modernist studies

Essay Collection  

Abstracts/Expressions of interest are invited for an essay collection: British Theatre and the 1920s

These new essays will explore British theatre in the 1920s across a spectrum of genres and locations. The book’s focus is on theatre in a broad sense, encompassing a range of performance cultures and demonstrating some of the major ways in which theatre operated within the broader culture and society of the time.

 Topics might include (but are not limited to):

The dramatic legacy of WWI

Political theatre

Melodrama

Moderns and Others: genre, gender, faith and form in noncanonical British literature  

(deadline 3rd November 2023) 

Influenced by Le Corbusier’s ‘Radiant City’, the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St. Louis were a modernist, utopian vision of urban renewal. However, they quickly slid into disrepair and in 1972 were partially demolished in a nationwide, televised spectacle. The failure of Pruitt-Igoe shows us that the dystopia is always necessarily contained within the utopia: despite the intentions of its architect Minoru Yamasaki, in planning the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects, it was always destined to be a vision of 'functional' racial segregation by its federal ideators. Although the edict of racial segregation was thrown out by the Supreme Court, the dystopian seed had been planted, and serves as an exemplar for what a dystopia truly is: a utopia unraveled.

Spanish Sapphic Modernity

Edited by Angela Acosta (Davidson College) and Rebecca Haidt (The Ohio State University)

Call for Papers, CEA 2024: Atlanta

March 21–23, 2024

Westin Buckhead Atlanta

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on BRITISH LITERATURE OF THE 20th AND 21st CENTURY for our 53rd annual conference.

"Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease." –Virginia Woolf

We are especially interested in presentations that incorporate topics related to the conference theme of TRANSFORMATIONS, but we will consider all proposals.

Crossing Boundaries: Literary and Linguistic Intersections in Modernist Studies

Roma Tre University

Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Sala Ignazio Ambrogio

Via del Valco di San Paolo, 19 – Rome

22-23-24 May 2024

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Václav Paris (City University of New York)

Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia)

Call for Papers

What can be said about epic today? Although M.M. Bakhtin famously declared the impossibility of epic in a modern, polyphonic world in 1941, the category has remained a dynamic source of artistic and critical interest. The works considered in studies like Franco Moretti’s Modern Epic (1994), Sneharika Roy’s Postcolonial Epic (2018), or Václav Paris’s Evolutions of Modernist Epic (2021) re-evaluate epic as a multifarious category capable of shedding light on the global, postcolonial, and postmodern condition of contemporary literature—either as a site of resistance or as a form of cultural domination. Yet even in its new, polyphonic forms, the idea of epic is rarely severed completely from its classical roots.

CALL FOR CHAPTERS. The humanitarian Crisis in the 21st century: challenges of liberal democracies to deal with the humanitarian crisis 

Publisher: Nova Science Publishers

Maximiliano E. Korstanje- University of Palermo, Argentina

Christina Akrivopoulou – Hellenic Open University, Greece – Editor in Chief of Int. Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies.

Ambiguous and paradoxical, the concept of hospitality has been extensively explored in its social, political, and ethical dimensions. In his cycle of seminars on hospitality (1995-97), Jacques Derrida reconstructs hospitality’s conceptual history, highlights its complexities and contradictions, and underlines the imbrication between hospitality and hostility. Building on Derrida’s reflections, works such as Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (2001), McNulty’s The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (2006), and Baker’s Hospitality and World Politics (2013) have considered the global, transnational, and gender aspects of hospitality.

The poetic term “strophe” carries a long-standing implication of movement. It refers to the first part of an ode and is defined as a unit of movement with a song performed in Ancient Greek Tragedy by the chorus as it turned one way (strophe), then another (antistrophe) and then stood in its track (epode). In subsequent definitions, it came to be associated with the song of troubadours and became known for its flexibility in discussing poetic performance with music, dance, gesture and breath. Apart from strophe, movement is also implied in the description of other poetic terms.

Remembering “the magic of the B.B.C. box” long after he had left for London, George Lamming described the event of a Caribbean Voices broadcast: “West Indian writers would meet in the same house and listen to these programmes,” absorbing “the curriculum for a serious all-night argument” and then wrangling “among themselves and against the absent English critic.” With venues for print often vanishingly small, radio assumed an outsized importance for postcolonial writers in the middle of the twentieth century, offering larger audiences, steadier remuneration, and programming with a generative mix of stories, poems, drama, and criticism. How did wireless outlets, and networks, shape literatures emerging from the protracted end of European empires?

This proposed edited collection on Michael Cimino will represent the first, full critical engagement with the work of this divisive figure: acclaimed and lionised with The Deer Hunter (1979 Oscars for Directing and, presented by John Wayne, Best Picture), dismissed and demonised with Heaven’s Gate, condemned for The Year of the Dragon, and marginalised and forgotten thereafter, only to be haltingly reappraised shortly before his death in 2016 (with tributes at the Venice and Locarno film festivals).

Greetings!
We hope this message finds you well. We are delighted to announce that the Department of English at Daulat Ram College, under the aegis of IQAC, invites papers for an International Conference on “Modernism, India and the Colonial Gaze” to be held in New Delhi on February 1-2, 2024.