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CFP Long Modernist Novel Conference 23-24 April 2014

The Long Modernist Novel: A Comparative Conference

http://dorothyrichardson.org/conferences/LMN.html

 Please note change of dates to 23-24 April 2014

Birkbeck College, London.

Confirmed speakers: Michael Bell (Warwick), Eveline Kilian (Humboldt), Laura Marcus (Oxford), Jeremy Tambling (Manchester).

Deadline for Abstracts 14 December 2013.

Call for Papers

One of the most remarkable events in the history of early twentieth-century literature was the almost simultaneous emergence in different national cultures of a new form: the long modernist novel. Characterised by a wholesale rejection of the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, the long modernist novel opened itself up to narrative experiments with impressionism, point of view, and alternative states of consciousness, from fugue, to dream, to the banality of the everyday. Both a response to and an intervention into the conflicting temporalities of early twentieth-century modernity, the long modernist novel sought to bring all the resources of earlier narrative forms to bear on the present, stretching the conventions of representation to their limits and beyond. Not excluding early precursors by Henry James or Romain Rolland, a non-exhaustive list would include:

Marcel Proust A la recherche du temps perdu (1913-1927)

James Joyce, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake (1914-1939)

Dorothy Richardson, Pilgrimage (1915-1938/1967)

Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)

Gertrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1911/1924)

Alexander Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

Robert Musil, Ein Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930-1943/1978)

John Dos Passos, USA (1930-1936)

Virginia Woolf, The Years (1937)

While all these novels have received individual attention and authors such as Proust and Joyce have attracted a wealth of criticism, very little work has been done on the long modernist novel as a form in itself. Equally, and perhaps understandably given the demands each text makes on the reader, comparative work has been limited. The purpose of this conference is to begin the critical work of defining the long modernist novel and to initiate comparative studies of the form. The organisers hope that this conference the volume of essays that will follow will stimulate new critical discussion of this unique literary form.

Comparative papers that address at least two long modernist novels are invited. Topics of discussion might include.

  • Structuring duration: the long modernist novel’s use and reconfiguration of a variety of pre-existing narrative forms – epic, Bildungs/Künstleroman, memoir, historical narratives; and its incorporation of new popular forms – genre fiction, headlines, advertising – to create a new kind of fiction.

  • The long modernist novel and the 1914-1918 war. Many long modernist novels (Mann, Proust, Richardson) were begun before the First World War and finished or published afterwards. The war appears sometimes directly (Proust), sometimes marginally (Mann), and sometimes implicitly (Musil), but it is almost always an acknowledged or unacknowledged point of reference.

  • The long modernist novel’s reconfigurations of narrative chronologies to represent brevity at length, and duration in abbreviated form (the day in the life, the life in the day), the uses of digression, flashback, epiphany, and mémoire involuntaire.

  • Works or work? Many long modernist novels are sub-divided, often appearing in instalments. Should the individual parts, e.g. Richardson’s ‘Chapter-Volumes’ such as Pointed Roofs or Proust’s De côté de chez Swann (or even Combray) be treated as individual works or parts of a larger whole? Should all Joyce’s prose fictions, from Dubliners to Finnegans Wake be treated as separate or as one work? How far does the long modernist novel rewrite the conventions of what a literary work is?

In addition to these topics, we would also welcome papers on cultural geography, gender, queer theory, the city, empire, popular culture, early twentieth-century new media technologies

Titles and short abstracts should be sent to Scott McCracken at s.mccracken@keele.ac.uk.

The Conference is organised by the Dorothy Richardson Society, www.dorothyrichardson.org with the with the support of the Northern Modernism Seminar and the British Association of Modernist Studies.

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Sons and Lovers: The Centenary Conference – 24 September 2013 , New York

Sons and Lovers: The Centenary Conference:

Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York

Tuesday, 24 September 2013

With keynote Speakers Sandra Gilbert and Colm Tóibín.

