cfp.english.upenn.edu

Deadline extended: Early Twentieth-Century Communications: Literatures, Philosophies, Technologies

11 and 12 September 2009 at The University of Winchester

Keynote Speaker: Rebecca Beasley (Birkbeck)

With the advent of modernism, it would seem that the focus of art and literature shifted away from depiction, plot and characterisation to the fact and the methodology of the communication itself. The method of communication no longer seemed to be a transparent depiction or description of events or things, but a problematic and contested medium for transferring messages from artist or author to viewer or reader. Did one school of art communicate in a different way from another? And did other languages communicate in the same way as English? How did communication work? And is it possible to explore individual successes and failures? Was anything being communicated at all?

We invite proposals for papers investigating artistic or literary communication and the idea of communication in the early twentieth century.

Papers might explore:
How art and literature’s communicative technologies developed from those of nineteenth-century realism
How the art and literatures of this period prefigured those we know as the late twentieth-century’s technological developments: television, internet, texting
How less canonical artists and writers reacted to modernism by returning to more traditional forms of communication or following other trajectories
Was there a consistent philosophy of communication that could work across different media
How the communicative potential of language and artistic mediums was expanded
How the philosophies of the period effected or were effected by ostensibly literary or artistic modes of communication

Please send abstracts for 20 minute papers of 300 words to Emile.Bojesen@winchester.ac.uk
by 30 April 2009

Those who have already submitted papers need not re-submit.