Category: Postgraduate

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Events Postgraduate

Event: Science and Poetry in in the 1920s and 1930s – 14 November, Oxford

This month at the University of Oxford’s Literature and Science Seminar, Dr Michael Whitworth (Merton College, University of Oxford) will be giving a talk entitled “Science and Poetry in the 1920s and 1930s”. The talk is free and open to all.

Friday 14th November, 2pm-3.30pm, Seminar Room B, Faculty of English, St Cross Building, University of Oxford

For more information about this seminar series and other literature and science talks taking place at Oxford, please visit http://litsciox.wordpress.com/events/

 

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP Rural Modernity Volume

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 500 word 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 literature, 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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Events Postgraduate

Culinary Modernism: A Roundtable Seminar in Oxford on 12 November

The Oxford 20th and 21st Century Graduate Works-in-Progress Seminar presents:

Culinary Modernism: A Roundtable Seminar
Dr Richard Brown (Leeds)

Wednesday 12 November (Week 5) at 6pm
Seminar Room B, Oxford English Faculty

Dr Richard Brown of Leeds University will lead a roundtable seminar in conversation with Nanette O’Brien on culinary modernism in Joyce, Stein and Mansfield. The reading for discussion is ‘The Kitchen Muse: The Modernist Cookbook and Its Sequels’ which is chapter 5 of Sandra Gilbert’s new book, The Culinary Imagination: From Myth to Modernity. This event is free of charge. Wine and soft drinks will be provided.

There are a limited number of places available for an organized dinner after the seminar at Jamie’s Italian with a set menu for £18 pp. If you are interested in joining us for dinner afterwards please email Nanette O’Brien at nanette.obrien@wolfson.ox.ac.uk by Monday 10 November at 5pm.

Conveners: Jennifer Cole [jennifer.cole@merton.ox.ac.uk], Benedict Morrison [benedict.morrison@merton.ox.ac.uk], Nanette O’Brien [nanette.obrien@wolfson.ox.ac.uk] and Natalie Ferris [natalie.ferris@queens.ox.ac.uk]

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Events Postgraduate

Announcement: BAMS OGM, 6 December 2014

The next BAMS OGM will be held on the 6th December at Cardiff Metropolitan University, coinciding with the New Work in Modernist Studies Graduate conference. The OGM will consider a revised constitution for BAMS (attached: please compare this revised version with changes highlighted to the constitution published on our web-site). If BAMS members have any comments on the revised constitution or issues they would like on the agenda at the OGM please contact the Secretary (Alex Goody, agoody@brookes.ac.uk).

BAMS Constitution rev.2014-2

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: ‘The Humble in 19th, 20th and 21st-Centuries British Literature and Arts’ – Montpellier

Call for papers

An EMMA conference to be held at

Montpellier 3 University on March 27-28, 2015.

 

 

The Humble in 19th, 20th and 21st-Centuries British Literature and Arts

 

This conference will both expand and renew our work on Ethics of Alterity in 19th, 20th and 21st-Century British Literature and Arts. The relation to the other will be envisaged as a “way of being other” through the category of the humble. Through the double meaning of its etymology, humbleness refers to a social condition and/or a way of being. It can be defined as “being low in rank or station” or as “being aware of one’s own limitations or weaknesses”, i.e., as an awareness of one’s ability to fail.

This conference will be an opportunity to explore the humble as a theme in 19th, 20th and 21st Century British Literature and Arts and as an aesthetic or ethical category. From a neo-Platonist ethics (as defended by Levinas), we shall thus turn to a neo-Aristotelian one (as defended by Nussbaum or Ricoeur, among others), which also implies a form of practice. We propose to address how British literature and art connect with the ideals defended in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries by philosophers, economists, politicians and jurists—from John Stuart Mill’s concept of happiness to the Welfare State and the ethics of care—and we will examine how aesthetics connect with ethics as well as with politics.

The humble may be understood as:

  • A form of economic, psychological, religious or aesthetic destitution, poverty, precariousness, dispossession, humility, vulnerability, etc.
  • A “form-of-life” (Agamben), a utopia or any other form of reaction to a social status quo.
  • A new paradigm for the human, at a time when the sovereignty of the subject has been defeated and the subject has become autonomous, as well as a paradigm for the living.

The humble may be regarded as disenabling or enabling, disempowering or empowering (Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster).