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MSA reminder: deadline for seminar registration – July 1st

MSA 15: Sussex
Everydayness and the Event
August 29-September 1, 2013

Conference website: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa15/
Register at: http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa15/registration.html

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CFPs Events

Beyond the Victorian and Modernist Divide

Call for papers
International Conference, organized by Anne Besnault-Levita and Anne-Florence Gillard Estrada

March, 27-28 2014, Rouen University

Université de Rouen – laboratoire ERIAC : http://eriac.net/beyond-the-victorian-and-modernist-divide/
Keynote speakersProfessor Michael Bentley, University of St. Andrews
Professor Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new!” or Virginia Woolf’s “on or about 1910” statement have long been used in order no support a version of modernism as a strictly aesthetic revolution — or crisis — implying an essential break with Victorian art, culture and ideology. In the last decade, however, the crucial transition between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been variously reassessed. In the wake of the new modernist studies and of the recent revaluations of the Victorian period, a growing body of scholarship now challenges traditional periodisation by examining the existence of overlaps and unexplored continuities between the Victorians, the post-Victorians and the modernists. Once separated by a critical and cultural break, Victorian and modernist scholars have become preoccupied with a similar search for cultural and aesthetic complexities that make it possible to move beyond doxic discourses and fixed dichotomies: the past and the present, outer life and inner life, materiality and spirituality, tradition and innovation, ideology and aesthetics.This international conference would like those scholars to join forces and contribute to this new phase in the Victorian-modern debate from a broad range of perspectives across the disciplines: literature, criticism, the visual arts, history, science and philosophy. The emergence or re-emergence of ideas such as the “modern”, the “new” or “change” at the turn of the century is an indisputable fact that we want to acknowledge and re-contextualize by examining the different meanings and practices they encompass. From there, we wish to explore the birth and perpetration of two critical meta-narratives and their interdependence: the myth of “high modernism” and the myth of “Victorianism”. If there is no clear repudiation of history and heritage on the modernists’ part, if “rupture” was a useful fiction, if the challenge to traditional aesthetics and ideology was already a Victorian preoccupation, then we definitely need to remap modernism and Victorianism simultaneously.The papers that we call for are meant to contribute to a trans-disciplinary publication whose synopsis could be the following, although it is far from being fixed.I- Periods, words, labels: historicizing and contextualizing the idea of the “break”

II- Victorian, Edwardian and modernist literature: unexplored lines of filiation

III- Art history, aesthetic philosophy and the visual arts across the Victorian/Modernist divide

IV- Science, philosophy, ideology: landmarks for a new history of ideas

V- New approaches to identity, gender and the self: from mid-Victorians to modernist ideologies and practices.

Scientific Committee

Pr Catherine Bernard, University Paris-Diderot — France, XXth-century literature and art

Dr. Anne Besnault-Levita, University of Rouen — France, British Modernism, genre and gender studies

Pr Michael Bentley, Université of St. Andrews — UK, XIXth-century and early XXth-century British politics

Pr Myriam Boussahba-Bravard, Université Paris Diderot — Paris 7, France, XIXth-century social and political history, women’s history and gender history

Pr. Laurent Bury, University of Lyon 2 – France, XIXth-century literature and visual arts, President of the Société Française d’Etudes Victoriennes et Edouardiennes (S.F.E.V.E.)

Pr Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto Canada — modernism, narratology, globalism/internationalism, and book history/print culture

Dr Stefano Evangelista, University of Oxford— UK, XIXth-century English literature, comparative literature, Aestheticism and Decadence, gender and visual culture

Pr Isabelle Gadoin, University of Poitiers — France, XIXth-century literature, art history and visual arts

Pr Elena Gualtieri, University of Groningen — Netherlands, modern English literature and culture, visual arts

Dr Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada, University of Rouen — France, XIXth-century English literature, art criticism and visual arts, Aestheticism and Decadence

Pr Catherine Lanone, University of Paris 3 — France, XIXth-century and literature

Pr Laura Marcus, New College, Oxford — UK, XIXth- and XXth-century literature and culture

Pr Christine Reynier, University of Montpellier — France, modernist literature, XXth-century literature

Dr Philippe Vervaecke, University of Lille 3 – France, XIXth- and XXth-century social and political history

The proposals (300 to 500 words with a short biographical notice) should be sent to both Anne Besnault-Levita (annelev@club-internet.fr) and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada (af.gillardestrada@orange.fr) by September 15th 2013. Notification of acceptance: October 15th, 2013.

