category: modernist studies

UPDATE -- 2013 MMLA Convention: Is the Artist Present? (Confirmed Special Session)

Thu, 23 May 2013 15:06:40 -0400

In 2010, performance artist Marina Abramović presented a retrospective show at MOMA entitled Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present that included one new performance. From March 14 to May 31, Abramović performed a solo piece in the museum’s atrium; she invited visitors to sit silently across from her for as long as they chose. In this way, she was “present” in more ways than one; being present was her piece, she was present in her piece, and she presented her piece all simultaneously. This unique and profound performance, and the title of the show itself, raises questions about the role of the artist in contemporary art.

These questions are equally relevant to the discussion of contemporary fiction. In some postmodernist texts, the author (or some version of the author) has reinserted him or herself, complicating Roland Barthes declaration of the death of the author in 1967. What is this aberration and what has caused it? Is the author suddenly present, sitting in the room as it were, across the table from us as we read? Has the author been resuscitated, resurrected, or at least propped up in apparent lifelikeness? And if so, what are the implications of this presence?

This is now a confirmed special session for the 2013 M/MLA in Milwaukee. Please send abstracts and brief vita to Dr. Brett Wiley at bwiley1@mvnu.edu by June 15, 2013. The conference takes place in Milwaukee from Nov. 7-10, 2013.

[EXTENDED DEADLINE] The Marginalised Mainstream: Fading and Emerging NEW DEADLINE

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:06:55 -0400

Second Annual Marginalised Mainstream Conference: Fading and Emerging, 12-13 September 2013 NEW DEADLINE: 17 June 2013

‘Fading and Emerging: Tracing the Mainstream in Literature and Popular Culture’, the second annual Marginalised Mainstream conference, seeks to explore the issue of fading and emerging in popular literature, films, and other media that have been subject to critical marginalisation. How does the mainstream itself foster the process of fading and emerging? How are vanishing and appearance dealt with in popular narratives?

In literature, characters fade into the background or erupt onto the page with sudden violence to affect the plot. The deus ex machina is a staple of thrillers, but where else (and how) is it incorporated? Cinema and photography have offered a unique space to experiment with the concept of fading and vanishing, both literally and figuratively, but also traces and mirages - pressing half images against the psyche invites shadows in and encourages us to see what was never there (think Hitchcock's Psycho). Metaphors, such as dawn and twilight, shadows and pools of light, abound. Such devices have been used in storytelling since the popular myths of the ancient world. This conference seeks to understand their significance.

We invite submissions from postgraduate students, early career academics and established researchers working in the fields of literature, cultural studies and elsewhere in the humanities to answer these questions and beyond. The aims of this conference strive not only to consider fading and emerging as aspects of narrative but also outside of the fictive world: how and where are trends and fads begun? Why are icons so attractive? What sparks crazes, new styles and popular movements in storytelling, fashion or music? And what is the cause of the more recent trend of remaking and rebooting older films and franchises?

These issues are often the subject of academic marginalisation, which begs the question: what trends can we see in academia? What causes a subject to fall out of favour? And why do so many academics fall prey to the idea that something is only worth studying after it has fully emerged?

We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of the theme of fading and emerging that could include, but are not limited to:

• Fictional traces
• Revelations/concealment
• Dawn/twilight
• Wallflowers and supporting characters
• Vanishing and waning
• Deus ex machina
• Fade-in, fade-out
• Styles, trends and movements
• Generic inception/genesis
• Fads and crazes
• The icon – the ‘It’ girl, the ‘It’ film
• Popular re-emergence
• Disappearance
• Re-reading (or re-viewing)
• Remakes and reboots

It goes without saying that writers, texts or topics need not be canonical. In addition, we actively encourage papers discussing writers, texts and visual media that engage with mainstream cultures from around the world.

Keynote speakers: Dr Kate Macdonald (Ghent University), Dr Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton), and Professor Yvonne Tasker (University of East Anglia)

Panels will follow the format of three 20-minute papers followed by questions.

Abstracts of no more than 350 words are invited by Monday 17 June 2013. Acceptances will be sent out by no later than Monday 1st July 2013. Please email abstracts and a cover sheet including your name, university, contact information, plus a brief biographical paragraph about your academic interests or any enquiries to marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com.

