Objects of Modernity

Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity

The University of Birmingham, 23-24 June 2014

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Ulrika Maude (University of Bristol)

 Conference blog: http://objectsofmodernity.wordpress.com/

What were the objects that shaped modernity? How did they function? Who created them, used them and reflected on their significance?

This two-day conference, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at The University of Birmingham and partially funded by the British Academy, seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines in order to reflect upon a cultural history of modernity by way of its objects. This burgeoning field of study, which encompasses scholarship on material cultures, the history of technology, social theory and psychoanalysis and which has been pioneered by the ‘cultural phenomenology’ of Steven Connor and the ‘thing theory’ of Bill Brown amongst others, has spawned new, interdisciplinary research from literary critics, art historians, philosophers, sociologists and cultural historians. Yet this work has often not been drawn together in such a way as to reflect upon its specific significance as a subject of study or its relevance for more traditional forms of historical analysis. Answering the question of how a particular object should be read entails an assumption about its readable qualities and interpretive value. Reflecting upon the key interpretive tools that allow objects to become meaningful in this way will therefore be a fundamental component of the conference and, while the nature of the final panels cannot be predicted in detail, it is envisaged that several methodological or thematic strands will run throughout. These will include, but are not limited to:

• The Phenomenal. How do ‘the things themselves’ of phenomenology shape our being-in-the-world? How do they throw us into a world of cultural practices that make our experience precisely what it is?
• The Phantasmagoric. How do objects both display and hide their inherent traits? How do they circulate? Who possesses them?
• Obsolescence and Waste. What happens when apparently ‘modern’ objects become obsolete? What kind of an object is rubbish?
• The Materiality of Art. What kind of object is the book, painting or sculpture? How does its ‘thingness’ mediate the experience of art?
• Subject and Object. In what ways can human bodies (or their parts) be considered objects? How have technological innovations altered bodies and subjectivities? Are objects invested with human traits?

The approach of this conference is therefore both thematic and methodological rather than period specific. However, it is also true that the range of questions referred to above can be most effectively addressed when given some limited terms of reference. As such, the organizers are looking for papers that deal broadly with the period 1850-1950.

The second day of the conference features a research networking forum, generously supported by the British Academy, which will run parallel to the academic conference. 

At this forum, we are seeking Early Career Researchers in academia, in heritage management and in the creative arts to talk about their professional and creative encounters with objects of modernity. The forum will provide an opportunity for ECRs working across different disciplines to come together to talk about the ways in which objects of modernity (physical, phenomenological, imagined) function in art, literature and culture, and will offer researchers a space in which the challenges of such objects (hermeneutic, methodological and curatorial) can be debated in an interdisciplinary way. ECRs from the heritage sector in particular will be encouraged to bring along information about their institutional collections, particularly in areas they consider to be untapped. The aim of the forum is to help unlock some of the resources, archives and collections of objects, things and artefacts of the industrial and post-industrial heritage of the UK to ECRs, and to help forge new professional, cross-disciplinary connections that will shape a growing and fertile field of study in the coming years.

We welcome all participants to both events at a reception and buffet dinner on Monday 23rd June.

Those interested in speaking at the academic conference should submit a 500 word abstract, together with a brief biography, to Dr. Rex Ferguson (r.ferguson@bham.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014. Those interested in presenting at the networking event should send the same information to Dr. Dan Moore (d.t.moore@bham.ac.uk) by the same date.

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public

Friday 9 May 2014

Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent decades modernist studies has seen an explosion of scholarship undermining the myth of modernist isolation from commercialised literary production, with critical attention focused largely on the engagement of modernists with mass markets and popular cultural forms.  Less attention has been given to how mass culture itself responded to and approached modernism. This one-day symposium seeks to explore the two-way relationship between artists and popular audiences; how modernists found a public and how the public also took ownership of modernism.  While modernist writers and artists played with or actively assimilated mass market tactics, the mass markets themselves played with or actively assimilated high modernist techniques.  As mass audiences became increasingly aware of the modernist revolution, modernism not only found its public face, but also met a public increasingly active in refiguring modernism’s profile.  This symposium aims to bring together scholars interested in debating alternative methods of approaching and interpreting interactions between mass markets, popular culture and modernism.