See the selected bibliography as well as the forthcoming information on the conference website: http://eriac.net/beyond-the-victorian-and-modernist-divide/

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Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda – 28 August 2013, Institute of English Studies

Anti-Communism: Culture, Literature, Propaganda

28 August 2013

Institute of English Studies, Senate House, University of London

Organisers: Dr Benjamin Kohlmann (Columbia University/Freiburg University) and Dr Matthew Taunton (University of East Anglia)

‘[A]t no time since 1917 has anti-communism failed to occupy a major, even a central, place in the politics and policies of the capitalist world.’ – Ralph Miliband & Marcel Liebman

‘Perhaps the truth is that real leftism today can only be anti-Communist.’ – Arthur Koestler

‘Anti-anticommunism — the wish to avoid giving aid and comfort to cold warriors before 1989, and End-of-History triumphalists since — has crippled political thinking in the Labor and Social Democratic movements for decades; in some circles it still does.’ – Tony Judt

Some two decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, this symposium will explore the complex literary and cultural legacies of one of the twentieth century’s most influential and under-theorised political philosophies. Anti-communism had a shaping influence on the development of twentieth-century Western liberalism and social democracy as well as providing intellectual justifications for McCarthyism and the jingoism of the Cold War Right. It was a key element of Nazism, but also of twentieth-century anarchism. Its relation to literary and artistic culture was equally complicated.

Rather than suggesting that there was a unified anti-communist aesthetic, the speakers at this symposium will examine the historical and formal specificity of anti-communist modes of writing, ranging from avant-garde to realist-documentary forms, and from the defiantly heterodox experiments by avant-gardists in the 1920s and 1930s to the condemnation of modernist writing as ‘proto-communist’ by American conservatives after 1945.

The symposium brings together an exciting group of scholars in order to explore a widespread public debate that took place among writers and intellectuals across the political spectrum and in a variety of media. The diversity of literary anti-communism is reflected in the range of writers considered at this symposium, from critical fellow travellers and chastened 1930s radicals to exiles, émigrés, and Cold War Conservatives. Writers to be discussed will include Emma Goldman, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Edward Upward, Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur Koestler, Doris Lessing, and Hannah Arendt. The speakers will illustrate the pervasiveness of anti-communist attitudes from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, taking into account critical arguments about anti-communism that were conducted in literary and political journals (including Partisan Review, Encounter, and others) and in the media, as well as the more extreme and more visible instances of anti-communist polemic and propaganda.

Confirmed speakers include: Prof. Tyrus Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz), Prof. David Ayers (Kent), Prof. Adam Piette (Sheffield), Dr. Marina MacKay (Durham), Dr. Nick Hubble (Brunel), Dr. Petra Rau (UEA), Dr. Ben Harker (Salford), Dr. Thomas Karshan (UEA), Dr. Benjamin Kohlmann (Freiburg / Columbia), Dr. Matthew Taunton (UEA), and Dr Debra Rae Cohen (University of South Carolina)

This symposium is supported by the Leverhulme Trust and the University of East Anglia.

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Registration

£35 Standard

£20 Students/Concessions/IES Members

Registration: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-events/conferences/AntiCommunism

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

Katherine Mansfield and France – 19–21 June 2014, Paris

Katherine Mansfield and France

International conference organised by the Université Paris III—Sorbonne Nouvelle in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

19–21 June 2014

Guest speakers will include C. K. Stead and Gerri Kimber

2014 seems the ideal year to celebrate Katherine Mansfield’s lifelong attachment to France, and her passionate involvement with all things French: not just the language, literature and the arts, but the everyday world too, from recipes and customs to the contemporary socio-political context, transport, economics and of course the devastating impact of the war. France for Mansfield was a land of transit, a haven to escape to and a place of exile; it was an adopted home and a sad reminder of how far away those she loved were; life the other side of the Channel was sometimes a source of wonder and inspiration, at others the trigger for comic irony and bitter satire.

