Category: Uncategorized

As MSA members shape panel, roundtable, and poster/digital exhibit proposals in advance of the April 17 deadline, it may be helpful to keep in mind that the ICA/Boston will open a major exhibition centered on the legacy of Black Mountain College, curated by Helen Molesworth with Ruth Erickson, about a month before MSA comes to town in November 2015.

Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957

October 10, 2015 – Jan. 24, 2016

The first comprehensive exhibition on the subject of Black Mountain College to take place in the United States, Leap Before You Look features individual works by over fifty artists. Organized by Helen Molesworth, the ICA’s former Barbara Lee Chief Curator, the exhibition offers new insights into Black Mountain College and the art produced there, as well as its lasting influence on American artistic practice and art education. Following its debut at the ICA, the exhibition will travel to the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

As Carrie Preston mentioned in a recent message, the MSA’s conference organizing committee is working with the ICA/Boston to make the most of this happy accident of timing. An update on that prospect is expected soon.

In the meantime, MSA members interested in coordinating BMC-related proposals for the conference program are invited to contact me at steven.evans@maine.edu, preferably before April 1.

I have volunteered to help informally with the crafting of a possible BMC “path” through the conference proceedings and would welcome the chance to work with anyone who shares that interest. (Of course, all proposals will need to go through the regular MSA review process.)

The history of BMC is especially resonant within the interdisciplinary context of MSA. It makes sense, I think, to take advantage of the opportunity the ICA’s exhibition offers us for renewed inquiry into its wide range of radical—and sometimes revolutionary?—activities.

Steve Evans

8^th-10^th April, 2015, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Plenary Speakers: Christopher Norris (Cardiff); Emma Sutton (St Andrews); Scott W. Klein (Wake Forest, NC)

A three-day conference hosted by the School of English at the University of Nottingham. For more information please visit the conference website:http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/english/modernist-musics-and-political-aesthetics/index.aspx

A programme can be found here: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/Conference/fac-arts/English/Modernist-Musics-and-Political-Aesthetics/Documents/MMPA-Conference-Programme.pdf

Registration will open soon.

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will take place at 6pm on Tuesday 24 February, in room G35 (ground floor) of Senate House, London.

Laurel Brake, Professor Emerita of Literature and Print Culture at Birkbeck, University of London, will be presenting a paper on Walter Pater titled ‘Pater and the new media: the “child” in the “house”’. Please see below for further details.

The seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism and periodical studies. For more information, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com or visit http://modmags.wordpress.com

With best wishes,

Charles Dawkins (University of Oxford)

Aimee Gasston (Birkbeck, University of London)

Chris Mourant (King’s College London)

Natasha Periyan (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Pointed Roofs Centenary Event

The Dorothy Richardson Society invite you to an event in Bloomsbury to celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Pointed Roofs the first volume of Dorothy Richardson’s novel cycle Pilgrimage.

Time: 17.00-19.00
Date: Friday 15 May 2015
Place:

17.45 Panel discussion: Laura Marcus (University of Oxford), Jo Winning (Birkbeck College), Scott McCracken (Keele University), Deborah Longworth.

18.15 Questions and discussion.
18.45 Wine Reception
Dinner

The event is free, but if you wish to come please please inform Tracey Harrison t.l.harrison@keele.ac.uk

‘In this series there is no drama, no situation, no set scene. Nothing happens. It is just life going on and on. It is Miriam Henderson’s stream of consciousness going on and on. And in neither is there any grossly discernible beginning or middle or end. ‘ May Sinclair, The Egoist (1918)

Dear fellow modernists,

This is just a message to announce the official launch of The Cantos Project, a website dedicated to the study of Ezra Pound’s poem The Cantos.

The website is conceived as a work in progress which will occupy the Poundian community for a number of years. We have thirty years of research not packaged into a companion to the poem.
New Directions allows us to have six cantos live on the site at any one time. This situation lets us work serially, canto by canto. After the annotation of a canto is deemed complete, the glosses will be transferred to an online companion – a downloadable pdf. Canto I is annotated as an example.

