Category: Uncategorized

World premiere of music inspired by Virginia Woolf takes place in Cambridge in November

The third concert of the ‘Virginia Woolf & Music’ project takes place on November 3^rd at 7.45pm in Robinson College Chapel, Cambridge. Performed by the renowned Kreutzer Quartet, the concert explores Woolf’s interest in string quartets and features new work inspired by her writing. The concert includes work by Beethoven, by the South-African British composer Priaulx Rainier, and Mozart’s arrangement of a Bach fugue for string quartet. Two world premieres are featured: Jeremy Thurlow’s Memory is the seamstress and Elliott Schwartz’s Portrait (For Deedee). A free public talk on the topic takes place at 1pm the same day.

Tickets are available here, and further details on the event website.

Stephen Ross (University of Victoria)

Ghostmodernism

Date: 17 October 2016  at *16:00 – 18:00 (*new time)

Institute: Institute of English Studies- School of Advanced Study- University of London

Venue: Room 243, Second Floor, Senate House, 

Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

Abstract:

“[I]t occurs to me that entire libraries of enigmas in literature would yield up their key, were we but to reconsider the ‘supernatural element’ responsible for them: to be precise, the appearance of a Specter” (Nicholas Abraham “The Intermission of ‘Truth’” 188)

 Though actual ghosts are in exceedingly short supply in modernist novels, ghostly figures manifest with shocking abundance. It may in fact be one of the most striking features of the modernist novel that almost without regard to who the author is or what the novel is mainly concerned with, a certain rhetoric of spectrality permeates. All of Joseph Conrad’s major novels feature numerous such figures, as do most of the novels of Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Djuna Barnes, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce – not to mention the less dense but still sizeable representation in the works of Mary Butts, Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Townsend-Warner, HD, and May Sinclair. Put simply, the modernist novel is amongst the most haunted sites in all literature. In this paper, I both outline some of the ways in which modernist prose fiction mobilizes this rhetoric of spectrality, and argue that it serves as means by which a wide range of novelists engage with a wide range of issues, from the nature of reality to sex and sexuality, and from history and heritage to being and the body. The spectral provides the common medium of engagement with these issues. Its inherent link to ethics gives that medium its significance: through the rhetoric of spectrality, modernist novelists establish the ethical as the overarching horizon for all these concerns.

 Stephen Ross is  Professor of English and Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is the General Editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016), co-editor of The Modernist World (2015) as well as editions of Dorothy Richardson’s novels Pointed Roofs and The Tunnel (both 2014), editor of Modernism and Theory (2009), and author of Conrad and Empire (2004). He is Director of the Modernist Versions Project and of Linked Modernisms, both digital humanities approaches to the cultural heritage of aesthetic modernism. He is finally at work on a book on ghostmodernism, a work whose topic has haunted him for nearly twenty years now.

 The seminars  is  FREE and open to all.  However, for reasons of room capacity, please register your participation by contacting  the Seminar convenor, Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, Visiting Research  Fellow at IES/SAS and Assist. Professor at Peloponnese University at  angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk

The call for papers has been extended for the Historical Modernisms seminar to be held at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, on the 12 December 2016.

Please send abstracts of approximately 200 words and a short paragraph of biographical information to Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou at angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk, by 30 September 2016.  

More information is available on the conference website.

The call for papers is announced for Historical Modernisms, a one-day symposium to be held at the Institute of English Studies, London on the 12 December 2016.

Proposals are invited until September the 20th.

About the conference

Counter to the conventional perception of modernism as ahistorical, there have been recent academic and critical efforts to historicise it. The Historical Modernism Symposium seeks to contribute to this  trend by inviting readings of modern/ist literature and avant-garde art movements in the historical contexts of their production and reception, while assessing their entanglement with history and modernity transnationally.

The symposium aims to look at the history of modernism and the avant-gardes in relation to and their place in (literary and art) History, addressing questions of their relation with modern times, raised, for example, by colonialism; nationalism; globalisation; economics; politics; tradition; technology; urbanism, classicism; mythology; mysticism; religion; psychology/psychoanalysis.

Moreover, and importantly, it will examine pertinent philosophies of time, historiographical practices and representations of local and world historical events, such as the two World Wars, the Russian  Revolution and the rise of Fascism.

Finally, it will also investigate modernist concepts of the spirit of the times as well as new notions of and approaches to literary history.

A core question posed by the symposium topic is how a modernist aesthetics of  innovation transformed history in ways that make modernism not just a history of the present moment but also the history of our present.

Confirmed Featured Speakers:

Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Laura Marcus, University of Oxford

More featured speakers and plenary events to be announced soon.