Mansfield’s biographers have minutely charted out her constant channel crossings in the years 1914–1923. Her letters, notebooks and stories all point to the different repercussions of France and French culture on her vivid imagination. Recent critical studies have explored both the story of Mansfield’s reception in France and the various influences French arts had on her own creative output. But the time now seems ripe to bring together scholars, researchers and students to try and piece together an overall picture of Mansfield in France and ‘une Mansfield française’.

Suggested topics for papers might include:

v Mansfield and French arts and literature: her reception in France; Mansfield as reader, critic and reviewer of French arts in Great Britain; her influence on contemporary and later French authors; translations and the publication history of her works in French.

v The French influence on Mansfield: French language and culture in her education and apprenticeship years; France as a setting for her stories; French life recorded in the journals in early story sketches; her readings of key French authors and their influence on her works; French aestheticism, fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century philosophy.

v Mansfield and French life and society: as journalist and eye-witness of war-torn France; a satirist of local habits and customs; a bemused observer of expatriate and émigré life; Paris and the French Riviera as the specific locations that have become so much associated with her work, but also French geographies of displacement, both real and affective.

v Mansfield, the polyglot, cultural ambassador and cosmopolitan: France as a step outside Englishness; forms of cultural otherness, alienation and renewal through the meeting and mixing of identities; language as empowerment and disempowerment; nationalism versus the political repercussions of border crossing; bilingualism; redefining the self as other; Mansfield the European.

v Mansfield and Frenchness as a means of thinking between: cross-dressing, role-play, borrowed identities, impersonation; travesty, but also Frenchness itself seen from within and without, from the privileged outsider’s point of view, the ‘devenir français’ from Mansfield’s perspective.

v Biographical, linguistic, literary, sociological, political comparative . . . all approaches are welcome in this endeavour to embrace Katherine Mansfield’s French life.

Our exploration of the various French avenues in her life, works and afterlife will take place in the heart of Paris, and time out will be programmed into the conference to enable all those who attend to obtain a very literal sense of place and setting. Possible Mansfield-inspired walks within Paris itself and additional excursions to the immediate environs will be suggested later.

The three-day conference will also include an alternative, intercultural approach to Mansfield’s French life in the form of a cello recital given by London-based cellist Joseph Spooner and New Zealand pianist Kathryn Mosley with a programme of early twentieth-century French music and works by Arnold Trowell.

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference organisers : kminparis@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: December 31st 2013

Organisers:

Claire Davison, Caroline Pollentier, Anne Mounic, Anne Besnault-Levita

Paris 2014 Call for Papers 1

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CFPs Events

The Mediated City, April / October 2014

THE MEDIATED CITY

– two multidisciplinary conferences examining “the city”…… a virtual, filmic, social, political and physical construct.

CONFERENCE 1.
Place: London
Dates: 01-03 April 2014
Host: Ravensbourne (University)

CONFERENCE 2.
Place: Los Angeles
Dates: October 2014 (TBC)
Host: Woodbury University

Outline:

The nature of the city is a contested concept. For architects it is generally a question of bricks and mortar – a physical entity. For human geographers it is a place of human interaction and engagement. For filmmakers it is a site for action and futuristic nightmare. For animators and computer programmers it becomes a virtual world – a second life, a SIMulated city. For sociologists, it is a defining aspect of cultural identity. For political activists and theorists, it is a place to ‘occupy’ and the site of the polis.

THE MEDIATED CITY conference offers a platform for multiple and diverse examinations of the city. It aims to bring people together from diverse backgrounds and fragment, multiply and reconfigure our readings of the city; to offer multiple and conflicting discipline perspectives. The intention is to share views of the city as physical entity, online community, film set, photographic backdrop, geographical map, sociological case study, political metaphor, digital or video game etc…. – to examine it as a mediated and shared phenomenon.