We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers, which might address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:

• Approaches to modernism in mass market periodicals
• Individual modernist writers and the commercial press
• Mass market publishing and modernist outputs
• Advertising and modernist design
• Modernism and celebrity
• Modernism and fashion
• Middlebrow culture
• Methodological issues arising from the study of modernism in mass culture

 

Please send abstracts with a brief biographical note and full contact details to the symposium organisers, Dr Rod Rosenquist (rod.rosenquist@port.ac.uk) and Dr Alice Wood (alice.wood@port.ac.uk), by 21 February 2014.  Participants will be notified by 1 March 2014.  Any queries may be directed to either of the email addresses above or visit http://www.port.ac.uk/centre-for-studies-in-literature/literature-events/symposium-2014-public-modernism–modernisms-public/

‘Utopia’

The deadline for abstract submission to the 4th EAM conference in Helsinki, 29.-31. August 2014, has been extended to 5 February. At that time we will close!

http://www.eam2014.com/

David Jones: Christian Modernist?
Oxford, 10-13 September 2014

‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.

Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.

This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?

It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?

Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.

For more information visit:http://modernismchristianity.org/david-jones-conference/

Call for Papers: Clothes, Working Lives and Social Change, 1880–1939

(Bishopsgate Institute, London 12–13 September 2014)

Two-Day International Conference

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Eugenia Paulicelli (Queen’s College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Professor Lou Taylor (University of Brighton)

This cross-disciplinary conference explores the relationship between work, clothes and social change at the turn of the twentieth century.

During the long nineteenth century mechanized manufacturing, accelerated modes of production and innovative trades and industries created employment possibilities for an increasingly professionalized workforce. While factory and clerical workers, shop girls and other members of a newly established workforce faced changing working hours and environments, a transformation of clothes paralleled this revolution in trades and industries. New vocations required new vestments at a time when the affordability of mass-produced clothing launched the ready-to-wear industry. Social mobility expressed itself in new sartorial patterns and specific uniforms or dresses became the markers of professional identity and social mobility. At the turn of the twentieth century the histories of dress and labour shared many common Hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute in London’s East End, this interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Creative Arts who have research interests in the intersecting histories of clothes and labour at the turn of the twentieth century.

Topics include but are by no means restricted to:

 Sweated Labour and the Clothing Industry

 Clothes and the New Workforce (especially working women)

 Work in the Fashion Industry (seamstresses, models, designers)

 Haute Couture versus Ready-to-Wear Garments

 Film Stars, Celebrity Culture and Clothes

 Textiles and Communities of Immigrant

 Workers (particularly London’s East End)

 Uniforms

 The Politics of Fashion and the Coding of Clothes

 Clothing, Work and Consumption (especially in times of war)

 Work and Rural Dress

The conference organizers invite paper proposals of 300 words by 30 April 2014. Please email abstracts to tailoredtrades@exeter.ac.uk. We invite abstracts from scholars at all career stages and are particularly interested in receiving proposals from textile curators who work on projects related to turn-of-the-century fashion and design.

This conference is part of a series of research events on the interconnected histories of clothes and labour funded by the AHRC Connected Communities programme: http://tailoredtrades.exeter.ac.uk/.

Finite, Singular and Exposed: Who’s Afraid of the Modernist Individual?