Food for thought:

-how the humble or a humble voice interacts with a text, how a poetics of the humble may be created,

-how the humble literary genres and arts of the Victorian, Edwardian, Modernist, post-modern or contemporary periods relate to the canonical literary genres or arts,

-how the humble is represented (phenomenal realism, modernist aesthetics, post-humanism, etc.) and what genres or modes the humble privileges,

-the various forms of humble arts, from printmaking to Kitsch or some forms of land art, etc.

The list is not restrictive.

Proposals bearing on the humble as a theme in 19th, 20th and 21st-Century British Literature and Arts and signalling to a poetics of the humble or the epistemological, ethical or political significance of the humble will be considered..

 

Proposals in English of about 300 words should be sent to Isabelle Brasme (isabellebrasme@gmail.com), Jean-Michel Ganteau (jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr) and Christine Reynier (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr) by December 15, 2014.

Selected papers will be published in Horizons Anglophones/Present Perfect at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.

http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/present-perfect.html

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: “Impression(s): 1880-1920” Dijon, France

 

Call for papers

“Impression(s): 1880-1920”

16th October 2015

University of Burgundy (Dijon, France)

 

 

 

On the occasion of the symposium “Impression(s): 1880-1920” organised by the Image-Texte-Langage research centre (EA 4182) at the University of Burgundy on 16th October 2015, we wish to invite contributions that explore the relationship between art criticism, literary impressionism and printmaking from the late 19th century to the immediate postwar period in Britain.

We invite researchers, librarians, curators and collectors to examine the writings and artwork of art critics and writers who were also professional or amateur printmakers, namely in the fields of lithography, wood-engraving, woodcut, and etching. The symposium aims to discuss intermedial practices, the mutual influence of artistic practice and textual production, as well as the dual meaning of impression as a mode of reception and of expression. Papers should examine impression both as theme and trope in literary texts and art criticism in connection with the material characteristics of media in which writers/artists chose to express themselves. They can also address how the shift from late Victorian aesthetics to modernist experimentation was negotiated in this field.

The time period considered here is framed by the creation of the Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880 and that of the Society of Wood-Engravers in 1920. It spans four decades which saw the advent of photomechanical process and the revival of printmaking as an “original” mode of expression based on the premium granted to individual impression as autographic response and to the trope of the print as imprint on a medium and/or on the mind.

Within this time frame, papers can focus on individual careers—like those of Edward Gordon Craig, Joseph Pennell, Campbell Dodgson, or young Moderns such as C. R. W. Nevinson and Paul Nash. They may also explore trends, groups and societies—from the Vale Group to The Bloomsbury Group, from Arts & Crafts and Aestheticism to modern design.

In parallel with literary texts and art criticism, a variety of publications and related aspects can be examined: lectures given and handbooks produced in art schools and technical schools (such as the Slade, the Central School of Arts & Crafts, and the Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts); reviews published in small magazines such as The Dial or reviews such as The Studio; exhibition and print room catalogues; manifestoes and statements issued by private presses or societies such as the Senefelder Club.

 

 

Deadline: please send your proposals (500 words along with a short bio-bibliography) to Sophie Aymes and Bénédicte Coste by the end of December 2014. Note that all papers should be in English. A selection of peer-reviewed articles will be published.

Confirmation: February 2015.

 

Sophie Aymes (Université de Bourgogne): sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr

Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne): benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr

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Events Postgraduate

Rachel Cusk, Will Self 19 Nov; 2015 Creative Responses to Modernism

The King’s College London Centre for Modern Literature and Culture is pleased to announce that our 2015 Competition for Creative Responses to Modernism is now open.  This year the competition is open to postgraduate students from throughout the UK.  You are invited to submit texts (up to 2000 words), images, films (up to 15 minutes), digital artefacts, musical compositions (up to 12 minutes for up to two instruments or for electronics*).

Please do come along to our launch event for the 2015 competition:

Inventing the Modern Novel

Wed 19 November, 6.30-7.45pm, Edmund J Safra Lecture Theatre

Rachel Cusk and Will Self in conversation with Lisa Appignanesi

Acclaimed novelists Rachel Cusk and Will Self will explore the influence of modernist literature on their own work and interrogate what it might mean to be influenced by modernism.  Is modernism more a period of early-twentieth century art or a set of styles?  If the modernist novel still exists today, is it necessarily formally avant-garde? Does it continue Virginia Woolf’s task of tracing ‘the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’? Does it employ what TS Eliot termed ‘the mythical method’, as ‘a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’?

This discussion is free and will be followed by a drinks reception.  It is open to the wider public but 150 seats have been set aside for students eligible to enter our Creative Responses to Modernism competition.