Conference organisers: Brittain Bright, Emma Grundy Haigh and Sam Goodman

Conference email: marginalisedmainstream@gmail.com

Conference website: www.marginalisedmainstream.com

Short Story at MMLA 2013

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:53:38 -0400

This session welcomes critical papers on the short story for the annual MMLA convention. Proposals may be related to the conference theme of Art & Artifice, but it is not necessary.

Please send 250-word abstracts by May 31, 2013, to Katy L. Leedy, Marquette University, katy.leedy@marquette.edu.

The convention will be held November 7-10, 2013, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For more information, visit the conference website at http://www.luc.edu/mmla/annualconvention.html.

Assimilation & Vice in American Literature, NeMLA Convention, Harrisburg, PA (April 3-6, 2014)

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:45:55 -0400

We typically think and speak of assimilation not only as a process that results in cultural hybridity but as a process accomplished through hard work and sacrifice. But what role does vice play in this assimilation narrative? Moreover, what do forms of vice tell us about the time period from which the author writes? In speaking of 'vice,' we will not limit ourselves to criminal acts (although we will not exclude these, either); rather, we will also speak of the narrative functionality and potentiality of activities like dancing, gambling, alcohol consumption, and adultery in assimilation stories.
Please send 250-300 word abstracts to Francisco.Delgado@stonybrook.edu.

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

Interested participants may submit abstracts to more than one NeMLA session; however, panelists can only present one paper (panel or seminar). Convention participants may present a paper at a panel and also present at a creative session or participate in a roundtable. http://www.nemla.org/convention/2014/cfp.html

GAMES OF LATE MODERNITY; Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: 75 Years Later (January 15-17, 2014)

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:18:09 -0400

GAMES OF LATE MODERNITY
Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: 75 Years Later (January 15-17, 2014)

The end of this year will be marked by the 75th anniversary of Johan Huizinga’s classic study of the Homo Ludens. Its main thesis is, as striking as it is simple, well known: Culture is founded on and as a form of play. Huizinga’s aim was to understand play as a ‘totality’. The element of play can be observed in all different aspects of culture, ranging from seemingly innocuous leisure activities to the uttermost serious and advanced systems, such as the financial world or political institutions.

Though, self-evident as Huizinga’s thesis still seems to be, with regard to multiple Huizinga-quotations in various fields of contemporary scholarship, the modern-day situation also raises a pivotal problem: it seems impossible to keep thinking of game and play as a humanistic principle of knowledge, ethics and aesthetics in the exact same sense as Huizinga did. Modern day experiences such as warfare and economical and scientific fraud, wherein every rule of the game is being postponed, force us to revise and amplify Huizinga’s thesis, in order to rediscover Huizinga’s far-reaching significance today. The purpose of this three-day conference is to bring together experts from a number of disciplines to shed light on Huizinga’s thesis. Participants are asked to address at least one of the following issues:

1. Playing after Auschwitz: how is it possible to formulate a theory of play that is able to deal with culture not only in its elegant and innocuous appearances, but in its most cruel and tragic forms as well?

2. To play or being played with: The power of the culture industry tells us that we are playing all of the time, from the first until the very last minute. But one has to come to terms with the fact that this can hardly be the free-play Huizinga has proclaimed.

3. From cultural history to sociology: intellectuals such as Levi-Strauss and Foucault and many more have deployed an idea of game as the structure society. How can they revise and strengthen Huizinga’s concept of game and play?

4. The ethos of play: to play means to play by the rules. But isn’t the disappearance of any rules whatsoever precisely late modernity’s main characteristic? How to deal with those who cheat?

We welcome individual abstracts as well as panel proposals, from every relevant field, such as sociology, anthropology and criminology, history and historiography, economy and management studies, ethics, philosophy, aesthetics and cultural studies, biology and psychology.

Speakers are: Loïc Wacquant, Elena Esposito, Giorgio Agamben (t.b.c.), Dubravka Ugrešić, Thomas Macho, Jos de Mul, Joyce Goggin, and Helmut Lethen.