University of Córdoba (Spain)
30-31 October, 2014

There was a time when the individual was the central category in modernism. It was a time of quasi-blind reliance on the Hegelian oppositions self-versus-reality and self-versus-society, critical talismans tirelessly employed by Marxist critics from Lukács through Goldmann. In fact, Lukács’s censorious construal of the modernist novel as an anomalous form bound to stage the individual “confined within the limits of his own experience” remained an article of faith for various generations of critics. Admittedly, that time is up. The old focus has been replaced by a new emphasis on community and communal determinations of individuality in new Modernist studies. What Mao & Walkowitz called “the transnational turn” is an adept symptom of this critical tendency, also present in works by Jessica Berman, Elleke Boehmer, Kim Worthington, Laura Doyle, and Walkowitz herself. This new turn is, moreover, inextricably involved with postcolonial and feminist approaches to Modernism, and expands the traditional psychoanalytic perspectives on the modernist self as an isolated mind. What is at stake is no longer the anti-social de-affiliation of the male Western subjectivity (Marcel, Joseph K., Lord Jim, Leopold Bloom, Gustav von Aschenbach), but rather the compensatory affiliation of repressed minorities (gendered, racial, sub-national, artistic) within a differential spectrum of communal possibility.

And yet, we believe, the ghost of the individual has never been fully exorcised. The Lukacsian dialectical operators remain, often latent, in most current accounts of high and late modernist fiction. We believe that this latency is dangerous, for it promotes an a-critical resumption of the notion of the individual, shorn of its dialectical—and potentially metaphysical—valences. In the context of the recent wave of dialectico-metaphysical approaches to subjectivity and individuality encouraged by thinkers like Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, Jean-Luc Nancy and Alain Badiou, a fresh re-definition of the modernist individual is manifestly in order, a re-definition that is likely to enrich the psychoanalytic scope recycled by trauma-studies for modernist studies. We thus propose a tentative return to the theoretical articulation of modernist individuality. This return is not to be conceived as an antagonistic response to community-oriented approaches to modernist fiction, but rather as an attempt to complement it through a dialectical counterweight.

The organizers welcome proposals for 25-minute papers in English on canonical Modernist authors (Conrad, James, Joyce, Woolf, Ford, Lawrence, Mansfield, Stein…) as well as on non-canonical and late Modernists. Although our main focus will be on English-speaking writers, comparative approaches exploring the work of non-English speaking Modernists will also be welcome.

Suggested paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

– Jean-Luc Nancy’s metaphysical categories of individuality: singularity, finitude, exposure.
– Alain Badiou’s faithful subject. Slavoj Zizek’s ticklish subject.
– Giorgio Agamben’s bare life. Judith Butler’s precarious life.
– Attridge’s singularity and the otherness of modernist writing: implications for a re-reading of the modernist subject.
– Individual, subject, character: Displacements and re-evaluations.
– Individuality and “life-writing.”
– Traditional communal determinations of individuality: Race, gender, class, nation as categories of communal affiliation.
– Enfranchisement, citizenship and national/sub-national/transnational affiliation.
– The artistic subject: The myth of bohemia and the Künstlerroman.
– Displaced subjects: Exile, migration and deterritorialization.
– Regressive subjectivation: Archaic utopias and pastoral communities.
– The singularities of Modernism.
– The Modernist body: Vulnerability, precariousness, corporeity and finitude.
– The Modernist mind: The ‘inward turn’, introversion and dehumanization.
– The isolated subject: Immunity and risk societies.
– The cosmopolitan subject.
– Subject to sacrifice: The Modernist scapegoat.

Please submit your 400-500 word abstracts by June 15th, 2014 to Julián Jiménez Heffernan (jsjimenez@uco.es) and Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (gerardor@ugr.es). Abstracts should include a short biographical note.

Selected papers will be considered for publication.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)

Deadline: June 15th, 2014.

Registration fee: 35€

Organizers: Julián Jiménez Heffernan, María Jesús López, Paula Martín Salván, Gerardo Rodríguez Salas, Pilar Villar Argáiz, Mercedes Díaz Dueñas, Juan Luis Pérez de Luque.