Category: Uncategorized

Waste and the Archive

This proposed panel for MSA 18 will explore the relationship between waste and the archive in modernism. Concerns about waste pervaded the modern period: many high modernists sought to eradicate wasteful and excess language from their literary productions, while the rise of a consumer culture created increasing amounts of rubbish. Our idea of the modern archive has expanded too in recent years to include cultural productions such as the lowbrow, middlebrow, and popular culture: ‘trashy’ literature is now precious. Considering the conference’s theme of culture and industry, this panel seeks papers that examine the material and figurative excesses and waste created in modern cultural production and what kind of unofficial, portable, ad-hoc, and non-traditional archives these wastes and excesses produced in turn. From the detritus of a life, collected in the literary archive—scribblings, lists, works-in-progress—to things we might not consider cultural archives at all—rubbish, odors, food scraps—this panel will examine the possibilities of and anxieties surrounding modernist archives full of waste.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

–alternative archives: lowbrow and middlebrow, popular culture, non-literary archives

–thing theory, object studies, collectors, hoarders

–waste studies, recycling, environmental and natural archives

–portable archives, new technologies, data and information

–works-in-progress, leftovers, excesses, remains, overflow

–the politics of archives in relation to gender, racial, class, and sexual identities

Please submit paper proposals of no more than 250 words and a brief bio to laura.james@stonybrook.edu and r.m.bowler@keele.ac.uk by March 31 2016.

Adding to an expanding sense of what encompasses “institutions of modernism,” this panel proposes to examine the space of literary and cultural production that non-governmental organizations have occupied. If high modernist institutions have popularly been configured as networks of print matter, late modernist institutions can include forms that reflect technological change and the shifting global arena. The establishment of the United Nations in 1945 gave rise to the powerful institutional ideal of the modern day NGO. From the outset, NGOs with a literary or cultural focus, such as PEN, Amnesty International, and UNESCO, engaged in issues like censorship, literacy, and educational access, which were themselves issues imbricated with the post-war discourse of modernist influence.

This panel seeks proposals that critically examine the framework of these NGOs. While some NGOs promote a progressive platform, especially when it comes to issues such as human rights, literacy campaigns, and democratization, they can still perpetuate hegemonic discourses of literary forms and cultural hierarchies.

Paper topics may involve:

• Historicizing NGOs within the milieu of post-World War II politics
• Analyzing forms of knowledge produced by literary and cultural-focused NGOs
• Address the more recent NGO boom and its effect on the cultural politics of literary form
• Present a specific NGO in the context of a literary development

Differentiate between NGOs and other non-state actors (such as the Congress of Cultural Freedom or the Rockefeller Foundation) in light of one of the areas listed above

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract with a short bio to matthewchambers@protonmail.com by April 1^st.

Calls for Papers –

Literature and the BBC, 1922 to 1955, University of Edinburgh, 15th June 2016 –

This one-day conference explores the relationship between BBC broadcasting and literature, aiming to further explore the manifold interrelations between twentieth-century literature and the Corporation.

See the attached Word document for further details, deadline for submissions is 14th March 2016.

International Conference on Elizabeth Bowen, Warsaw, Poland, 5th July 2016 –

Elizabeth Bowen occupies a special place among twentieth-century writers. A superb novelist and a master of the short story, she is known for her exquisite style and unconventional narrative technique. This conference seeks to explore her work, as well as the work of other writers, artists, film-makers, or scholars inspired by Bowen’s life and writing.

See the attached Word document for further details, deadline for submissions is 20th March 2016.

New Middlebrow Publication –

Sally Faulkner’s new book, Middlebrow Cinema, will be released in April through Routledge. By analysing cinema, it challenges an often uninterrogated hostility to middlebrow culture that frequently dismisses it as conservative, which it often is not, and feminized or middle-class, which it often is. The volume defines the term relationally against shifting concepts of ‘high’ and ‘low’, and considers its deployment in connection with text, audience and institution.

Further details about the book can be found here:https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138777132

Reading Sheffield –

Reading Sheffield, which, you will no doubt remember, was the recipient of an award from the Aviva Community Fund, has a new website as well as a new blog. Reading Sheffield has made available a unique and newly created resource for research into everyday reading and the history of literary taste in the twentieth century.

See the attached Word document for further details and visit the website here:http://www.readingsheffield.co.uk

Spying from a Gendered Position Call for Articles

In Seuils (1987), Gérard Genette posed a rhetorical question about a canonical modernist text to highlight the functional importance of the then largely ignored paratext: “reduced to its text alone and without the help of any instructions for use, how would we read James Joyce’s Ulysses if it were not called Ulysses?” Genette undertook a synchronic structuralist account of the paratext, the body of productions, such as the title, author’s name, preface, epigraph, footnote, illustration, or dedicatory letter, that constitutes the zone of transition and transaction surrounding a text and presenting it as a text.