Time Travellers: Transtemporal Movement in Queer Feminist Modernisms

Modernist Studies Association Conference

The Drake Hotel

Chicago, IL, Nov 7-10, 2024

This panel focuses on the political, aesthetic benefits and limits of transtemporal techniques as found in the works of twentieth-century modernist women writers. Whether through the forging of literary or personal genealogies, sudden intrusions of the asynchronous into the present moment, or replications and/or completions of fragmented textual forms, women writers of this period, in the words of Elizabeth Freeman, made use of literary modernism’s “interruptive archaisms”, achieved via "fragmented structures, nonlinear chronology, [and] paratactic juxtaposition", to conceptualize organizations of time and space outside of “straight time”, in which normatively inadequate or excessive expressions of identity could comfortably exist (Freeman7; Boone 5; Boellstorff 3). This proposal invites papers that examine the stylistic and ethical implications of the restless movement between contemporary and historical stylistics, old and new texts, and personal/cultural pasts and futures in writings by queer or non-normative modernist women. What alternative histories and domains are made possible in the works of such literary time travellers? What is still fruitful and applicable, in their invocations of alternative temporalities, to our present political moment? Conversely, what manifestations of identity or personhood are excluded in such textual movements, and what potential (real or imaginary) worlds are foreclosed? Papers that deal with depictions of fluctuation in identity over time, revisions, excavations, or parodies of historical/familial narratives, strategic adoptions of archaic forms, collages of temporally discrete images or texts, and attempts at transtemporal connection through intertextual citation will all be welcome. 

Please submit a 200-400 wd abstract, along with CV and bio, to syates93@mail.ubc.ca by April 2, 2024.