The main thing is that The Cantos Project is an open resource, meant to serve everyone who has an interest and a need, whether for research or teaching. The first six cantos from Ur-I to III are online. So are the bibliographies, throughout the poem. No registration necessary, unless you want to contribute. If you’d like to follow the work, drop me an email to put your name on the mailing list, which will be operational by mid-November.

This is the address: http://www.thecantosproject.org

With all my best,

Roxana Preda
Editor of The Cantos Project

A one-day conference De Montfort University Saturday 28th February 2015
Keynote Speaker: Scott McCracken, Keele University

When Thomas Hardy lamented to Virginia Woolf in 1926 that modernist authors had ‘changed everything now’ he reinforced the idea that modernism had wrought a cataclysmic division between itself and its Victorian predecessors. Woolf had specified December 1910 as the point when literature abandoned omniscience for the realism of interiority and the historical consequence has been a linear model where Victorian
and modernist literatures are placed consecutively; as generally discrete entities. But Victorian literature was similarly inventive and experimental: the proto-modernism of Emily Brontë, the realism of George Eliot, the Zola-inspired Naturalists including George Moore who segued into Symbolism. Nor was Modernist literature always forward-looking: at the time G. K. Chesterton questioned the ‘originality’ of Futurism and John Middleton Murry argued that modernism was less about textual revolution and more about one’s ability ‘to train hard on a page of Ulysses every day;’ subsequently Tony Pinkney notes D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Victorian realism’ and James Eli Adams recognises a ‘host of continuities between Victorian and modernist literature’.
This conference aims to suture the ‘divide’ between ‘Victorian’ and ‘Modernist’ literature, to explore the ways in which they dovetailed and overlapped, shared ideals and textual practice. We seek papers exploring novels, poetry, periodicals, little modernist magazines and other textual ephemera. Papers might include, but are not limited to:
• frameworks of ‘Victorian’ and ‘modern’
• shared Victorian/modernist themes in/forms of prose, poetry, plays and periodicals
•shared sub-genres
•Proto-modernist/retro-Victorian literary tendencies
•authors whose output spans both periods e.g. Thomas Hardy, George Moore, W. B. Yeats, H. G. Wells
•periodicals with a publication run spanning both periods
The organisers hope to begin a conversation in this conference that will result in the publication of a collection of essays. To this end, we have been in discussion with Ashgate and delegates may want to consider their conference paper proposal as the beginning of a longer work for publication.
Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted by January 5th, 2015 to:
Louise Kane, louise.kane@dmu.ac.uk
Deborah Mutch, dmutch@dmu.ac.uk

An EMMA conference to be held at

Montpellier 3 University on March 27-28, 2015.

The Humble in 19^th, 20^th and 21^st-Centuries British Literature and Arts

This conference will both expand and renew our work on Ethics of Alterity in 19^th, 20^th and 21^st-Century British Literature and Arts. The relation to the other will be envisaged as a “way of being other” through the category of the humble. Through the double meaning of its etymology, humbleness refers to a social condition and/or a way of being. It can be defined as “being low in rank or station” or as “being aware of one’s own limitations or weaknesses”, i.e., as an awareness of one’s ability to fail.

This conference will be an opportunity to explore the humble as a theme in 19^th, 20^th and 21^st Century British Literature and Arts and as an aesthetic or ethical category. From a neo-Platonist ethics (as defended by Levinas), we shall thus turn to a neo-Aristotelian one (as defended by Nussbaum or Ricoeur, among others), which also implies a form of practice. We propose to address how British literature and art connect with the ideals defended in the 19^th, 20^th and 21^st centuries by philosophers, economists, politicians and jurists—from John Stuart Mill’s concept of happiness to the Welfare State and the ethics of care—and we will examine how aesthetics connect with ethics as well as with politics.