To book please visit

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/eventrecords/2014-2015/CMLC/modnov.aspx

The Competition

In the early decades of the twentieth century writers, visual artists, filmmakers and musicians across the world competed to follow Ezra Pound’s injunction to ‘make it new’.  Whether artists were willing or resisting change – hurling themselves into the (often technological) future or hankering elegiacally after lost forms and ways of life – the first fifty years of the twentieth century saw an explosion of artistic production in all the arts.  Shaken up by two world wars, stirred by the invention of cinema, artists questioned what art was and could be and asserted its value in a fragmented yet increasingly interconnected world.

Postgraduate students are invited to submit their own creative responses to this moment of artistic explosion in whatever art form seems most appropriate. This might be a homage, pastiche or parody or could be a much freer (and less historical) engagement with modernism.  You might see yourself as continuing, challenging or simply evoking the modernist project. The judges are looking for originality and hope to be made both to think and feel. Entries should be accompanied by a paragraph (up to 150 words) explaining the work of art and its relation to modernism.

The prize is open to postgraduate students from across Britain and will be judged by our Advisory Board (Lisa Appignanesi, Michael Berkeley, AS Byatt, Alison Duthie, Juliet Gardiner, Jeremy Harding, Michael Holroyd, Stephen Romer, Fiona Shaw).

The deadline for the prize is Monday 30 March 2015. Entries should be submitted to modern@kcl.ac.uk(or posted to Dr Lara Feigel, English department, King’s College London, Virginia Woolf Building, 22 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NR).

The three shortlisted entries will be published in the journal Textual Practice and on our website.  If a musical composition is shortlisted it will receive a concert performance before the prize-giving ceremony which will also be recorded and published on our website.  The winner will receive a year’s membership to the Tate (or the equivalent museum in the recipient’s home city) and all the shortlisted contestants will meet the Advisory Board at a dinner following the prize-giving ceremony in June 2015.

To see details of the 2014 winning entries and for more details about the prize seehttp://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/cmlc/Competition.aspx

The Centre for Modern Literature and Culture was founded in September 2013 and is currently engaged in a project called ‘Inventing the Modern’. We aim to provide a hub for investigating modernist culture in London, initiating conversation and collaboration between researchers and creative artists. For us modernism can be seen as reaching back into the nineteenth century and forward into the twenty-first, embracing all art forms and nationalities and often mingling popular culture and high art. Our mission is to bring together academics, writers and artists to explore, interrogate, dismantle and reinvent the notion of the ‘modern’.  For more details about the Centre see http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/cmlc/aboutus.aspx . To join our mailing list please email modern@kcl.ac.uk with the heading ‘join mailing list’.

* Music scores, which may be accompanied by a recording (in WAV or mp3 format), should be either posted as hardcopies or send electronically in PDF.  Musical compositions for electronic medium should be submitted in WAV format only.  Any works that include extensive improvisatory or aleatoric elements should be accompanied  by a recording of a performance.

Best wishes,

Lara Feigel

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: Making It New: Victorian and Modernist Literature and Periodicals, 1875-1935

Making It New: Victorian and Modernist Literature and Periodicals, 1875-1935

A one-day conference, De Montfort University, UK, 28 February 2015

When Thomas Hardy lamented to Virginia Woolf in 1926 that modernist authors had ‘changed everything now’ he reinforced the idea that modernism had wrought a cataclysmic division between itself and its Victorian predecessors. Woolf had specified December 1910 as the point when literature abandoned omniscience for the realism of interiority and the historical consequence has been a linear model where Victorian and modernist literatures are placed consecutively; as generally discrete entities. But Victorian literature was similarly inventive and experimental: the proto-modernism of Emily Brontë, the realism of George Eliot, the Zola-inspired Naturalists including George Moore who segued into Symbolism. Nor was Modernist literature always forward-looking: at the time G. K. Chesterton questioned the ‘originality’ of Futurism and John Middleton Murry argued that modernism was less about textual revolution and more about one’s ability ‘to train hard on a page of Ulysses every day;’ subsequently Tony Pinkney notes D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Victorian realism’ and James Eli Adams recognises a ‘host of continuities between Victorian and modernist literature’.

