modernist studies

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

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.

Ex-position Feature Topic Call for Papers

The Twenty-First Century: The New Contemporary?

Publication Date: June 2024 (Issue No. 51)

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2023

■ ■ ■

It’s time we began to talk about the twenty-first century. Period.

Periodization is one of those topics to which academics often say there are no well-rounded approaches. We qualify our account, understate the possibility of being spot-on, and even feel apologetic.  

Modern Language Association Annual Convention

4-7 January 2024 Philadelphia 

The Henry James Society invites proposals for the following panel.

Henry James and Event(s)

CALL FOR PAPERS

DISCOURSES OF MADNESS

Special volume of Humanities (Journal): Journal of Interdisciplinarity

Today I felt pass over me a breath of wind from the wings of madness.   

—Charles Baudelaire

Katherine Mansfield: Life, Light, and Renewal

Fontainebleau-Avon, France

13-15 October

An international conference and the annual birthday lecture

organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society

Professor Elleke Boehmer FRSL FRHistS FEA

will be presenting the Keynote Address / Birthday Lecture

Utpictura18.      Call for papers.           Issue on Shakespeare

https://utpictura18.univ-amu.fr/rubriques

Coordination of the volume by:

Jean-Louis Claret, Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA

Jean-Jacques Chardin, Strasbourg Universioty

Anne-Valérie Dulac, Sorbonne Université, VALE

Estelle Rivier-Arnaud, Université Grenoble-Alpes, ILCEA4

The Jonathan Bayliss Society will sponsor a roundtable panel at the 34th Annual Conference of the American Literature Association, to be held May 25-28, 2023, at the Westin Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston.

Narrative Form in American Fiction

deadline for submissions: January 25, 2023

CALL FOR PAPERS: American Studies Association (ASA)

In-person, Le Centre Sheraton,

Montreal, Canada, Nov 2nd-5th, 2023

Session Title: "Pedagogies of Solidarity in Black American Literature at Mid-Century"

Session Organizers: Rachel Carroll, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Ariel Martino, Colgate University

Due Date: Please send abstracts (250-500 words) and a brief bio (max 350 words) to racheljc@illinois.edu and afrasermartino@colgate.edu by Friday, January 20th, 2023.

The tension between adherence to traditional modes of expression, and experimentation has underlain modern Irish literature. Regarded as the epitome of Modernist experimental writing, James Joyce went so far in pushing the boundaries of what constituted prose as to become the object of criticism from such different commentators as Lukács and Pound, both of whom found fault with Joyce for the radicalness of experiment, particularly in Finnegans Wake. However, Joyce himself considered his work to be firmly set in the realist tradition. At a time when he was yet to publish his first collection of lyrics, W. B.

Hugh Kenner: How to Write

Symposium, Université Paris Nanterre, May 5th, 2023

Call for papers