CROSSING THE BORDERS

 ANGLO-RUSSIAN CONTACT ZONES 1880s-1940s

7 October 2016

Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, University of Rome Sapienza (Italy)

Keynote speaker:

Rebecca Beasley, Associate Professor of English Literature, Queen’s College, University of Oxford

Organiser:

Martina Ciceri, Department of European, American and Intercultural Studies, University of Rome Sapienza

Recent years have seen a proliferation of innovative studies in international literary and cultural transactions. In the thriving area of cosmopolitan studies, the Anglo-Russian literary and cultural connections naturally loom large. Nevertheless they invite further scrutiny, particularly in relation to the issues of reception, adaptation, assimilation, and contamination. In 1919, Virginia Woolf famously declared that “the most inconclusive remarks upon modern English fiction can hardly avoid some mention of the Russian influence,” thus grafting, as it were, Russian aesthetics on modernist practices. Needless to add the diverse and combined impact of the Russian Ballets, Tolstoyan ideology, Constance Garnett’s translations, Russian drama and Soviet cinema on the English literary and cultural traditions. British modernists played a pivotal role in the dissemination of Russian literature and culture, showing a rare insight into the unprecedented opportunities Anglo-Russian cross-cultural dialogue offered to rejuvenate the British literary forms and aesthetic idioms.  In the steps of the “Russia in Britain” conference, organised by Rebecca Beasley and Philip R. Bullock in 2009, this one-day international conference engages with some of the key questions, concerns and issues stemming out of the complex landscape of Anglo-Russian cross-cultural encounters from the 1880s to the 1940s. It aims at casting light on the most recent developments in Anglo-Russian studies in their multiple perspectives – historical, cultural, linguistic and literary.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to:

–            British reception of Russian and Soviet literature, drama, music, art and film

–            Cosmopolitanism and transnationalism

–            Hybridization among English and Russian literary traditions, genres and styles

–            The role of translation in the promotion of Anglo-Russian cultural and literary rapprochement

–            Travelogues and travel writing

–            The British and the Russian “intelligentsia”

–            Émigré and refugee culture

–            British/Russian periodical culture and the émigré press

–            English/Russian politics and ideologies

–            Tolstoyan, Anglo-Russian and Anglo-Soviet communities

–            Russophile publishing houses

–            Children’s literature and folklore

–            Journalism and travel writing in between Russia and Britain

–            Theoretical linguistic and sociolinguistic

–            Theories of reception, translation and comparative literary studies

Please submit a title, 300-word abstract, a short author bio and a list of relevant publications, if applicable, by 20 May 2016 to martina.ciceri@uniroma1.it. Papers should be 20-25 minutes’ long. Notification of acceptance by June 15^th. Contributions from doctoral students and early-career researchers are encouraged.

MSA 18: Slowing Down Modernism

Cfp MSA 18 / Pasadena, CA / 17-20 November 2016

The emergence and proliferation of new media technologies around the turn of the century (mass print, film, broadcasting) altered the speed, urgency and scale of cultural production. This was reflected in the literature produced at the time, which became obsessed with technology and velocity, with ‘the new!’ and ‘the now!’ Yet alternative temporalities in a period David Trotter describes as the First Media Age by and large remain uncharted terrain. This panel is interested in a modernism that resists ideas of velocity and urgency in both its aesthetics and its modes of production. Slowness is modernism’s antidote. While Beckett is a prime suspect in a discussion of the unhurried pace and rhythm of modernist writing, the panel also hopes to zero in on less canonical texts and contexts. In what ways, for instance, did long bouts of inactivity in the trenches affect the writing of soldiers in World War One? How did banality and boredom inform cultural production? Which processes were involved in the translation of ideas or the circulation of periodicals on the outskirts of Empire? How does modernist experimentation with language, especially stream of consciousness, play with different rhythms? Which techniques, ranging from the handwritten periodical to Nancy Cunard’s use of an antique printing press, counterintuitively persisted in the 20^th century? Taking its cue from the work of Miller (2013) and Majumdar (2013), this panel places slowness at the heart of the modern artistic project. In doing so it aims to consider complementary narratives that see modernism as a mode whose emergence, aesthetics and production were less fast-paced and immediately revolutionary than is often thought.