If you are interested in participating, please submit a 300-words paper proposal and a short résumé of your current research by September 1, 2013 to Léon Hanssen, Professor of Life Writing and Cultural Memory, Tilburg University, email: info@gamesoflatemodernity.org

Participants will be informed of acceptance by September 30, 2013. The conference fee will be €250 and includes: two receptions, lunch and refreshments during all three days of the conference, free admittance to De Pont (museum of contemporary art), access to all artist performances and video screenings.

Together with the keynotes a number of papers will be selected for a book to be published by Amsterdam University Press and an affiliated international academic publishing house.

[UPDATE] “Making Meaning at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Texts” SAMLA Nov. 8-10 Abstracts by 6/7

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:14:37 -0400

SAMLA Convention 2013
November 8-10, 2012
Marriott Atlanta Buckhead Hotel
Atlanta, Georgia 2013

“Making Meaning at the End of the World: Apocalyptic Texts”
Chair: Lynne Simpson, Presbyterian College
Affiliated Group: College English Association

As R.E.M., that great band from Athens, Georgia, famously sang, “It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.” What is driving our current American obsession with the apocalypse? Papers that explore imagined endings from environmental disasters to zombie invasions are welcome. What do apocalyptic literature, television, and film mean for us culturally, and what might we discern from these often cautionary tales? Please send abstracts of around 500 words to Lynne Simpson at lsimpson@presby.edu by June 7.

Trickster: (Re-)constructing the World from its Edges (NeMLA 2014, April 3-6)

Mon, 20 May 2013 14:07:29 -0400

45th Annual Convention, Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
April 3-6, 2014
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Host: Susquehanna University

The session topic coincides with recent renaissance of the interest in trickster, comprehended both as an agent of change and instrument of progress, but also a vehicle of instability, and a driving force of destruction. The growing awareness of this character, which embodies uncertainty at the moment of change, reflects upon the sensation of tumble of well-established categories and time-honored institution of the world as we know it.
The session lays its conceptual roots in the comprehensive monograph by Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes this World, which was first available in 1998, and has recently been republished in 2008, and again in 2010. While recognizing mythological provenience of a trickster, Hyde puts this character in the comparative perspective, and promotes study of a trickster as an archetype, that has constantly reappeared in different forms in culture from antiquity to the modern times. The panel offers to build on the scholarship dedicated to a trickster by critically exploring one particular aspect of this character, i.e. his ability to create alternative worlds with the use of acquired or self-invented skill, and further confuse these constructs with reality.

This Panel will include papers that present modern incarnation of archetypal Trickster, as presented in literature from the 19th till 21st century. Successful articles should be concerned with the creational aspect of the trickster, his/her ability to “make the world,” and to confuse the notion of reality. We are particularly interested in the portrait of the trickster as an architect of alternative/virtual realities, visual illusions, and confusing imagery.

Please submit 300-500 word abstract and brief bio to Joanna Madloch at madlochj@mail.montclair.edu

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Please include with your abstract:
Name and Affiliation
Email address
Postal address
Telephone number
A/V requirements (if any; $10 handling fee with registration)

The 2014 NeMLA convention continues the Association's tradition of sharing innovative scholarship in an engaging and generative location. This capitol city set on the Susquehanna River is known for its vibrant restaurant scene, historical sites, the National Civil War museum, and nearby Amish Country, antique shops and Hershey Park. NeMLA has arranged low hotel rates of $104-$124.

The 2014 event will include guest speakers, literary readings, professional events, and workshops. A reading by George Saunders will open the Convention. His 2013 collection of short fiction, The Tenth of December, has been acclaimed by the New York Times as “the best book you’ll read this year.” The Keynote speaker will be David Staller of Project Shaw.

[UPDATE] VI International Gothic Congress ‘Gothic Convergences’, UNAM, Mexico City, April 1, 2 & 3, 2014

Mon, 20 May 2013 12:33:25 -0400

During the last years, Gothic Literature has just begun to be accepted as a literary field worth of study among Mexican scholars. The doors remain open to deepen into the study of a style whose manifestations go beyond the barriers represented by time, culture, genre, and art modes.

