century. Aestheticism and Decadence were not vanquished with Wilde’s imprisonment but, rather, continued as vital and diverse forms in twentieth century aesthetics and culture. Their influence was in some cases openly acknowledged by the authors in question, but often it was oblique and obscured as many later writers, most famously the High Modernists, eschewed any admissions of such a debt.
 
This conference considers Aestheticism and Decadence from three main angles:
1) the continuing evolution, diversification and internationalisation of    
     Aestheticist and Decadent ideas and forms;
2) how writers, artists, critics, musicians engaged with the figures and ideas of     
     nineteenth century Aestheticism and Decadence.
3) the production of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ and the posthumous representation of Decadent and Aestheticist writers, particularly Wilde, Swinburne and Pater, in memoir, biography and literary criticism
 
We encourage proposals that address these Aestheticist and Decadent afterlives in the context of their cultural, political and social moments, and which engage with the problematics of these terms.
 
Subjects might include but are not limited to:
 
*Decadents and Aesthetes publishing after 1895 (e.g. Machen, Beerbohm, Lee)
*Decadents and Aesthetes who refashioned themselves and are now considered Modernists (e.g. Yeats)
* The concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ in post-1895 literature and art
* The cultural and artistic legacies of fin de siècle decadence in ‘Modernist’ works
* Reappraisals of Decadent tensions such as deviant sensuality and ‘reserve’
* The Decadent/Aesthetic individual in the modern city
* Decadent tropes and characters in the ‘middle-brow’ novel
* Reworkings of Decadent literary forms
* Decadence/Aestheticism on film/in photography
* Decadence/Aestheticism in Music
* Critiques and denunciations of nineteenth century Aestheticism/Decadence
* The influence of and engagement with Aestheticism/Decadence in non-
   Western cultures
* Decadence/Aestheticism in the United States
* The presentation of Decadents/Aesthetes in monuments, biographies, histories, memoirs.  
 
Writers and artists who could be explored within these contexts are legion, but some notable cases include:
 
*Arthur Symons
*Max Beerbohm
*Arthur Machen
*M. P. Shiel
*Victor Plarr
*Ernest Rhys
*Henry Havelock Ellis
*Thomas Hardy
*Edward Thomas
*Rupert Brooke
*Lord Alfred Douglas
*Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo)
*Michael Field
*Ronald Firbank
*W. B. Yeats
*A. J. A. Symonds
*Charles Ricketts
*Eric Gill
*W.T. Horton
*Thomas Sturge Moore
*Vernon Lee
*T. S. Eliot
*Ezra Pound
*H. D.
*Rose Macaulay
*James Joyce
*D. H. Lawrence
*Wyndham Lewis
*Edith Wharton
*Evelyn Waugh
*The Sitwells
*Cyril Connolly
*Aldous Huxley
*Beverley Nichols
*Ford Madox Ford
*Virginia Woolf
*Christopher Isherwood
*John Betjeman
*Carl Van Vechten
*Ben Hecht
*James Huneker
*F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
And the ‘afterlives’ of:
 
* Oscar Wilde
* The Pre-Raphaelites
* Algernon Charles Swinburne
* Walter Pater
* John Ruskin
* Lionel Johnson
* Ernest Dowson
* Aubrey Beardsley
 
Please send Abstracts of 250 words with a short bionote to Dr. Kate Hext and Dr. Alex Murray atdecadence.modernism2015@gmail.com by the 30th of November 2014.
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CFPs

CFP: Rural Modernity: A Collection of Essays

Call for Chapter Proposals

 

Rural Modernity: A Collection of Essays

Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2014

 

Edited by Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University and

Michael McCluskey, University College London

 

We are seeking proposals for submissions to a collection of essays devoted to the theoretical and historical elaboration of the concept of rural modernity as it is worked out in literary, artistic, and other cultural objects and movements in early

twentieth-century Britain.