This panel is interested in contributions on the idea of slowness in relation to the modernist aesthetic and newly emerging media and technologies; in slowness and affect (boredom, waiting, endurance); in slowness and the periodical press (“slow print”); in slowness and form (the long novel, the encyclopaedic); in slowness and history (protracted revolutions, permanent warfare); in the development of modernism (progress v. stasis); in deep time, killing time and modernist conceptions of timelessness; and, more generally, in temporalities that challenge the rapidly modernizing, fast-paced nature of early-20^th-century life.

Please submit abstracts of 200-300 words and a short scholarly bio to cedric.vandijck@ugent.be by 10 April 2016.

CFP: Radical America: Revolutionary, Dissident and Extremist Magazines

BORDERS OF MODERNISM

International Conference, Perugia, 14-16 December 2016

CFP

Besides, interesting things happen along borders—transitions—not in the middle where everything is the same.

(Neal Stephenson)

(Invisible boundaries by Rowan Mersch)

Keynote speakers:

Prof. Claire Davison Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris

Prof. Daniel Ferrer, Item (Institut des textes & manuscrits modernes), Paris

Prof. Paolo Giovannetti, Iulm, Milan

Prof. Catriona Kelly, University of Oxford, Oxford

Prof. Andrew Thacker, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham

Originally deriving from the Old French bordure (meaning “seam” and “edge of a shield”), in its geopolitical sense the term “border” was first used in Scotland in the 1530s. The Borders was indeed the name of the district adjoining the English boundary. Accordingly, over the centuries borders have been used to signal differences, separations, distinctions, discontinuities, the beginning of the other, as well as the need for protection and preservation. One could mention cultural, linguistic, political, social, gender borders, and the list could of course be much longer. In The Order of Things Michel Foucault maintained that the concepts of boundaries and partitions should be replaced by that of “threshold” and “hinges”, whereby the latter are “porous borders” that both separate and communicate. Such a contiguity inherent in the very notion of threshold suggests a physical adjacency, a spatial contact that, although it can or cannot be pursued, certainly calls for attention. In this regard, modernism as a wide-ranging of philosophical and artistic expressions that cross several ideological, political and cultural boundaries epitomises Foucault’s concept of permeable lines and borders. In particular, this conference will explore those borders that modernism has either dissolved or provocatively recovered in light of an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and trans-geographical approach.

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers which address but are not limited to the points below:

• CHRONOLOGICAL BORDERS

Modernism in context: modernism and aestheticism; modernism and 19^th century realism; modernism and contemporary literary movements (such as avant-garde, vorticism, imagism, etc.), modernism, postmodernism and beyond.

• GENERIC BORDERS

Modernism/literary and artistic genres.

• GEOGRAPHICAL BORDERS

Eastern and western modernism, European, American and Eurasian modernism; modernism and colonialism; national modernisms and the emergence of a wider notion of modernism, transnational or, more appropriately, European.

• LITERARY BORDERS

Interdisciplinary modernism: modernism and science, modernism and medicine, modernism and music, modernism and art, modernism and media, modernism and law, etc.

• SOCIO-CULTURAL BORDERS

The interconnections between high and middlebrow literature. Does modernism address only to high literature or is there such a thing as a “modernist pop literature”? Is there a left and a right modernism?

• GENDER BORDERS

Is there a female modernism and a male modernism or perhaps a trans-sexual modernism? How does gender affect modernism?

• DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Mapping modernism through digitalization, 3-d mapping and electronic literary analysis.

Please submit a 300-word proposal along with a 200 words max biographical note to conference@cemstudies.eu by May 31. Notifications of acceptance will be given by June 20.

Please also notice that all participants will have to cover their own costs including conference registration € 40.

Scientific Board:                    

Francesco Fiorentino (Roma Tre), Paolo Tamassia (Trento), Valeria Tocco (Pisa), Massimiliano Tortora (Perugia), Annalisa Volpone (Perugia)

Organizing Committee:  

Valentino Baldi (Malta), Novella di Nunzio (Vilnius), Rossella Riccobono (St. Andrews)

www.cemstudies.eu