Category: Uncategorized

Call for Papers

Reading Walter de la Mare, 1873–1956: ‘a voice which has no fellow’

20–21 September 2018, University of Cambridge

About

By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?
. . .
By the delicate, invisible web you wove —
The inexplicable mystery of sound.

               — From T. S. Eliot, ‘To Walter de la Mare’

We invite proposals for a two-day conference in Cambridge, U.K., which aims to re-evaluate Walter de la Mare’s place in literary history; to read his work on its own terms; to consider what it meant for him to write as he did from the end of the nineteenth century, through the turbulent decade between 1911-1922, and on into the mid-twentieth century; and to explore the ways in which the legacy of de la Mare’s writing might challenge current conceptions of literary ‘modernism(s)’.

Discussions of all aspects of his work are invited: poetry, prose fiction, plays, essays, anthologies, and archives. Fresh consideration by scholars in diverse fields will be encouraged, including, but by no means not limited to, literary studies, sound studies and musicology, theology, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Participants might consider the following in relation to Walter de la Mare:

Genres and art forms

• Nonsense poetry, nursery rhymes, and the anonymous poet
• Children’s literature at the turn of the century and beyond
• Short stories in periodicals
• Ghost stories
• Gothic stories
• Allegorical stories
• Fairy tales and the changeling
• Tales told again: the art of re-telling stories
• Combining the anthology, memoir, and essay
• Musical, visual, or theatrical adaptations and interpretations
• Illustrations for de la Mare’s works; de la Mare’s words and images
• Translations of de la Mare’s works

Topics

• De la Mare’s style
• Style and rhythm in poetry and prose
• Sound-sense in literary language; the ‘inward ear’ and the ‘inward voice’
• The experience of reading and writing
• The work of books; the book as material object
• Hospitality and company
• The self and selves
• Mind and body
• The eye and the face
• Time and memory
• Echoes, allusions, and quotations
• ‘Nothing’, ‘something’; ‘some one’, ‘no one’
• Dream and imagination; the ‘imagination of the heart’
• Enchantment and lullaby
• The Stranger and the Traveller
• Birdsong and other motifs of sound
• Sensory perception within and of texts; the physiology of reading
• The uncanny and the unknown; the supernatural and the præternatural
• Physics and other sciences
• Poetry and religion

Literary affinities and connections

• Contemporary writers: writers whose lives overlap with de la Mare’s lifetime, 1873-1956 (including, by order of birth, Christina Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, A. E. Housman, Charlotte Mew, W. H. Davies, Ralph Hodgson, Dorothy Richardson, G. K. Chesterton, Robert Frost, Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bowen, Vladimir Nabokov, Stevie Smith, Graham Greene, W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, W. S. Graham, Angela Carter, J. H. Prynne, and many others)
• Past writers before 1873 (including William Shakespeare, Robert Burton, Thomas Browne, Jonathan Swift, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë)
• Writers after 1956 (including Lucy Boston)

These prompts are certainly not meant to be comprehensive, and other topics are welcome. To propose a paper, please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biographical note of 50 words to readingwalterdelamare@gmail.com by 31st March 2018. Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Decisions will be made by late April 2018.

Visit our website (https://readingwalterdelamare.wordpress.com) for more details. If you have any questions, please get in touch with the conference organisers (Yui Kajita and Anna Nickerson) at the above address.

Call for Papers: The Working-Class Avant-Garde

One-day Symposium, London | Friday 22^nd June, 2018

This symposium seeks to examine contributions to the twentieth-century British avant-garde by artists and writers of working class heritage. The avant-garde is often conceived to be the domain of the elite – those with the financial backing, education, and networks to succeed in this competitive arena. Indeed, studies such as John Carey’s divisive text, Intellectuals and the Masses, have understood the high intellectualism of the twentieth-century avant-garde to have developed in response to the improved education of the mass populace: a means to retain the divide between the masses and the elite. This symposium solicits papers about artists and writers who are outliers to this rule: the working-class figures who partook of the elite world of the avant-garde.