Key dates – Conference 1 – London

15 September 2013. Deadline for abstracts / initial proposals

15 January 2014. Deadline for full papers / detailed proposals

01 April 2014. Conference –1

For full details visit: http://architecturemps.com

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word, 1800-1945 – University of Warwick, Saturday 8th March 2014

Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word, 1800-1945

Saturday 8th March 2014, University of Warwick

Keynote speakers:

Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton)

Dr Margaret Beetham (University of Salford)

CALL FOR PAPERS

This one day interdisciplinary conference will explore the place of food, drink and acts of consumption within the textual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years 1800-1945 are marked by food adulteration scandals, the growth of the temperance movement, and significant reforms in the regulation and legislation of food standards, as well as the influence of the colonies on British cuisine and a relationship with food and drink made increasingly complex by wartime paucity and rationing. These changes are both precipitated and responded to in a vast array of textual forms, including periodicals, the press, recipe books, household management manuals, propaganda, literature and poetry. This conference will therefore engage with the intersections of food/drink cultures and the written word.

We are seeking papers which explore how food and drink were written, experienced and imagined during the period: as a commodity, a luxury item, a source of poison or nutrition, in its abundance or in short supply. We hope to attract all researchers who have an interest in the culinary cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those working in the histories of medicine, art and food, as well as anthropologists, historians of the nineteenth century and war years, and those working in literary studies. By bringing together scholars from many disciplines, we hope to provide a space in which to open up dialogue about nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives of eating, drinking, consuming, and their worth, and to provide a timely examination of our relationship with food and drink at a moment when economic and ecological pressures herald a re-appropriation of the values of wartime thrift and Victorian domestic economy.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

•Representations of food and drink in specific texts and their wider implications.
•Cultures of eating, drinking and cooking.
•Social histories of food and drink.
•The uses of food and drink in the articulation (or challenging) of community, nation or empire.
•Food or drink as metaphor/trope/structural device.
•The relationship(s) between reading and eating or drinking.
•The role of food and drink in cultural constructions of domestic space.
•Perspectives from ‘fat studies’/‘fat feminism’.
•Gendered practices of food and drink consumption.
•Food and drink in medical/psychiatric discourse: alcoholism, eating disorders, compulsive behaviour.
•The cultural legacies and/or persistence of Victorian and early twentieth century cultural imaging of food and drink.
•Recipe books, household management manuals and aspirational food.
•The narrating of gluttony or hunger.
•Textual representations of farms, breweries, pubs and restaurants.

Applicants should note that papers may also be considered for inclusion in a possible publication resulting from the conference.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words, should be sent to devouring2014@gmail.com by 31st October 2013.

This conference is being organised by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros (University of Warwick).

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/food/

http://devouring2014.blogspot.co.uk/

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Events Postgraduate

Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar: Modernism and Dance, Wednesday 26 June

Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar: Modernism and Dance

Wednesday 26 June, 6 pm, 11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RF (room F1)

Susan Jones (University of Oxford), ‘The British Reception of Les Noces’

Kathryn Anderson (University of East Anglia), ‘”Dance of the Book”: Ballet, Text, and the Reader-Spectator’

Full details at: http://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

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CFPs Events

Rebecca West: Celebrity, Publicity, Memory – New York University (September 21-22, 2013)

Rebecca West: Celebrity, Publicity, Memory

New York University, September 21-22, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Faye Hammill

Centering on the contested and still-evolving reputation of Rebecca West, this conference explores the processes by which a celebrity writer passes into cultural memory. How have scholars selectively created their own Rebecca Wests? How do recent cultural representations reinforce or contest her reputation? How did West’s peers create or contribute to the memory of West? How did West’s manipulation of her own image affect the way she is remembered? How does the history of West’s celebrity—the shaping and misshaping of her image—compare to that of other writers and artists of her period? Are women writers, and West, remembered primarily in a gender context? How can we understand West in light of recent theorizing of modernist celebrity by critics such as Aaron Jaffe and Faye Hammill? And what does West’s work contribute to conceptualizing larger aspects of personal and cultural memory?

These questions, and others, can productively frame discussions of West’s fictional and non-fictional work. We also welcome abstracts on other topics related to West’s voluminous oeuvre.

Please send abstracts of up to 200 words by June 15, 2013, to Ann Norton at anorton@anselm.edu