British Association for Modernist Studies - Website Designed and Developed by Callum LeithLiterature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar: Text and the Moving Image
Wednesday 16 October, 6 pm
11 Bedford Square, London WC1B, room F1
Dr Catherine Grant (University of Sussex), ‘“Some new eloquence”? On the written word in audiovisual film studies practice’
Harriet Wragg (University of Oxford), ‘How to Title a Garbo Movie’
For full details, go to http://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com/the-programme/
University of Warwick
15 November, 2013
Venue: R1.15 Ramphal Building, University of Warwick
10.45 Welcome from Christina Britzolakis
11.00 Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick), ‘I’ve been waiting for it all my life’: Beckett, Modernism and the Phenomenology of Old Age’
12.00 Robert Spencer (University of Manchester), ‘Lateness and Modernity in Theodor Adorno’
1.00 Lunch
2.00 Mark Storey (University of Warwick), ‘P.T. Barnum and American Modernism’
3.00 Tea and Coffee
3.15 Howard Booth (University of Manchester), ‘Broken Baxter: D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers and Queer Melancholia’
4.15 Kate McLoughlin (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘The Modernist War Veteran: Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway’
5.15 Close.
All are welcome, and attendance is free, but please send an email to Christina Britzolakis if you are coming
Travel Directions to the University of Warwick
The easiest way to access Ramphal Building is via Library Road. Walk down University Road until you reach Library Road. Once on Library Road, you will pass the Engineering Faculty and the Chemistry Faculty on your right.
The first London Modernism Seminar of the year will take place on Saturday 5 October in Room 349 in Senate House ( 3rd floor Senate House South) at 11-1pm. The topic will be Colonial Modernism and we are very pleased to welcome as speakers Angela Smith (University of Stirling) and Bill Schwarz (Queen Mary, University of London). Their paper titles are:
Angela Smith, ‘Fauvist Women in a White Man’s World’
Bill Schwarz, ‘A fable for freedom? What do we do with V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas?’
Full abstracts and biographies of the speakers can be found below.
You can find the complete programme for the 2013-14 on the Institute of English Studies website: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/53/Modernism+Seminar Please circulate this link among any postgraduates and colleagues you think might be interested in attending. These seminars are open to everyone working on Modernism.
Best wishes,
Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary, University of London, s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London, t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk
David Ayers, University of Kent, David Ayers, dsa@kent.ac.uk
Rebecca Beasley, Queen’s College, Oxford, rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, University of London, h.carr@gold.ac.uk
Register as a member of the British Association for Modernist Studies on the website: https://bams.ac.uk/
Abstracts and Biographies for Colonial Modernism
Angela Smith (University of Stirling), ‘Fauvist Women in a White Man’s World’
From their childhoods the three colonial modernists who are the focus of this paper were aware of the limitations that imitation of the imperial centre imposed. The Australian artist and critic Margaret Preston (1875-1963) wrote that in ‘wishing to rid myself of the mannerisms of a country other than my own’, that is British art, she studied the work of ‘the Australian aboriginals, and it is only from the art of such people in any land that a national art can spring’. The Canadian painter and writer Emily Carr (1871-1945) was given an alternative identity when the First Nation people of the northwest coast native villages named her Klee Wyck. Whereas her father ‘wanted his place to look exactly like England’ her experience was transformed by an encounter with a First Nation sculptor’s totem of a woman with eagle-heads for breasts rising out of the forest. The New Zealand writer Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) rejected the bourgeois respectability of her native Wellington, ‘the empire city’, finding in the group that produced the little magazine Rhythm a radical and inter-disciplinary approach to the arts. I shall argue that Rhythm and specifically its art editor the painter J D Fergusson, a Scot who defined his identity as Celtic, provided an agency for change in the work of Preston, Carr and Mansfield.
Angela Smith has taught in English departments in California, Wales, Malawi and Scotland. She is an emeritus professor of the University of Stirling. Her books include East African Writing in English, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two and Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life. She edited Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea for Penguin and Katherine Mansfield: Selected Stories for Oxford World’s Classics. She is currently editing, with Gerri Kimber, two volumes of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield for Edinburgh University Press.
Bill Schwarz (QMUL), ‘A fable for freedom? What do we do with V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas?’
For a long while now I have been troubled by the issue of what we do with V S Naipaul. In the domain of public letters it is common to find Naipaul revered, lauded as much for his human integrity as for his writings, as the citation for the Nobel prize demonstrates. On the other hand a significant number of literary scholars regard him with little or no respect. Sometimes this is personal, as in the reactions to his incessant litany of high-wire provocations against the imperatives of modern, popular life. Sometimes it inflects the interpretations not only of the author but of his writings too. These conflicting stances drive what is now becoming known as the Naipaul Question, or the N Question.
From this “conflicted” location I intend to approach the N Question by focusing on the 1961 novel, A House for Mr Biswas which conventionally is often described as his best novel, and which in the years after its initial publication was promoted in various quarters as – perhaps – one of the world’s great novels. It was on the basis of Mr Biswas that the most influential anglophone Caribbean intellectual of the twentieth century, C L R James, in 1963, elevated Naipaul to be one of the great creators of the modern Caribbean, alongside Toussaint L’Ouverture, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon and Fidel Castro. Strange company indeed.
