Category: Seminars

Colloquium:

Mapping the Olfactory: Modernist Representation of Body and the Sensory Aesthetics

10 March 2016, 14:30~17:30 Room 243, Senate House, University of London

“Where two or three thousand words are insufficient for what we see . . . there are no more than two words and one-half for what we smell.” Virginia Woolf, Flush
Words have such disadvantage in the representation of smell. However, scents, which are ephemeral and always slip away from the present time, are the loci of modernist imagination. What is the significance of smell in the modernist aesthetics? How does smell contribute to modernist representation of body? The latest issues in the argument of modernist sensory aesthetics will be explored by the following speakers:

Fay (Fae) Brauer

Professor of Art and Visual Culture,
University of East London Centre for Cultural Studies Research;
Honorary Professor of Art History and Cultural Theory,
The University of New South Wales National Institute of Experimental Arts.

“Unleashing Hypersensory Subjectivity: Modernists, Mesmerists and Hypnotic Bodies”

Crispian Neill

PhD Candidate, University of Leeds.

(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/profile/20043/1116/crispian_neill).
“The smell of modernism: malodour, olfactory activism and futurity”

Yuko Ito

Visiting Research Fellow,
Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, Associate Professor, Chubu University, Japan.

“Virginia Woolf and the Olfactory: Body, Scent and the Representation of Space”

To register, please send a brief email to IESEvents@sas.ac.uk.

We are very pleased to welcome Robin Veder (Penn State Harrisburg) to speak at the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar.

‘Embodied Elitism, Energy Regulation, and the American Audience for Modernism’

Wednesday 2 March, 6 pm, Senate House, London, Room 261

Early twentieth-century American modernists – artists, art critics, art models, and art historians – reified the American taste for modernism in an embodied elitism. Key figures in the American avant-garde repeatedly formulated modernist aesthetic experience in terms of somatic self-consciousness, specifically kinesthesia, the sense of movement. By learning to regulate postural alignment and breath, they cultivated and controlled kinesthetic responsiveness, a practice that perfectly complemented the ‘introspective’ protocol of experimental physiological psychology, which American university laboratories were conducting and dispersing to the art community via theoretical and pedagogical texts. Veder contends that in both the body cultures of modernity and the physiological aesthetics of modernism, the concept of ‘poise’ figured as a discourse of energy regulation. Building upon Bourdieu, Veder shows that in this context, the hexis of poise accompanied the habitus of physiological aesthetics, both contributing to a new kinesthetic category of elite identity formation.

Robin Veder is Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the College of William in Mary, and she has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism, Harvard’s Garden and Landscape Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks, and in spring 2016, the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University. She is author of several articles on transatlantic art history, visual culture, history of the body, and landscape studies of the long nineteenth century, appearing in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, American Art, Visual Resources, Journal of Victorian Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and International Journal of the History of Sport. Veder’s book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy, was published by the Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England’s Visual Culture Series in 2015.

For more details and information about other sessions, see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

And you can follow us on Twitter @Litviscult

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
Royal Holloway, University of London

Conference Announcement

Ravenstein Seminar, Edition 2016, January 28 and 29

Cultural Hierarchies and Practices of Middlebrow Literary Culture

The 2016 edition of the Ravenstein Seminar will take place in Amsterdam, on the 28^th and 29^th of January. 

The topic of this year’s edition is Cultural Hierarchies and Practices of Middlebrow Literary Culture. 

Speakers include: Ann Ardis, Chris Baldick, Dirk De Geest, Nicola Humble, Lise Jaillant, Tom Perrin, Adriaan van der Weel, Emma West

For more information about the program, please check the website: https://ravensteinseminar.wordpress.com/

For registration: http://www.oslit.nl/ravenstein-seminar-2016-cultural-hierarchies/

2016 T. S. Eliot Society Meeting

Rapallo, Italy, June 17-21

ADDITIONAL PEER SEMINAR ANNOUNCED

Peer Seminars

The Society will sponsor two peer seminars, led by Ronald Schuchard and Jahan Ramazani.  Participants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 pp) on the topic of the seminar by June 1, 2016 for discussion at a two-hour meeting on the first day of our conference, Friday, June 17.  Membership in the peer seminars is limited to twelve in each, on a first-come, first-serve basis. Please enroll by April 15, by sending an email with the subject line “peer seminar” to tseliotsociety@gmail.com with your contact information. No paper or proposal is required to enroll.

Seminar II: T. S. Eliot and the Global

Jahan Ramazani

This seminar invites papers that explore the transnational range, dynamics, and subsequent influences of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Although Eliot has often been considered either canonically English or quintessentially American, we will examine his poetry’s overflowing of national borders, its global horizons and reach. Possible topics for exploration include:

• how, why, and to what extent his poems traverse a variety of literary and cultural traditions, as well as multiple geographies, languages, and religions;
• the meaning and significance of his appropriation of East Asian cultural materials in The Waste Land,Four Quartets, and elsewhere;
• the interrelations between the local and the foreign or even planetary in his work;
• Eliot’s influence on poets from the global South, as well as other countries of the global North.

Participants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 pp) on the topic of the seminar by June 1, 2016 for discussion at a two-hour meeting on the first day of our conference, Friday, June 17.  Membership in the peer seminars is limited to twelve in each, on a first-come, first-serve basis. Please enroll by April 15, by sending an email with the subject line “peer seminar” to tseliotsociety@gmail.com with your contact information. No paper or proposal is required to enroll.

Jahan Ramazani

Jahan Ramazani returns to the Society this year after giving the 2013 T. S. Eliot Society Memorial Lecture on “T. S. Eliot, Poetry, and Prayer.” He is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and, most recently, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. His A Transnational Poetics (2009) won the 2011 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, awarded for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010. Previous books include The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He edited the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and, with Jon Stallworthy, The Twentieth Century and After in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012). He is also an associate editor of the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Virginia’s highest honor.

For information about Ron Schuchard’s seminar on “Eliot’s Prose,” and for the remainder of the CFP, please visit our website (http://www.luc.edu/eliot/activities.htm).

The next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar will take place this Thursday, 12 November, 6 pm, in Senate House, London, Room 261.

We’re pleased to host two papers on modernist figures whose work spans disciplines.

Professor Angela Smith (Stirling), ‘“They couldn’t see the forest for looking at the trees”: Emily Carr’s colonial modernism’

Elliott Morsia (Royal Holloway), ‘D. H. Lawrence and visionary awareness: “not so much because of his achievement as because of his struggle”’

For abstracts, more details and information about other sessions, see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com.

Please follow us on Twitter @Litviscult

We hope to see you on 12 November.

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
Royal Holloway, University of London

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Angela Smith is an emeritus professor in English Studies, and was a founding member and Director of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies, at the University of Stirling in Scotland. Her books include East African Writing in English (Macmillan 1989), Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Clarendon 1999), and Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life (Palgrave 2000). She edited Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea for Penguin (1997), and Katherine Mansfield Selected Stories for Oxford World’s Classics (2002). With Gerri Kimber she edited The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, volume 3 of the Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, published in 2014.

Elliott Morsia is a PhD student at Royal Holloway. His thesis on ‘D. H. Lawrence & Genetic Criticism’ is focused on the manuscripts and rough drafts of Lawrence and considers Lawrence’s writing processes in the context of modernism and the more archetypal compositional styles of other contemporary authors.