In recognising the fluidity of the term ‘working class’, and indeed its changing conditions through the twentieth century, we welcome studies of artists and writers who represent this designation relative to their own generation. Equally, as the definition of ‘avant-garde’ may well be contested, we propose an inclusive and flexible understanding of the term. Notable figures may include Henry Moore, DH Lawrence, Merk Gertler and David Bomberg in the early twentieth century, or later figures such as the ‘Two Roberts’, Merseybeat poets, and some YBAs. Studies of lesser-known figures of the avant-garde are welcomed, as are papers on the conditions of working class artists during the twentieth century.

Did their background influence their practice, or was it rejected in favour of a depoliticised aesthetic? Who were the patrons, institutions, art schools and collectives who supported these figures? How did the cultures and ideas of the working classes influence the development of British art throughout the twentieth century?

We invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes in length. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, along with a brief biographical note to: atrott@brookes.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is Sunday 11^th March, 2018.

Speakers will be given the opportunity to publish their papers in a peer-reviewed edited volume.

The symposium will take place on Friday 22^nd June, 2018. In keeping with the symposium’s theme, it will be held at London South Bank University, previously the Borough Polytechnic, and home of Bomberg’s Borough Group.

This symposium is organised collaboratively by:

Dr Alexandra Trott (Oxford Brookes University, Fine Art)

Dr Leon Betsworth (London South Bank University, English)

Dr Nick Lee (Royal Holloway, University of London, Media Arts)

AMSN4: Modernist Comedy & Humour

The Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference

http://amsn.org.au/amsn-conferences/amsn4/

University of Melbourne, 26-28 October 2018

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Virginia Woolf and the Writing of History

8-10 November 2018
University of Rouen
ERIAC (http://eriac.univ-rouen.fr)

Organisers: Dr. Anne Besnault-Levita, Dr. Marie Laniel, Dr. Anne-Marie Smith-di Biasio HDR
With the collaboration of the University of Picardie – Jules Verne
https://www.u-picardie.fr/unites-de-recherche/corpus/presentation/
And the Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes
http://etudes-woolfiennes.org

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Anna Snaith (King’s College, London)
Dr. Seamus O’Malley (Yeshiva University, New York)

Call for papers
New submission deadline: 20 February 2018

We propose to examine Virginia Woolf’s relationship to history by reflecting on her reading and writing of history,[1] be that the history of her own time, of the past, women’s history or literary history. This will involve analysing how the literary and historicity are interlinked not only in her novels, but also in the essays, letters and journals. This in turn might lead us to consider the question of anteriority and tradition, engaging both the po-ethical and political dimensions of a Woolfian writing of history and of pre-history, such as that which informs her late essay “Anon,” but is also present throughout her writing in the attention it accords to a cultural unconscious, subtending the present of language like a sometimes conscious, sometimes not yet conscious memory of the past.[2] We might also be led to see Woolfian historiography from the perspective of materialist revisionism, a feminist rewriting of the past, or an infinite working through the library of her father, Leslie Stephen. Other possible perspectives would be to consider her work as that of an archivist writing against the archives of patriarchy in search of her own arkhe,[3]or examining how she reinvents the historiographical, biographical and literary traditions. Woolf’s engagement in the history of Modernity might in turn be considered from a Benjaminian perspective, as a form of historiographical reconfiguration anticipating post-modern philosophy.
The question of Woolf’s hermeneutics of history might lead us to define the different forms of her engagement in women’s history, in the history of class, of her queering of history, her heterodoxy. We can also read her writing as a form of archeology delving into the written and non-written traces of history, attentive to the emergence of spectres and forms of survival or survivance[4] but also as a response to what Woolf herself called, in Three Guineas, “history in the raw.” Thus addressing how Woolf arrests the kairos of historical moment, her own inscription of two world wars as if in negative, might lead us furthermore to consider her writing as a form of resistance, nonetheless steeped in the Real of history, the present and the body.
We invite papers which address these questions among others from a variety of theoretical, literary and cultural approaches.