This conference aims to suture the ‘divide’ between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ literature, to explore the ways in which they dovetailed and overlapped, shared ideals and textual practice. We seek papers exploring novels, poetry, periodicals, little modernist magazines and other textual ephemera. Papers might include, but are not limited to:

• the reconsideration/ reconfiguration of the terms ‘Victorian’ and ‘modernist’
• Victorian prose, poetry, and plays which develop and anticipate some of the key components of ‘modernist’ writing
• modernist texts that deliberately reuse and capitalise on themes and forms developed during the Victorian period
• the manifestation of Victorian sub-genres (e.g. Realism, Naturalism, the Sensation Novel) in a modernist context
• the ways in which modernist periodicals bear the hallmarks of Victorian periodicals and Victorian periodicals anticipate modernism
• authors whose output spans both periods e.g. Thomas Hardy, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells

The organisers hope to begin a conversation in this conference that will result in the publication of a collection of essays. To this end, we have been in discussion with Ashgate and delegates may want to consider their conference paper proposal as the beginning of a longer work for publication.

Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted by 5 January 2015 to:

Louise Kane, louise.kane@dmu.ac.uk
Deborah Mutch, dmutch@dmu.ac.uk

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Modernist Magazines Research Seminar – Tuesday 4 November

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will take place on Tuesday 4 November at 6pm, in room G37 (ground floor) of Senate House, London. Catherine Clay, author of British Women Writers 1914-1945 (2006), will be speaking on ‘Time and Tide, Feminist Periodical Networks, and Cultures of the New’. Please see below for an abstract and speaker biography. The seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism. For more information, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com or visit http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/387/Modernist+Magazines+Research+Seminar With best wishes, Charles Dawkins (University of Oxford) Aimee Gasston (Birkbeck, University of London) Chris Mourant (King’s College London) Natasha Periyan (Royal Holloway, University of London) ‘Time and Tide, Feminist Periodical Networks, and Cultures of the New’ In a discussion of the ‘Anglo-American feminist press and “emerging modernities”’ Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo warn of the ‘problems and pitfalls of modernism as a critical paradigm, as modernist studies expands into the field of print culture.’ (In Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, p. 49) Literary and cultural approaches privileged in modernist studies provide a limited lens, they argue, for comprehending the ‘new’ in forms of print media that had other social and political priorities, and feminist periodicals show us that ‘it is crucial to look for and understand emerging modernities […] from a broader and more flexible perspective and critical context.’ (52) This seminar will consider the implications of these arguments for ‘modernist magazines research’ with reference to the modern, but not modernist, magazine Time and Tide. Locating this magazine within an overlapping set of feminist periodical networks, the seminar aims to address questions of the modern, modernity and the ‘new’ beyond the parameters of literary modernism, and to recover a neglected history of women’s modern print media. Author bio: Catherine Clay is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of British Women Writers 1914-1945 (2006) and is currently completing a monograph on the feminist periodical Time and Tide. Supporting material: Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo, ‘Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging “Modernities”’, in Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (eds.) Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basgingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 48-65. Catherine Clay ‘“WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT – If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent Foods”: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the “Battle of the Brows”’, Modernist Cultures 6:1 (2011), pp. 60-95. Please note: consulting this material is not an absolutely prerequisite for attending the seminar. However, all supporting material will be sent to those on the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar mailing list. To sign up to our mailing list, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com

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Events Postgraduate

Literature and Material Culture seminar series, Oxford

In Michaelmas Term 2014 the English Faculty at the University of Oxford (click here for a map) will be hosting a cross-period, interdisciplinary seminar series on literature and material culture. The seminars will take place on alternate Tuesday evenings at 5.15pm in the Faculty’s History of the Book Room throughout the autumn term. Drinks and discussion will follow each seminar.

Please see the attached poster and literaturematerial.wordpress.com for more information, or contact Claire Johnstone and Hannah Ryley at literaturematerial@gmail.com

Across the term, established academics (including Dr Adam Smyth, Dr Paula Byrne, and Dr Vike Plock) and graduate and visiting speakers will explore three main threads: material texts, clothing in literature, and object-oriented literary biography. We hope to see you there!

Tues 21 Oct (Week 2) Dr Adam Smyth (University of Oxford)

– Fallen books in early modern England: or, what can we do with errors in print?

Tues 4 Nov (Week 4) Dr Paula Byrne (University of Oxford)

– The Life of Small Things: researching and writing an object-based biography of Jane Austen

Tues 18 Nov (Week 6) Dr Vike Plock (University of Exeter)

– Edith Wharton, fashion, and the fictions of modernity

Tues 2 Dec (Week 8) Graduate & Visiting Speakers:

Beatrice Montedoro (University of Oxford)

– Reading early modern drama: the ‘material trace’ left in commonplace books

Dr Kate Macdonald (Sassoon Visiting Research Fellow)

– The missing bodies of the First World War

All at 5.15pm in the History of the Book Room,

English Faculty, University of Oxford