Category: Postgraduate

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.

27-28 June 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London.
CFP deadline: 10 March 2014.

The third annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. It aims to provide opportunities for those who frequently find themselves at the margins of their department or discipline to engage with other scholars who share theoretical approaches and interests.

Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration.

The conference is divided into thematic streams, each coordinated by different researchers and with separate calls for papers, included in this document. We welcome paper proposals that respond to the particular streams below. In addition, papers may be proposed as part of a general stream, i.e. with no specific stream in mind. Spanning a range of broad themes, these streams provide the impetus for new points of dialogue. Read the full call for papers here.

Aesthetic Refusals: Oppositional Citizenship and Public Culture
Conceptions and Practices of Critical Pedagogy
Critical Approaches to Care Relationships
(Dis)orders of Migration
Dissenting Methods: Engaging Legacies of the Past, Defining Critical Futures
‘entitled’
‘everyday political’
How Does One Think Difference?
Legal Critique: Positions, Negotiations and Strategies
Moving Through the Intersection? Interrogating Categories and Postintersectional Politics
Philosophy and Critical Thought Inside and Outside The University
Pragmatism and Critical Traditions
Sounding the Counterfactual: Hyperstition and Audial Futurities
Strategies of Silence
Street Level: Towards a Critical Discourse on Urban Aesthetics
Subjects in Space(s): Navigating Multiplicity
The Critical Brain
The Human After Anthropocentrism? Life. Matter. Being.
Time Discipline
What is the Question of Critique?

Please send paper/presentation proposals with the relevant stream indicated in the subject line to paper-subs@londoncritical.org. Submissions should be no more than 250 words and should be received by the 10th March 2014.

Participation is free (though registration will be required).

http://londoncritical.org

Inventing Urban Modernity: Building the Present by Constructing the Past

The modern city is the site of continual destruction and construction, disintegration and renewal, death and rebirth, an environment endlessly productive of new ‘presents’. But where in these transient moments might we locate the city’s past? Does it reside in the palimpsest of archaeological remains buried beneath our feet? In monumental form, as statues, memorials, graves? In representations of the city, cartographic or artistic? And how might we understand the modern city as growing out of and/or in relation to this past or ‘pasts’? Does the present reify and repeat the past? Does it reimagine and reinvent it? Or does it obscure and efface it? Featuring keynote addresses from Professor Patrick Wright (KCL), Professor Peter Mandler (Cambridge), and Dr Matthew Beaumont (UCL), this symposium seeks to open conversations between different disciplines within the humanities and across historical and geographical parameters. As well as traditional panels the day will culminate in a roundtable discussion between the keynote speakers and the audience, and is being held in association with the Centre for Modern Literature’s launch project ‘Inventing the Modern’.

The organisers invite proposals for either individual twenty-minute papers or alternative contributions. These may address, but are certainly not limited to, the following themes:

• Ruins and ruination

• Urban archaeology

• Afterlives

• Monuments, memorials and remembrance

• Reconstruction

• The colonial and/or postcolonial city; the centre and periphery

• Proto-modernisms, late modernisms, contemporary modernisms, postmodernisms

• Urban regeneration

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Jo Robinson (joanna.robinson@kcl.ac.uk) by Friday 14th March 2014.

Women Modernists and Spirituality: a Symposium – University of Stirling, 22-23 May 2014

Recent criticism in modernist studies indicates a growing interest in the relationship between spirituality (broadly understood to include religious structures and practices as well as less traditional engagements with the sacred) and modernist discourse. This symposium aims to bring modernism and spirituality together with research on women modernists, many of whom still call for greater critical attention. It will focus on women modernists and foreground gender in analysis of modernism and spirituality in order to highlight and problematise issues including the relationships between spirituality and embodiment, authority, domesticity, the public sphere and creative practice. From Edith Sitwell’s incarnational poetics to Mary Butts’s pagan landscapes; from Elizabeth Smart’s engagement with the King James Bible to Dorothy Richardson’s interest in Quakerism, the symposium seeks to address spirituality in all its guises in the work of modernist women. Papers are not limited to literary criticism; the symposium invites papers that consider a range of modernist fields, including art, film, music, philosophy, etc.

Papers are not limited to literary criticism; the symposium invites papers that consider a range of modernist fields, including art, film, music, philosophy, etc.
Abstracts of 250-350 words are invited for twenty minute papers on any aspect of the symposium’s theme. Papers may consider (but are not limited to) the following:

spirituality and embodiment
spirituality and feminism
spirituality and form
spirituality and the everyday
spirituality and material culture
religion, gender and authority
modernism and the occult
the feminine divine
religious conflict or dissent
modernist syncretism
spirituality and domesticity and/or the public sphere
modernism and sacred texts
mysticism
engagement with institutional religion
transnational modernism and spirituality
modernism and pilgrimage
spirituality and creativity
religious communities and networks
religious hermeneutics
minority (religious, racial, etc.) voices

Please send abstracts to Elizabeth Anderson (sarahelizabeth.anderson@stir.ac.uk) by 3 March 2014.

The Symposium is held in association with the Scottish Network for Modernist Studies (SNoMS); the Centre for Gender and Feminist Studies, University of Stirling; and the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Stirling.

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public
Friday 9 May 2014
Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth

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.