Possible topics may include:
• Virginia Woolf as a reader and interpreter of history
• Virginia Woolf as an apprentice historian
• Virginia Woolf’s revisionist historiography
• Virginia Woolf’s counter literary histories
• Virginia Woolf’s complex relations to past and present historiographical traditions
• Virginia Woolf, Historicism and New Historicism
• Virginia Woolf, historicity and the new biography
• Virginia Woolf’s feminist take on history and literary history
• Virginia Woolf, history and its “effect upon mind and body” (Three Guineas)
• Virginia Woolf’s writing of history and pre-history
• Memory, the immemorial, oral tradition
• History, historiography and chronotopes in Virginia Woolf’s works (libraries, museums, monuments…)
• Archeology, material artifacts and the archive

Submission

Paper proposals (a 300-word abstract with a title plus a separate biographical statement) should be sent by January 30th 2018 to Anne Besnault-Levita (anne.besnault@gmail.com), Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (amdibiasio@neuf.fr) and Marie Laniel (marie.laniel@gmail.com)

Advisory Committee

Prof. Michael Bentley, University of St Andrews
Dr. Anne Besnault-Levita, University of Rouen
Prof. Catherine Bernard, University of Paris 7
Dr. Nicolas Boileau, University of Aix-Marseille
Prof. Melba Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Prof. Claire Davison, University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dr. Anne-Marie Di Biasio, Institut Catholique de Paris
Prof. Camille Fort, University of Picardie
Prof. Trevor Harris, University of Picardie
Dr. Marie Laniel, University of Picardie
Prof. Scott McCracken, Queen Mary, University of London
Dr. Caroline Pollentier, University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle
Dr. Floriane Reviron-Piégay, University of St Etienne
Dr. Angeliki Spiropoulou, University of the Peloponnese

In Search of a New Fiction?  British Avant-Garde Writing of the 1960s

A Discursive Conference

University of East Anglia, Saturday 27th January 2018

This conference aims to participate in, contribute to, and mark the significance of growing scholarly interest in British avant-garde writing of the 1960s.  As part of this, the conference will launch a network for scholars working in the field.

The format of the conference will be discursive.  The scholarship under discussion comes from the forthcoming EUP collection British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Eds. Kaye Mitchell, Manchester and Nonia Williams, UEA).  This collection of original essays sets out to rectify a lacuna in twentieth-century literary criticism/history by offering detailed analyses of several 1960s avant-garde British writers.  Materials will be circulated beforehand, and discussion will be led and facilitated by respondents.  

Please email Nonia Williams on N.Williams@uea.ac.uk by Monday January 15th 2018 if you would like to attend.  A full programme and materials will follow.  The conference is free to attend and light refreshments will be provided, so do let me know of any dietary requirements.  There will also be a conference dinner that evening, please let me know if you’d like to come.

Programme:

11am               Registration and arrival, Tea and Coffee

11.20am Welcome:  Nonia Williams (UEA) and Kaye Mitchell (Manchester)

11.30am        Panel 1:  Respondent, Julia Jordan (UCL)

Materials on Christine Brooke-Rose (Stephanie Jones, Aberystwyth), B.S. Johnson (Joseph Darlington, Futureworks Media School), Rayner Heppenstall (Philip Tew, Brunel), and Muriel Spark (Marina McKay).

1pm                Lunch

1.45pm          Panel 2:  Respondent, Glyn White (Salford)

Materials on Alexander Trocchi (Christopher Webb, UCL), Eva Figes (Chris Clarke, Southampton), Anna Kavan (Hannah Van Hove, Glasgow) and Robert Nye (Tamás Bényei, Debrecen), and and Brigid Brophy (Len Gutkin, Harvard).

3.15pm           Tea and Coffee

3.30pm          Panel 3:  Respondent, TBC

Materials on Maureen Duffy (Eveline Kilian, HU Berlin), Alan Burns (Kieran Devaney, Independent Scholar), Ann Quin (Jennifer Hodgson, Independent Scholar) and Giles Gordon (David Hucklesby, De Montfort).

5pm      Plenary:  Launch of British Avant-Garde Fiction Network

5.30pm           Wine and Snacks

7pm             Conference Dinner                  (Please say if you would like to attend)