Modernism’s Origins in Cinema

This proposed special panel for the 2009 MLA asks whether cinema might be
ranked alongside literary modernism’s established causes. Is it possible
that, rather than manifesting mere spots of author-
specific ‘cinematicity’, and rather than relating to cinema as a sibling,
modernism resulted from the emergence of the image-type and cultural
economy ‘the cinema’ in the same way that it resulted from the discovery
of the unconscious, the rise of relativity in physics, collectivist
notions of mass consciousness and the First World War? Can modernism be
convincingly singled out as a formal literary mode which, were it not for
cinema, would not have existed? And is cinema distinct enough from its
preceding and neighbouring visual media to constitute a separate
influence on literary practice?

Send abstracts of no more than 300 words to andrew.shail_at_ell.ox.ac.uk by
15 March 2009. Submitters will receive an answer by 20 March 2009, and
panellists must be MLA members by 1 April 2009. This panel will have to
be reviewed by the MLA Programme Committee.

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Received on Mon Feb 09 2009 - 16:09:36 EST