CFP- MSA XI- Panel: Modernist In/Hospitality (5/3/09; 11/5/09-11/8/09; Montreal)

full name / name of organization: 
Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, University of California, San Diego
contact email: 

Abstracts are sought for a proposed panel for the 11th Annual Conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Montreal, Canada, November 5-8, 2009.

The conference website is available at http://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa11/index.html.

Modernist In/Hospitality

The period stretching from the 1870s to the mid 1920s was marked by a sharp increase in global interactions. The rise of transnational political projects, culminating in the foundation of several international institutions and events, testifies to the emergence of a new global consciousness concomitant with the modernist period. This dynamics was experienced first hand by many modernists, whose life and works bear the mark of different languages and cultures. This panel seeks to investigate modernist productions (in literature, music, visual arts, theater, architecture etc…) in the light of their engagement with boundaries between cultures, spaces, languages, and forms. Modernist works constitute spaces of interaction and in/hospitality, be it linguistically, textually, or culturally. I invite paper proposals that study the modalities of these contacts. Possible topics include linguistic and cultural translation, untranslatability, the cosmopolitan and the vernacular, liminality, hybridity, gender/sexuality, avant-garde experimentation. Papers interested in interactions between Western and non-Western languages and cultures are particularly welcome. Please send 250-word abstracts and short biographical note to Edwige Tamalet Talbayev (etamalet@ucsd.edu) by 3 May 2009.