Submissions

Possible topics for proposals include:

• Modernism/Avant-garde, Time and Memory
• Modern Technologies, Modernism/Avant-garde and New Temporalities
• History/ies of Modernism and Modern Times
• Modernism Making History
• Modern/ist Philosophies of History
• Modernists as Historians
• Modern Historiography and Literature/Culture
• Modernist Historiographical Theories and Practices (Subjects/Objects, Methods, Sources)
• Modernism and Bio-Historiographical Canons
• The Everyday and the Historic
• Issues of Periodisation
• Novelty and Tradition
• The Classic and the Modern
• The Modernist Event

Please send abstracts of  approximately 200 words and a short paragraph of biographical information to Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou at  angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk  by 20 September 2016.

Proposals for special panels and workshops, accompanied by topic description and full list of participants, are  also welcome by the same date.

Further information

The  Historical Modernisms Symposium  will be held at the Senate House, School of Advanced Studies, University of London and is part of the Comparative Modernisms seminar series at the Institute of English Studies, convened by Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou, IES/SAS Visiting Research Fellow and Assist. Professor at Peloponnese University.

For general enquiries, please send email to the above-mentioned address.

The Call for Papers is now open for a one day conference on “Redefining Allegory”, to be held at Queen Mary, University of London on the 24th of September, 2016.

Abstracts of 300 words are requested by August 24th.

About the conference

Even after “allegory studies” develops as a discipline in its own right, what allegory is and what allegory means is still a contentious issue. This conference aims to address 20^th century and contemporary theoretical applications for allegory, most notably in the work of Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man, and contrast them with the voices of scholars who consider this allegory a misinterpretation of a historically bound category.

What persists in allegory is its investment in a hidden meaning beyond itself, as Angus Fletcher explains in a recent essay “Allegory without Ideas” (2006). This dominant feature is consistent from allegory’s historical function as a mediator between the individual and the divine. However, in modern art practices, literatures and discourse given to secular inspiration, the singular and universal category of “the divine,” which defined Medieval and Renaissance uses of allegory in religious practice, is recognised in contemporary allegorical incarnations only as a trace of the Platonic ideas that underpins a western Christian doctrine. With contemporary allegory, we are stuck on our side of what Fletcher calls “the semiotic wall” of allegorical signification that separates the represented object from its cognition. Rather than being overcome through hermeneutics, “the wall” of allegory resists interpretation and seems to transmute any reading into irony.

In this respect, Walter Benjamin described allegory as ‘a particular aesthetic form of understanding truth (Wahrnehmen)’ (Lacis qtd. in Buck-Morss 1989;15), where allegorical form is meant to reveal and devalue the methods of how truth is constructed. For Paul De Man, writing in The Rhetoric of Temporality, any ‘understanding’ of a text is only ‘the impossibility in all writing and speaking, of saying what is intended, and of having a single intention, as well as the impossibility of reading what has been written.’

This conference aims to provide a platform to address issues surrounding the more recent definitions of allegory. What could the defining features of allegory be? Are there any possible benefits of the later definitions for more traditional historical led discussions of allegorical art? And finally, can there be a unified definition fit for interdisciplinary cross-cultural application that is both relevant to allegory as such and the allegorical in theory?

Keynote speakers: Michael Silk (King’s College London) and Jeremy Tambling

Call for papers

We invite papers from practitioners (poets, performers, artists, educators) and scholars in a range of fields including, but not limited to, English and comparative literature, linguistics, drama, media studies, cultural studies, psychology and philosophy.

We encourage submissions for 20 min papers, panels and workshops which reflect on the value of allegory in contemporary culture as well as presentations that consider possible problems inherent in more recent definitions of allegory. We also welcome speakers interested in novel methodologies for devising allegorical meaning from any historical period or from cultural traditions beyond the western canon.
Possible themes include:

 

* Comparative religion – What continuities across faiths find allegorical expression?  

* Temporality – What happens to the subjective experience of time when allegory is invoked?  

* Morality and ethics – How does allegory function to regulate and instruct behaviour?   

* Affect – What aesthetic affects are persistent in allegorical works?  

* Ritual – Is all allegory theological and can it maintain relevance in secular form?  

* Historical continuity – How do we relate to allegorical meanings in artwork that no longer directly illuminates our daily life?  

* Allegory and revision – Are pastiche and irony are tools to mediate and complicate allegorical standards?  

* Psychoanalysis – Is allegory a form of ‘working through’ the past? Alternatively, is it an impulse of societal discontent?  

* Post-Colonialism – Is there an inherent hierarchical power structure in allegorical works and is preference given to allegorical expression when cultures come into conflict?

How to submit

Please send abstracts of 300 words toredefiningallegory2016@gmail.com by 24^th August 2016.

More information is available on the conference website.