 

Please email queries to

Kristin Bluemel: kbluemel@monmouth.edu or

Michael McCluskey: michael.mccluskey@ucl.ac.uk

 

 

Despite the interwar explosion of books, advertisements, films, paintings, and pictures that depicted rural life, no study to date has looked into representations of the rural across diverse media. Nor has any study considered the relation of rural representation in early- and mid-twentieth-century culture to rural people who, as much or more than urban dwellers, grappled with the forces and effects of modernization and modernity. Rural Modernity aims to bring together essays on fiction, non-fiction, arts, crafts, and films to identify the interconnected—at times conflicting—ideas that images of the rural helped to circulate and to open up “rural modernity” as a particularly useful framework for further studies of interwar art and literature, and, more broadly, British culture.

 

Possible subjects include Writers: H. E. Bates, Adrian Bell, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Thomas Hardy, Winifred Holtby, A. A. Milne, H. J. Massingham, Beverley Nichols, A. G. Street, Flora Thompson, Mary Webb, Francis Brett Young Artists: Evelyn Dunbar, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Thomas Hennell, Laura Knight, Clare Leighton, John Nash, Paul Nash, Samuel Peploe, Gwen Raverat, Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer, Philip Wilson Steer Preoccupations: villages, cottages, country houses, farming, gardening, tourism and motoring, ramblers and anglers, folk dancing, Peacehaven and the Plotlands movement, rural industries and organic communities Media: books, prints, paintings, illustrations, photography, film, and mass print media.

 

The aims of writers and artists who engaged with ideas of the rural—evocation of lost worlds, celebration of new discoveries, participation in modernist experiments—tell only part of the story, and, while the essays included in Rural Modernity explore these motivations, they also seek to move beyond perceived oppositions between rural and urban/art and craft/modernism and middlebrow. The conception of rural modernity argued for in this collection makes connections within—and between—these distinctions while allowing for the complexity of the idea of “rural modernity” itself. How was it imagined? How was it marketed? Who promoted it and who opposed it? How have social historians and cultural geographers contributed to our understanding of rural modernity, and how can the concept of rural modernity contribute to literary studies, film studies, print culture studies, and art history?

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange

SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA: TRANSMISSION, CIRCULATION, EXCHANGE

Saturday, 18 April 2015
Trinity College, University of Oxford (UK)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper abstracts are invited for “Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange”, a one-day international symposium to be held in Trinity College, University of Oxford on Saturday, 18 April 2015. In this inaugural event of the AHRC-funded research network on Science in Text and Culture in Latin America, our aim is to discuss (inter)disciplinary questions raised by academic and creative explorations of science and culture in Latin America. We also seek to find points of connection and divergence between the study of this cross-fertilization in the region and the frameworks that have informed the study of science and cultural practices elsewhere. We thus invite contributions that ask how creativity is imagined in science, literature and other forms of cultural and artistic practice, and how the methodological frameworks of literature and science studies translate to the Latin American context. Confirmed speakers include Jens Andermann (Universität Zürich), María del Pilar Blanco (Oxford), Sandra Gasparini (Universidad de Buenos Aires), and Gabriela Nouzeilles (Princeton University).

We invite proposals for 25-minute papers for panel sessions, and 10-minute position papers for a forum on current research directions. The former should explicitly address one or more of the broader methodological and disciplinary issues listed below; the latter may focus on any aspect of research on the relationship between science and cultural texts in Latin America. Papers may be given in English or Spanish.

Paper topics may include the following:

  1. (1)  explorations of aesthetic and scientific cross-fertilizations in Latin American arts, including literature, film and other practices;

  2. (2)  examinations of how aesthetic innovations are encouraged by experimentation with the language of science;

  3. (3)  discussions of the methodological frameworks employed in science & culture studies, and their relevance in the Latin American context;

  4. (4)  investigations of the historical study of science’s relationship to the arts across different cultural contexts, in Latin America and beyond;

  5. (5)  discussions that explore whether we might hypothesize a Latin American specificity within the growing field of literature and science studies across different regions.

Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length. Please email your submissions, together with a C.V., to Joanna Page (jep29@cam.ac.uk) and María del Pilar Blanco (maria.blanco@trinity.ox.ac.uk) by 1 September 2014, specifying whether you wish your paper to be considered for a panel session or the research forum. All participants in panel sessions will be asked to circulate their papers in advance of the conference; those giving short presentations in the research forum are also welcome to circulate longer versions of their papers in advance.

