modernist studies

Dear Conradians/Colleagues/ Scholars/Academics

This panel will seek to understand the draw of Weimar Germany for the many British and American modernist writers who spent time there.  In keeping with the theme of this year's MSA, papers that consider the attraction of Weimar street life, in all its varieties, are particularly encouraged.

Please send a 250 word abstract and short biography by 3/31/2023.

Modernism & Writing Pedagogy Roundtable

Call for Abstracts – 100-150 words

Deadline: May 24, 2023, 11.59 EST, to lhartm13@jhu.edu

Organizer: Laura Hartmann-Villalta, Johns Hopkins University

3-4 slots available

In the spirit of the roundtable organized and chaired by Nissa Ren Cannon in MSA Portland entitled, “Modernism in the Writing Classroom,” this roundtable recognizes the suitability of modernist texts for writing classrooms of all sorts. This roundtable seeks to share pedagogical approaches at the intersection of modernism and writing. The call is purposefully broad.  

Some topics to consider:

DEADLINE EXTENDED - deadline for submissions: March 24 2023

Contemporary Modernisms - Call for Papers 

Institute of English and American Studies and the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform

Goethe University Frankfurt

25th–27th May 2023 

Confirmed Speakers:

John Brannigan (University College Dublin)

Julie McCormick Weng (Texas State University)

Václav Paris (City University of New York)

Barry Sheils (Durham University)

The Irish Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Forum invites proposals for a guaranteed roundtable at MLA 2024 (4-7 January) in Philadelphia, PA. 

This roundtable considers points of collision, comparison, and friction in the diasporic literary and cultural histories of the Global South and Ireland. How have different legacies of conquest, occupation, and resistance determined understandings of belonging to knowable communities? In turn, how have distinct practices and experiences of diaspora helped to effect specific forms of identity, affiliation, and tendency? And how have literary and cultural works served to articulate these relations into the fraught present? 

Memory and Poiesis between Aesthetics and Rhetoric

Edited by Amalia Salvestrini and Fosca Mariani Zini

Among the various fields that have historically contributed to the constitution of Aesthetics as an autonomous discipline in the 18th century is rhetoric, from which Aesthetics has taken terms, concepts and problems that it later develops and transforms (Saint Girons; Franzini; etc.). One of the themes with which the relationship between Aesthetics and Rhetoric can be investigated is memory, understood in its poietic dimension that concerns various fields of human productive and artistic activity.

International T. S. Eliot Society MMLA CFP 2023

CALL FOR PAPERS

vol. 4/2023

The editorial board of Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature encourages researchers and young scholars to submit their article proposals that  comprise with the profile of the journal.

Forum for Contemporary Issues in Language and Literature is an international multidisciplinary periodical that welcomes for review any innovative and challenging research article encroaching upon the fields of literature, linguistics, philosophy and cultural studies.

The manuscript submitted for publication is to be original and unpublished. It should not have been simultaneously submitted for review in any other journal.

CFP: MLA Annual Convention 2024 (4-7 January)

Proposals for presentations on travel writing in English from any period or part of the world. Please submit a 200-word abstract by April 1, 2023. The RMMLA conference will be held in Denver, CO, from Oct. 11-14, 2023. 

CFP: Robert Graves and The ‘60s: “All You Need is Love”?

British writer Robert Graves (1895-1985) associated with multiple counterculture movements, including the modernist vanguard and anti-war poets, made forays into Eastern mysticism, reimagined the Classical period, contemporized ancient myths and rituals, experimented with hallucinogens, and managed to publish over 140 books, including what some might term his magnum opus, The White Goddess, an encyclopedic work he subtitled “A historic grammar of poetic myth.” Above all else, he is remembered as a poet of Love, exploring the subject across his long career in its many iterations: romantic, allegorical, ritualistic, the literary—the coupling of Poet and Muse.

It is more than a cliché that gender plays a crucial role in religion, as most religious orders in the world were, and currently are, dominated by men. The role of women in cultic settings is, as a rule, secondary, as is also the authority of female ministers of religion, while the social benefits of those appointed with religious duties are also incomparable with the privileges received by men.  This year, we invite proposals that explore the female share in leadership roles related to religion (saints, prophetesses, priestesses, nuns, preachers, witches, shamans and more), and emphasize how their achievements are reflected in history and art. How prominent female figures have compromised men’s secured positions of power in socioreligious structures?

The year between December 29th 2022 and December 29th 2023 would have been the hundredth of William Gaddis’ life. Between 1955, when he published The Recognitions, and 1998, when he died shortly after completing Agapē Agape, Gaddis was notorious for a disproportion between reputation and readership. Being reflexively labelled “difficult,” with his own novels’ wry figurations of characters writing “for a very small audience,” and with a tendency to be categorized (though not always actually read) alongside the increasingly unfashionable “high postmodernists”… all this might have made it hard to envisage his work surviving into the 2000s.

Conrad's works feature linguistic sophistication, narrative complexity, psychological nuance, subtle irony, political contestation, and historical challenge. While some might seek to avoid difficulty, this panel instead embraces difficulty and considers how precisely the most challenging aspects of Conrad's art can empower students and cultivate subtlety, humanistic and historical breadth, and even humility. This panel invites papers that consider how the multivalent difficulty of Conrad’s works — syntactic, psychological, political, or aesthetic — offers pedagogical opportunity.  Comparative approaches are welcome.