The humble may be understood as:

• A form of economic, psychological, religious or aesthetic destitution, poverty, precariousness, dispossession, humility, vulnerability, etc.
• A “form-of-life” (Agamben), a utopia or any other form of reaction to a social status quo.
• A new paradigm for the human, at a time when the sovereignty of the subject has been defeated and the subject has become autonomous, as well as a paradigm for the living.

The humble may be regarded as disenabling or enabling, disempowering or empowering (Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster).

Food for thought:

-how the humble or a humble voice interacts with a text, how a poetics of the humble may be created,

-how the humble literary genres and arts of the Victorian, Edwardian, Modernist, post-modern or contemporary periods relate to the canonical literary genres or arts,

-how the humble is represented (phenomenal realism, modernist aesthetics, post-humanism, etc.) and what genres or modes the humble privileges,

-the various forms of humble arts, from printmaking to Kitsch or some forms of land art, etc.

The list is not restrictive.

Proposals bearing on the humble as a theme in 19^th, 20^th and 21^st-Century British Literature and Arts and signalling to a poetics of the humble or the epistemological, ethical or political significance of the humble will be considered..

Proposals in English of about 300 words should be sent to Isabelle Brasme (isabellebrasme@gmail.com), Jean-Michel Ganteau (jean-michel.ganteau@univ-montp3.fr) and Christine Reynier (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr) by December 15, 2014.

Selected papers will be published in Horizons Anglophones/Present Perfect at the Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.

http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/present-perfect.html

16th October 2015
University of Burgundy (Dijon, France)

On the occasion of the symposium “Impression(s): 1880-1920” organised by the Image-Texte-Langage research centre (EA 4182) at the University of Burgundy on 16th October 2015, we wish to invite contributions that explore the relationship between art criticism, literary impressionism and printmaking from the late 19th century to the immediate postwar period in Britain.
We invite researchers, librarians, curators and collectors to examine the writings and artwork of art critics and writers who were also professional or amateur printmakers, namely in the fields of lithography, wood-engraving, woodcut, and etching. The symposium aims to discuss intermedial practices, the mutual influence of artistic practice and textual production, as well as the dual meaning of impression as a mode of reception and of expression. Papers should examine impression both as theme and trope in literary texts and art criticism in connection with the material characteristics of media in which writers/artists chose to express themselves. They can also address how the shift from late Victorian aesthetics to modernist experimentation was negotiated in this field.
The time period considered here is framed by the creation of the Society of Painter-Etchers in 1880 and that of the Society of Wood-Engravers in 1920. It spans four decades which saw the advent of photomechanical process and the revival of printmaking as an “original” mode of expression based on the premium granted to individual impression as autographic response and to the trope of the print as imprint on a medium and/or on the mind.
Within this time frame, papers can focus on individual careers—like those of Edward Gordon Craig, Joseph Pennell, Campbell Dodgson, or young Moderns such as C. R. W. Nevinson and Paul Nash. They may also explore trends, groups and societies—from the Vale Group to The Bloomsbury Group, from Arts & Crafts and Aestheticism to modern design.
In parallel with literary texts and art criticism, a variety of publications and related aspects can be examined: lectures given and handbooks produced in art schools and technical schools (such as the Slade, the Central School of Arts & Crafts, and the Camberwell School of Arts & Crafts); reviews published in small magazines such as The Dial or reviews such as The Studio; exhibition and print room catalogues; manifestoes and statements issued by private presses or societies such as the Senefelder Club.

Deadline: please send your proposals (500 words along with a short bio-bibliography) to Sophie Aymes and Bénédicte Coste by the end of December 2014. Note that all papers should be in English. A selection of peer-reviewed articles will be published.
Confirmation: February 2015.

Sophie Aymes (Université de Bourgogne): sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr
Bénédicte Coste (Université de Bourgogne): benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr

Please see below for the latest catalogue of titles relating to modernism from Edinburgh University Press.

Modernism Catalogue Final PDF