A satirical post on a bulletin board in a hallway of a university arts building condemns the literary genius — citing Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats, Baudelaire, Poe, Hemingway, the Beats, and others — for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, proposing that we take anti-doping measures to cull the canon of those who would cheat at their craft.  Jesting aside, however, such satire points not only toward the near-ubiquity of psychotropic plant use to the literary imagination, but also to the cultural expectation placed upon the artist to trope, to turn the mind as well as the word.

When James Joyce was composing Finnegan’s Wake with Samuel Beckett as a scribe, someone knocked on the door. Joyce responded, “Come in?” When he realized he had mistakenly written this down, Beckett asked Joyce how far back to cross out. Joyce—so the story goes—decided to leave it in the novel, delighted at the way his life had blended with his work. How can we understand the dynamic relationship between art and life? When does the depiction of life become life itself? We propose a panel to investigate performance, specifically, as a liminal space between art and life, or between text and action, that offers the opportunity to explore the possibilities of the real and the unreal, of assumption and disruption, of subject and object.

In Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain reflects that the Armistice has “come too late”: “[the people] did not cry jubilantly: ‘We’ve won the War!’ They only said: ‘The War is over’” (421-2). This panel addresses practices of memory and commemoration, particularly relating to the fraught relationship(s) between war and peace, and the ways in which, as Madelyn Detloff reminds us, we exist in a “‘patched’ present troubled by modernist constellations of personal trauma, militarized violence, and ‘imperial loss’” (Modernism 10).

The College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania is requesting proposals/abstracts for its fifth international conference, to be held on Saturday, April 1, 2017. The conference theme is “Making Strangers: Outsiders, Aliens and Foreigners.”

The 2016 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize

The competition for The 2016 Leonard Boyle Dissertation Prize for Medieval Studies is currently open. This prize will be awarded to an outstanding dissertation in any field of medieval studies. The dissertation must be written by a Canadian or by someone resident in Canada. Entries are adjudicated by the Dissertation Prize Committee, a subcommittee of the Canadian Society of Medievalists (CSM). The prize consists of a cash award as well as a membership in the CSM for three years. Members automatically receive copies of the journal Florilegium and the CSM's newsletter “Scrinium.”