The conference is made possible by The Doctoral College Initiative Fund, Queen Mary University of London and is organised by PhD candidates John L. Dunn and Agnieszka Puchalska.

The call for submissions is now open for an edited collection entitled  Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays. Abstracts are required by September 30.

About the collection 

Popular novelist, female aesthete, Victorian radical and proto-Modernist, Lucas Malet was a literary tour de force in her own day, yet her work has been largely neglected by contemporary readers and critics. A daughter of Charles Kingsley, Malet was part of a creative dynasty from which she drew inspiration but against which she rebelled both in her personal life and her published work. Scholarship by Talia Schaffer and Catherine Delyfer has reopened critical enquiry into the work of this fascinating author, and we are seeking contributions in order to expand this emerging field of study.

Provisionally titled “Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays,” the collection capitalises on the developing critical interest in Malet and aims to bring together some of the best new research on her life and work.

Submissions

Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Imperialism
• Modernism
• Catholicism
• The Gothic and/ or supernatural
• The New Woman
• Gender, sexuality and eroticism
• Aestheticism
• Decadence and degeneration
• The damaged or disabled body

Please send abstracts of 500 words (for chapters of 6,000-8,000 words) along with a CV to Dr. Jane Ford (jane.ford@chester.ac.uk) or Dr. Alexandra Gray (alexandra.gray@port.ac.uk) by 30th September 2016.

The deadline for completed essays is 1^st July 2017. Any queries are welcomed.

The call for papers is now open for submissions to an edited collection entitled Oceanic Modernism. The collection will be edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long (University of the South Pacific).

Abstracts are due by September 30, and completed essays will be required by 31st January, 2017.

About the collection

In 1987, Raymond Williams’s ‘When was Modernism’ questioned the way in which a narrow selection of European and American writers had come to stand for an entire epoch. In the two decades since, modernist studies has undergone a radical reorientation, and critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Andreas Huyssen, Simon Gikandi, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have continued to reassess the temporalities, spatialities and formal components of modernism and modernity. The received, Eurocentric conception is giving way to new frameworks—alternative modernities, multiple modernities, modernity at large, new world modernisms, geomodernisms, transnational modernisms—which recognise the countless other experiences and articulations of a modernity now seen as global and interactive. While power relations remain uneven, in literature as in economics, assumptions of Western priority no longer hold. As the ‘new modernisms’ have shown, models of production predicated on a self-determining European core and a derivative periphery not only deny the creative agencies of the greater part of the modern world, they misconstrue the already compromised nature of the so-called ‘classical’ forms themselves. Now a contested term, modernism no longer simply denotes a particular aesthetic movement, born and perfected in Europe and America in the first decades of the last century. In a global sense, it names a range of aesthetic responses, to a modernity experienced in different ways, by different people, at different times.

As far-reaching as this critical revaluation may have been, Oceania remains largely ignored in modernist studies. With few notable exceptions, collections on global modernisms have left out the region altogether, quietly implying either that Oceania has had no aesthetic responses to modernity, or that it has had no modernity at all. Yet from at least the 1960s, Pacific writers and artists have been explicitly and self-consciously engaged in articulating Oceanic modernities. In a movement closely related to postcolonial independence in some countries, and to indigenous rights movements in others, Oceanians explored tensions between tradition and modernity, female and male, the village and the city, local and foreign, the indigenous and the indentured. These artists challenged and adapted all manner of inheritances, from the rich oral and other expressive traditions of the Pacific, including weaving, pottery, dance and tattooing, to other world modernisms, to the Indian literary and mythical heritage brought to the region, often forcibly, through the indentured labour system. Imbricated and transnational, Oceanic art and literature are thus eminently modern, with modernity understood not simply as rupture, amalgamation, and change, but—following Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and Zigmunt Bauman—as the conscious reflection on the contemporary.

This edited collection positions this aesthetic movement as an Oceanic modernism. It considers the relationship between Oceanic works and the modernities from which they emerged; the relationship between Oceanic works and other modernisms, however so defined; and the advantages and limitations of applying the modernist rubric to Oceanic works.

Submission details

We invite submissions that consider Oceanic modernism/modernity, with possible topics including but not limited to:

• Literature, Art, Theatre, Dance
• Weaving, Tattoos, Architecture, Cultural Practices
• Colonialism and Postcolonialism
• Nationalism and Transnationalism
• Independence, Indigeneity and Indenture
• Tradition and Modernisation
• Globalisation and Capitalism
• Gender, Racial and Cultural Relations
• Influence, Adaptation and Appropriation

Please send your title and a 500-word abstract to oceanicmodernisms@gmail.com by 30 September, 2016. Completed essays will be due by 31st January, 2017.