One travel bursary of US$1,250 will be awarded, on a competitive basis, to a participant who is resident in North, Central or South America and either currently studying for a doctorate or within three years of having received their doctorate (by the date of the conference).

“Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange” is the first of four international symposia that comprise the AHRC-funded research network on Science in Text and Culture in Latin America, which will run from 2014 to 2016. For more information on the network’s schedule of events, please visit our website (http://www.latin-

american.cam.ac.uk/science-text-culture) or email Joanna Page (jep29@cam.ac.uk) and María del Pilar Blanco (maria.blanco@trinity.ox.ac.uk).

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Modernism at War – deadline TOMORROW

SCOTTISH NETWORK OF MODERNIST STUDIES

Modernism at War 

University of Glasgow, Saturday 18 October 2014

Keynote speakers:  

Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), ‘War Modernism as Commemorative Trauma’

Randall Stevenson (University of Edinburgh),”Hoarse Oaths that Kept Our Courage Straight”: Language and War, Modernism and Silence’

The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be holding a one-day symposium entitled ‘Modernism at War’ at the University of Glasgow on 18 October 2014. Proposals are invited from academics and post-graduates for 20-minute presentations on any topic addressing war in modernist writing and art (including film and other media), the aesthetics and politics of commemoration, trauma and reconstruction, war elegy, anti-war and anti-art, war and the avant garde, war and the archive, war and pedagogy, methodologies for studying war and modernism, or any other related issues and approaches.

Short proposals for papers, expressions of interest and queries should be sent to Vassiliki Kolocotroni  (Vassiliki.Kolocotroni@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 5 September 2014.

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century

Call for papers for a major conference

Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century

Institute of Historical Research, London 22-24 April 2015

Engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of “Being modern”, across culture in Britain and the western world in the years around the First World War. Today, historical studies of literature, art, design, lifestyle and consumption as well as of the human sciences are exploring intensively, but frequently separately, on that talk of “science”. Historians of science are exploring the interpenetration of discourse in the public sphere and expert communities. This pioneering interdisciplinary conference is therefore planned to bring together people who do not normally meet in the same space. Scholars from a range of disciplines will come together to explore how the complex interpretations of science affected the re-creation of what it was to be modern.

Please see the website for more details: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/being-modern/

Submissions for four types of presentation and discussion are sought:

  1. disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
  2. cross-disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
  3. Focus on research presentations of 5 minutes plus two minute discussion each will provide opportunities particularly for graduate students
  4. Poster sessions

Closing date 19 October 2014. Get in early – competition will be strong!

Submissions to: research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

Enquiries to: Robert.bud@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Virginia Woolf Miscellany – Virginia Woolf in the Modern Machine Age

CFP: Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Issue #88, Fall 2015: Virginia Woolf in the Modern Machine Age

 

The Virginia Woolf Miscellany invites submissions of papers that address the role of everyday machines in the life and/or works of Virginia Woolf. From typewriters and telephones to gramophones and the wireless; from motor-cars and combat aeroplanes to trains and department store elevators; from cameras and film projectors to ranges and hot water tanks, the commonplace technologies of the modern machine age leave their trace on Bloomsbury. To what extent are these and other machines represented, hidden, implied, avoided, embraced, or questioned by Woolf and her circle and characters? What is the place of labour and mass production, or the role of the handmade or bespoke object, in the context of such technologies and the desires with which they are implicated? What are the ramifications for the individual’s everyday navigation of modernity, domesticity, and/or community? Alternatively, what is the influence of everyday technologies in our own interactions with Woolf and her writings? Please submit papers of no more than 2500 words to Ann Martin (ann.martin@usask.ca) by 31 March 2015.