There is much to say about the novel, even if we discount the more formal politics. Here I shall take the opportunity to reflect on how Mr Biswas conceives the practice of writing, and how writing itself underwrites the narrative structure of the novel. More particularly, I’ll endeavour to think through how the novel conceives of Caribbean writing.
Bill Schwarz teaches in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London. Most recently he has published Memories of Empire. Volume I. The White Man’s World (OUP), and edited: with Cora Kaplan, James Baldwin. America and Beyond (Michigan UP); with Rachael Gilmour, End of Empire and the English Novel (Manchester UP); and with Susannah Radstone, Memory. Theories. Histories. Debates (Fordham UP). He is an editor of History Workshop Journal.
The 24th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf, co-sponsored by Loyola University Chicago and Northern Illinois University, will take place in Chicago, USA, 5 – 8 June 2014. “Virginia Woolf: Writing the World” aims to address such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars and the centenary of the First World War, and myriad other topics.
We invite proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, and workshops on any aspect of the conference theme from literary and interdisciplinary scholars, creative and performing artists, common readers, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and teachers of Woolf at all levels. (See website for more details.)
Deadline for proposals: 25 January 2014
For more information about the conference, including a detailed CFP and the keynote speakers, go to http://www.niu.edu/woolfwritingtheworld/.
Remediating the Avant-Garde: Magazines and Digital Archives
Princeton University
October 25-26, 2013
This interdisciplinary conference will explore the conceptual and practical ground where traditional area studies, art history, periodical studies, digital humanities, computer science, and library and information science converge. We are interested in how these fields inform each other and challenge us to think in new ways, both as builders of digital resources and as scholars and teachers of avant-garde periodicals.
Details about the conference & registration can be found on the conference website: http://bluemountain.princeton.edu/conference
Conference speakers:
Keynote: “Radical Remediation” Johanna Drucker (Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies, Department of Information Studies, UCLA)
Panel 1: Representing the Avant-Garde Magazine
Chair: Milan Hughston (Chief of Library and Museum Archives, MoMA)
Discussant: Nicholas Sawicki (Art History, Lehigh University)
1. Kurt Beals (German, Washington University in St. Louis)
“The Universal and the Particular in the Avant-Garde Archive”
2. Jonathan Baillehache (French, University of Georgia)
“What User Interface for the Digitization of the Avant-Garde? The Dematerialization of El Lissitzky”
3. Sophie Seita (Comparative Literature, Univ. of London/Columbia University)
“‘What is “291”?’ The Little Magazine as Fetish, and the Archival Pilgrimage of the Critic”
4. Max Koss (Art History, University of Chicago)
“Losing Touch: The Digital PAN”
Panel 2: Navigating Avant-Garde Collections, Systems and Networks
Chair: Sandra Ludig Brooke (Librarian, Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology)
Discussant: Andrew Goldstone (English, Rutgers University)
1. Hanno Biber (Institute for Corpus Linguistics and Text Technology, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
“The AAC-FACKEL, a Digital Edition of the Satirical Journal ‘Die Fackel'”
2. Gayle Rogers (English, University of Pittsburgh)
“The Spanish Morgue and the Emergence of International Modernism”
3. Thomas Crombez (Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp/University of Antwerp)
“Digitizing Artist Periodicals: New Methodologies from the Digital Humanities for Analyzing Artist Networks”
Panel 3: Analyzing and Teaching the Digital Archive
Chair: Brad Evans (English, Rutgers University)
Discussant: Adam McKible (English, John Jay College)
1. Semyon Khokhlov (English, University of Notre Dame)
“Modernism from a Distance: Data-Mining the Little Review”
2. Jeffrey Drouin (English, University of Tulsa)
“Digital Pedagogy: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Teaching Modernist Periodicals”
3. Suzanne Churchill (English, Davidson College)
“The Digital Database: A Sustainable Model of Student, Staff, and Faculty Collaboration”
*****
This conference is organized by the Blue Mountain Project at Princeton University, a freely available electronic repository of art, music, and literary periodicals that both chronicle and embody the emergence of cultural modernity in the West. We are currently digitizing 34 titles published in Europe and the United States between 1850-1923, in French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Danish.
This conference is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Call for Papers
20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation
ACLA Annual Conference March 20-23rd, 2014 at New York University
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” Muriel Rukeyser’s often-cited sentiment unfortunately resonates as strongly today as it did in 1968. In this seminar, we hope to split open and illuminate alternate modes of access to the worlds of capital in order to rethink its human, cultural and political investments in twentieth century women’s literature. While capitals elicit fantasies of a cosmopolitan ethos predicated upon inclusivity and community, we want to trouble this narrative’s simplicity by questioning why women writers of the twentieth century more often than not lacked the cultural purchase to navigate cosmopolitan capitals around the world. We ask how this exclusion was renegotiated and represented in disparate texts. Instead of engaging in debates that can only ever aspire to equality, we want to understand more clearly how exclusion constitutes capital, and, more importantly, how women writers renegotiate and capitalize upon this exclusion.
