cfp.english.upenn.edu

Modernism and Affect essay collection (Edinburgh University Press)

How might affective reading practices inform our critical engagement with modernist texts? Can modernist formal innovations help us to think through the diverse theories of feeling explored in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies? Can such theoretical paradigms provoke new reflection on some of the key debates within modernist studies, and even invite us to remap the parameters of ‘the modern’? Proposals are invited for an essay collection on _Modernism and Affect_, commissioned by Edinburgh University Press. The collection will comprise 10-12 original 7,000 word essays, and aims to present new scholarship on modernist literature, film, and visual arts considered in the light of theory's 'affective turn'. Essays might explore the role of feeling in particular modernist works and/or engage with broader conceptual, theoretical, and disciplinary concerns, which might include:

The pleasures and discontents of modernism and modernist difficulty
Guilt, shame, and modernist discourse
Modernism's affective critical modes (including indifference/ disinterest/ dispassion)
Modernist intimacies
Modern trauma/ traumatic modernisms
Subjectivity, personhood, and the doctrine of impersonality
Modernism and anti/-sentimentalism, and the relationships between nineteenth- and twentieth-century affective modes
Affect and modernist epistemology
Affect and modernist temporalities

Please send an abstract (300 words) and a brief biography to julie.taylor@lmh.ox.ac.uk by 1 October 2012.