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: ‘The Banalization of War’

Call for Manuscripts

Special issue on “The Banalization of War” 

Issue editors: Graham MacPhee and Angela Naimou

 

War both establishes and destabilizes the fundamental distinctions between civilian and combatant, compatriot and alien, and the lawful and the illegitimate. Yet arguably there is another set of distinctions whose fragility has been exposed by the new modes of military violence emerging post–9/11, namely that between emergency and routine, crisis and continuity, the spectacular and the prosaic, the extraordinary and the banal. Military violence, traditionally justifiable only as the temporary suspension of the norms of civility in a state of exception, seems to be becoming increasingly routine and everyday as evidenced by a broad range of tendencies: from securitized responses to political dissent and the deployment of military technologies in law enforcement, border surveillance, and corporate activity to the transformation of combat weapons into consumer goods and the proliferation of war-simulation computer games. This banalization of war is dramatically illustrated by the spatial and temporal condensations of drone warfare. For the drone operator based in a suburban command center, the locus of military agency lies deep within the domestic space and “wartime” is woven into the fabric of everyday temporality, while the globe is reimagined as a battlefield.

 

Attention to the banalization of war in the post-9/11 period provides an opportunity to rethink conceptions of “wartime” as integral and discrete across wider historical and geographical parameters. In fact, the imbrication of war and everyday life has long been a structuring principle for the Atlantic slave trade and for colonial societies, while in the present it is experienced in very different ways—from service workers and translators whose labor facilitates war and occupation, to refugees, undocumented migrants, and those whose deaths would constitute “collateral damage.” This special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies invites essays that explore both the long histories of “wartime” and its differential meanings in the present—as mediated through literature, culture, and society, and as experienced along axes of immediacy and distance, urgency and banality, bodily violence and the pleasures of spectacle. This special issue is especially interested in contributions that interrogate and complicate the historical and geographical parameters of war across national, international, and transnational contexts.

 

Relevant topics would include (but are not limited to):

  • Literary and/or filmic representations of the militarization of everyday life
  • Cultural histories of the banalization of “wartime”
  • The militarization of visual experience in gaming, virtual environments, film and television
  • Military/non-military distinctions and the construction race
  • Discursive strategies for the normalization of militarized violence
  • Narratives of survival and resistance at the intersection of “wartime” and the everyday
  • Gendering and re-gendering wartime/conflict zone and the domestic and the everyday
  • Humanitarian law, human rights, and the porosity of wartime/war space
  • The racialization of “violence” and “civility”
  • The fate of civility, normativity, and exception under the routinization of violence

 

Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the issue editors at the email address below to discuss potential contributions: please include an abstract (c.500 words). Manuscripts should be double-spaced and between 8,000 and 12,000 words. For further details on manuscript submission and preparation see: http://www.wcupa.edu/_academics/sch_cas.lit/submissionGuidelines.asp

 

Contact: collit@wcupa.edu

Submission date: December 31, 2014

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Time and Place in T. S. Eliot and His Contemporaries

International Symposium ‘Time and Place in T. S. Eliot and His Contemporaries’. Promoted by Romualdo Del Bianco Foundation, 18-21 January 2015, Florence, Italy

Call for Papers

Time and place have huge symbolic significance in Eliot’s work and that of his contemporaries. Space and time exist as symbolical, religious, philosophical, historical, political and personal ‘nodes’ in Eliot’s writings. This conference wants to explore these ‘nodes’ in greater depth — where they exist, how they interact with other nodes and themes in Eliot’s writing, and how they intersect with the aesthetic and philosophical thinking of Eliot’s contemporaries.

The symposium topic is focused on, but not limited to, T.S. Eliot and Modernism, and may include such topics as:
– Evocations of time and place in Eliot’s writing or that of his contemporaries
– The preoccupation with space, place and (dis)location
– Modernism and the uses of time, ‘time past’, and timelessness
– Eliot, Modernism and history
– Eliot, Modernism and contemporary scientific and philosophical views on space and time
– Eliot’s place in the tradition, the canon, Modernism, and world literature

Papers that explore the connections between England and Florence or England and Italy in the context of Eliot and his contemporaries are also welcome.

