British Association for Modernist Studies - Website Designed and Developed by Callum LeithPlease 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)
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:
The deadline for submitting abstracts is 31 July 2015.
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 20th 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:
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 10th, 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
1. SHARP affiliate-organization panel
Secret Archives: Privacy, Control and Access
“Archive stories” about the difficulties to access certain collections, and what these stories tell us about power and control. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2015. Lise Jaillant (L.Jaillant@uea.ac.uk)
2. Joint panel, co-sponsored with the Faulkner Society
Faulkner in the Digital Age
Roundtable: New book history/ digital humanities projects on Faulkner; Use of digital resources to teach Faulkner’s work. 250-word abstracts by 15 March 2015. Lise Jaillant (L.Jaillant@uea.ac.uk) or Deborah Clarke (Deborah.Clarke@asu.edu)
The MLA convention will take place in Austin, Texas (7-10 January 2016).
I am seeking submissions for a prospective special peer-reviewed cluster on theModernism/Modernity print-plus platform exploring the question: “What is Sexual Modernity?” Does modernity have a sexuality? We might follow Rita Felski’s lead in The Gender of Modernity (1995) to ask what is at stake in, or what changes occur when we define the sexuality of modernity as queer, sapphic, heteronormative, perverse, or otherwise? How might these nominations intersect with or alter formations of the color of modernity, colonial modernity, atavistic modernity, or the gender of modernity?
Recent work has taken a different tact, boldly ascribing a particular sexual content to modernity. In The Sexuality of History (2014), for example, Susan S. Lanser “invert[s] the conventional wisdom that modernity consolidates a heteronormative order to argue that modernity can also be read as the emergence of the sapphic as an epistemic possibility.” Lanser understands the sapphic as a particularly charged site for theorizing the modern — its power relations, styles of governances, literary forms, and much else. Her work helps us to query whether the sexuality of modernity changes over time and as it travels across space. Her claim for a queer and specifically sapphic modernity cuts against claims like Afsaneh Najmabadi’s assertion that: “In the nineteenth century, homoeroticism and same-sex practice came to mark Iran as backward; heteronormalization of eros and sex became a precondition for ‘achieving modernity.’” This cluster asks if it is possible to reconcile these competing contentions. Are they part of what Fredric Jameson calls a singular modernity or do they instead form multiple and overlapping modernities? In what relation does this modernity or set of modernities stand to modernism in its plurality? Can helping define the sexuality of modernity enable us to have a clearer sense of terms (and the sexual personhoods which attach to such nominations) like queer modernism, sapphic modernism, and modernist sexuality?
Please submit abstracts of 500 words on these questions and questions of adjacent interest to Benjamin Kahan (bkahan@lsu.edu) by June 30th, 2015. These abstracts will be reviewed in anticipation of the submission of polemical 3000 word short essays due by December 15th, 2015.
What Ever Happened to the Working Class?
Rediscovering Class Consciousness in Contemporary Literature
An International Symposium at the Institute of English Studies, Senate House.
17 September 2015
Between Ed Miliband’s squeezed middle and tabloid diatribes against the underclass, the working class has seemingly disappeared from critical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Nevertheless issues of class, class consciousness, classlessness, and new configurations of class such as new affluent workers, the emergent service sector, and the precariat continue to form a rich source for novelists, poets and dramatists.
This interdisciplinary and international conference aims to bring together researchers and academics working in the fields of the literature and culture of the working class.

After the heyday of working-class literary studies in the 1950s to the 1980s with critics and theorists such as Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukàcs, and Raymond Williams helping to reconfigure the canon, working-class writing as a literary category seemed to slip from critical analysis. In its wake a series of critical paradigms around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postcolonialism, postmodernism, ecocriticism, and disability studies, important as they have been, have tended on the whole to shift class contexts from centre stage.
The rich period of working-class fiction, drama and poetry during the same period has perhaps been underplayed in the following decades. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top, Look Back in Anger, A Taste of Honey, and poetry by Tony Harrison, Tom Leonard and Barry Tebb now appear as works from a golden age in the exploration of working-class life. However, a significant number of writers continue to locate plots and characters in working-class contexts. In fiction, novelists such as Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Bernardine Evaristo, James Kelman, Andrea Levy, Courttia Newland, David Peace, Irvine Welsh, Zadie Smith, Alan Warner, Sarah Waters, Alex Wheatle, and Jeanette Winterson have continued to explore, construct and represent working-class life. Simon Armitage, Jackie Kaye, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Philip Levine and John Cooper Clarke have maintained the legacy of working-class poetry in differing ways, while dramatists like Caryl Churchill, David Eldridge and Roy Williams have developed approaches that develop the ‘kitchen-sink’ dramas of the 1950s and 60s.
One of the aims of the conference is to bring together those working to reintegrate and re- articulate class back into the fields of literary studies and cultural politics more broadly, with the aim of establishing a new set of critical approaches that foreground issues of class.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute individual papers, or 1-hour panels, from academics and researchers working primarily in the fields of twentieth- and twenty-first century literature and culture who have research interests in exploring issues of class. Papers may be on broad topics or on individual authors, and although the focus of the conference will be on contemporary literature and culture, we also welcome proposals that offer contemporary re- assessments of working-class literature from all periods.
Although many of the literary texts cited above have UK settings, we also welcome papers on the representation of working-class life from all parts of the world, and are indeed interested in the way in which class identities circulate internationally.
We are also open to the possibility of including a strand of creative practice into the conference, so would welcome 20-minute presentations/performances/films or displays from literary writers (fiction, poetry or drama), or film makers, photographers, visual artists, musicians or other creative practitioners.
Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length and emailed to n.bentley@keele.ac.uk by 28th April 2015.
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