OBJECTIVE: After the great response received in the previous Gothic Congresses (2008 - 2012), the aim is to keep encouraging the interest in the Gothic among both students and scholars at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and other Mexican institutions. To achieve this, we propose to start from the study of the plural presence of the Gothic in various modes of art, as well as time and space contexts.

DATES: March 1, 2 & 3, 2014 (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday).

PLACE: Salón de Actos I, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature (FFyL), UNAM (Nacional Autonomous University of Mexico), Mexico City.

CALL FOR PAPERS: We are calling for papers centered upon the idea of the Gothic as a timeless and intertextual plural phenomenon in literature and other arts.

Other Possible topics:
. History and evolution of Gothic Literature
. Gothic elements in Mexican and Latin-American Literature
. National Gothic Literatures (British Gothic, Scottish Gothic, American Gothic,
etc.)
. Gothic Literature and Postmodernism
. The future of Gothic Literature
. Gothic in Film and Art

Those interested in taking part in the congress are asked to send an abstract of their paper in 200 words, including its title; as well as a short summary of their academic background (50 words) with full name of the participant.
The PROPOSALS will be received until NOVEMBER 30, 2013.

The participants will be given around 20 minutes to read their papers. The works can be presented in either English or Spanish.
Keynote speakers will be given 50 minutes to read, with 10 minutes to answer questions from the public.

Those whose papers get accepted to participate in the congress can send a version of the paper to be included in the congress yearbook between April 4 and April 30, 2014. Such version must include both reference footnotes and the corresponding bibliography.

All proposals, papers and questions are to be sent to:

coloquio_gotico@hotmail.com / antonio.alcala@itesm.mx

Blog: http://gothiccongress.blogspot.com/
cfp categories:
american
eighteenth_century
film_and_television
international_conferences
modernist studies
popular_culture
science_and_culture
theory
twentieth_century_and_beyond
victorian

The Arts of Travel; MMLA, Milwaukee, Nov 7-10, 2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 08:55:28 -0400

One might consider traveling well to be an art in and of itself. While there is a lot of logistical planning, organizational skill, and practical preparation that must go into a trip, the art of traveling well--one might argue--is the ability to adapt, even to thrive, when the planning fails. This panel invites papers that consider traveling from perspectives that move beyond the merely practical. Does the art of traveling vary by location? By time period? By cultural perspective? What kinds of arts and artifacts are encountered by travelers, and what qualities are necessary to appreciate them? Is it possible to understand "foreign" arts as a traveler, or must one remain forever distanced from art objects that are produced by a culture that is not one's own? What might be the definition of an "artificial" traveler or an "artificial" destination or an "artificial" artwork? What are the implications of seeing a replica in a museum, for example, instead of the "real thing"? Why do so many people consider it an artificial or inauthentic experience to go on a packaged tour, but not so if they strike out on their own with a guidebook and itinerary? This panel welcomes papers on any time period and any travel destination, so long as they frame the process or product of travel through the lens of art and/or artifice.

MMLA Conference theme this year is Art and Artifice. Papers are welcome from scholars at all levels and focusing on any time period.

Inquiries and proposals should be directed to Professor Andrea Kaston Tange via email (akastont@emich.edu). Please indicate name, institutional affiliation, and rank on your proposal or in your email. Please send 500-word proposals by May 31, 2013.

Anaphora Looking for New Journal and Press Board Members

Sun, 19 May 2013 18:29:11 -0400

If you have a strong publication record, and if you are tenured in your academic or publishing job, please send a note of interest in participating as a Board Member of the Anaphora Literary Press, and the Pennsylvania Literary Journal. PLJ is now in its 5th volume, and with 11 issues in print, it's ready to undergo some changes. Your area of study should be modern or current literary or creative writing studies in all genres (novel, poetry, film, art, theater). You should be interested in actively contributing by finding established peer-reviewers and by soliciting work from established creative and critical writers that you are familiar with. This is not a silent position. You might also help by contributing business and creative operations and methodology ideas on how to improve the organization, publishing process and other components of the press and the journal. Email a query to director@anaphoraliterary.com, with a brief statement of what you can offer in this position, and a paragraph biography. You can learn more about Anaphora at www.anaphoraliterary.com.