We hope this line of questioning will invite papers about underexplored women’s literature and underrepresented women writers so that we might also reflect upon the enterprise of recuperation. Can we recuperate previously lost, buried, and out of print texts by women writers of the twentieth century without assimilating differences into a literary history that privileges white, heteronormative patriarchy? How do conditions of literary production and material, social, and cultural contexts inform our understanding of these texts’ vitality? Ultimately, what are we capitalizing upon when we recuperate women writers?
To submit an abstract, please visit the conference website and choose “propose a paper” or click here. You will be prompted to choose a seminar title when you submit your abstract. Be sure to choose “20th Century Women’s Writing and the Capital(s) of Recuperation.”
Abstract Deadline: November 1, 2013
Feel free to email me (sarahcornish@gmail.com or sarah.cornish@unco.edu) or Peter Murray (pmurray24@fordham.edu) with any questions.
Reading Animals
An International English Studies Conference
School of English, University of Sheffield, UK
17–20 July, 2014
Abstract deadline: 19 December, 2013.
CFP below
We are delighted to announce that KMS Patron Dame Jacqueline Wilson will be coming to the Birthday Lecture this year! Don’t miss out on this very special day in the KMS calendar. Last few tickets still available!!
Birthday Lecture 2013
Professor David Bradshaw, University of Oxford, will present a talk entitled:
‘Katherine Mansfield and “the indiarubber faced, mobile lipped, un-shaven, uncombed, black, uncompromising, suspicious, powerful man of genius in Hampstead”, J.W.N. Sullivan’
The event will be chaired by Emeritus Professor C. K. Stead, ONZ, CBE
Date: Sunday 13 October 2013, 2pm
Venue: Keynes Library 43 Gordon Square London, WC1H 0PD
Tickets to include birthday cake, wine and a souvenir booklet of the lecture: £20 non-members/£15 members
For details of how to purchase tickets please go to our website:
http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/birthday-lecture-2013/
The Country House in Britain, 1914-2014
Newcastle University, Friday 6th – Sunday 8th June 2014
Conference Organisers: Faye Keegan and Barbara Williams
http://www.countryhouseconference.wordpress.com
Supported by the Newcastle University Gender Research Group
Keynote Speakers: Deborah Cartmell, Christine Geraghty, Ellie Jones and Alison Light
From Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001) to Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child (2011), the country house has had a strong presence in British culture of the past decade. This is the culmination of a century’s interest in the spaces and places of the country house, an interest that burgeoned following the break-up of the great estates around the First World War. In texts ranging from P. G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle Saga to Elizabeth Jane Howard’s Cazlet Chronicles, and in television series such as ITV ‘s Brideshead Revsited (1981) and Downton Abbey (2010), British culture continues to return to the country house setting in both popular and high culture. Since the rise of the British heritage film in the 1980s and the proliferation of Austen adaptations in the 1990s the country house has played an equally important role in British cinema and continues to gain currency as a national icon. This preoccupation with the country house is fuelled by institutions such as the National Trust and English Heritage, as well as through documentary programmes such as BBC1’s The Edwardian Country House (2002), Channel 4’s Country House Rescue (2008) and Julian Fellowes’s Great Houses on ITV (2013). Often overshadowed by the country house in other centuries such as the seventeenth-century country house poem or the nineteenth-century country house novel, studies of the twentieth and twenty-first century country house are scarce.
This three-day interdisciplinary conference will trace the representation of the country house in British literature and film between 1914 and 2014. The conference will explore how space, class and gender operate in the wealth of filmic and literary texts which have been concerned with the country house throughout the last century, as well as considering how it functions in documentaries, historical monographs and reality television. We invite 300-word abstracts (for 20-minute papers) on any topic relating to the country house; possible topics might include, but are by no means restricted to:
Historical Fictions
The Downton Effect
The Modernist Country House
The Country House Abroad
The Middlebrow and Prize Culture
Costumes and Design
Cycles of Pride and Prejudice
Adaptation
Murder in the Country House
Haunted Homes and the Gothic
The Wartime Country House
Period Drama
Servants and Servitude
Class and the National Trust
Toy Soldiers and the Dolls House
Romance Fiction
Abstracts should be submitted via email to countryhouseconf@ncl.ac.uk by 1 November 2013; successful applicants will be notified by 2014. Send any queries to the above email.
Call for papers: Europe
Keynote speaker: ‘Proust and Wagner on the Beach’, John Coyle (University of Glasgow)
The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be holding a one-day symposium entitled ‘Europe’ at the University of Glasgow on 19 October 2013. Proposals are invited from academics and post-graduates for 20-minute presentations addressing: the role and rise of modernism in Europe; the influence of European writers on modernism and modern Anglophone writers; the locations of modernism; and the international or transnational character of modernism, amongst other topics.
This one-day event will also include a general meeting of SNoMS to discuss and plan future events. (There will be a small charge to cover the costs of refreshments.)
Proposals for papers should be sent to Matthew Creasy via email (matthew.creasy@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 6 September 2013.
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