Proposals of 100 to 250 words or completed papers may be sent as email attachments to any of the three co-organizers by 1 October 2014:
Prof. Temur Kobakhidze (temur.kobakhidze@cantab.net),
Dr. Wim Van Mierlo (Wim.Van-Mierlo@sas.ac.uk),
Dr. Stefano Maria Casella (stefanomaria.casella@alice.it).

For more information and registration please visit http://www.lifebeyondtourism.org/evento/522/International-Symposium-%22Time-and-Place-in-T.-S.-Eliot-and-His-Contemporaries%22%2C-18-21-January-2015%2C-Florence%2C-Italy.

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Katherine Mansfield and Antipodean Modernism

The Katherine Mansfield Society Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Conference, held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

29 January 2015

University of New South Wales

Keynote Speaker: Emeritus Professor Angela Smith (Stirling)

 

When Wyndham Lewis described Katherine Mansfield as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’ in September 1922, it was not meant as a compliment. Yet this disparaging remark gives a hint as to what makes her such a fascinating figure today. In the context of the recent scholarly extension of modernism’s borders in terms of geography, gender, class, and time, as well as such diverse new interests as the roles of literary networks, periodicals, and popular and material cultures, Mansfield is more important than ever.

These developments encourage new approaches to Katherine Mansfield, new ways of reading her not only as a short-story writer but as also an editor, a literary critic, a translator, and a poet. Recent criticism has also turned to considering Mansfield as a transnational modernist, whose antipodean origin influenced and affected her even after she emigrated to Europe, and whose legacy continues to inspire succeeding generations of writers and artists in New Zealand and beyond.

This, the third annual Katherine Mansfield Society postgraduate and early career researcher conference, aims to explore the place of this complex literary figure in terms of both modernist and antipodean writing: the ways that she and her works have crossed national, professional, and linguistic boundaries.

Proposals are invited, on these topics or any other topic related to Mansfield, from postgraduate students and early career researchers. Please submit abstracts of 250 words with a brief biography of 50 words to mansfield.unsw@gmail.com by 29 September 2014.

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CFPs

CFP: The Turn into the Twentieth Century and the Problem of Periodization: Critical Essays on American Literary History

Despite the substantial reconceptualization of the field of American literature in recent decades, century-based constructs typically remain in place throughout the field, particularly in relation to “nineteenth-century American literature” versus “twentieth-century American literature.” Courses are taught, textbooks sold, and academic jobs are constructed around such distinctions. Such logic particularly limits scholarship on the turn into the twentieth century, often characterized as a midpoint on a teleological trajectory culminating in literary modernism.  This collection of essays aims to complicate and challenge the conceptual divide between the 19th and 20th centuries by exploring turn-of-the-century works (“T-20” works) in light of the particular negotiations engaged in by writers from the 1880-1920 era, or those that render writing from this period irreducible to a clear periodization by century.  We are especially interested in essays that rethink boundaries denoted by century and in those that create models for extending both “19th c thought” and “modernity,” so as to interrogate the meeting of a long, late 19th century and an extended, emergent modernity.

 

Proposals for 25-page  essays might consider the following:

*What constructs, authors, and texts are particularly useful in exploring the unique historical and ideological assumptions about literature from the century’s turn?

* In what ways does the language we use to describe cultural and literary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reinscribe the logic of periodization by century?  How, for example, might rhetorics of progress and teleology reveal assumptions that undergird our approach to turn-of-the-century American literature? In what ways might these assumptions/terms be reconsidered?

*In what ways does the idea of the “turn of the century” emerge as a useful category through which to explore  continuities across centuries rather than stark divisions between them?  If there is a “long nineteenth century,” where might it end? If there is an “emergent modernity,” at what point(s) might it begin?

*In what ways does the profession of literary studies—the job market, academic conferences, scholarly journals, and book publishing—reproduce or challenge these divides in regard to specific authors or works?  In what ways can scholars and students take a less temporally restrictive view of the field?

 

Send abstracts of 250-500 words and short c.v.s to Melanie Dawson (mvdaws@wm.edu) and Meredith Goldsmith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) by September 15, in anticipation of full-length essays being due by February 15.  Enquiries welcome.