cultural studies and historical approaches

15th D.H. Lawrence International Conference, Taos, New Mexico, July 12-17, 2020

W.B. Yeats’ 1919 paradigmatic claim that “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold” encapsulates the twentieth-century fascination with figuring and conceptualizing the inevitability of instability and the certainty of entropy. For this panel, we are seeking papers on modernisms or modernist studies that dwell in the crumbling center. Approaches may include an investigation of:

            Decay

            Decline 

Decomposition

            Ephemerality

            Exhaustion

            Fragmentation

            Half-lives

            Ruins

“To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment” (Paul Virilio, The Original Accident 10). From the 19th century onward, the intervention of speed upon and across the landscape has created zones of contact between non-human animals and machines that resulted in numerous crashes, deaths, derailments and a wide variety of events that we know as accidents. With the speed of modern time, railway accidents involving humans and animals became a common theme of literary texts, travel books, journal reports, legal discussions, as well as photography and motion pictures. One of the early depictions of moving trains, J. M. W.

International Conference (6–8 June 2019) in Bayreuth

Engaging Cultural Heritage. German-British Perspectives on Regional Memorial Cultures 

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
STRANGENESS/ESTRANGED

‘Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent’, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle, perhaps controverting the words of Prospero, who to his ‘state grew stranger, being transported, and rapt in secret studies’.