modernist studies

‘In 1900 he believed in fairies; that was bad enough; but in 1930 we are confronted with the pitiful, the deplorable spectacle of a grown man preoccupied with the mumbo-jumbo of magic and the nonsense of India’

                            W. H Auden’s ‘The Public versus the late Mr William Butler Yeats’, 1939

In 2015, the University of Edinburgh Press launched a multivolume series of scholarly, refereed anthologies entitled ReFocus. Edited by Drs. Robert Singer (CUNY) Gary D. Rhodes (Oklahoma Baptist University), and Frances Smith (University of Sussex), each book focuses on a critically overlooked American film director who worked in the studio system, independent cinema, experimental filmmaking, or documentary tradition. Volumes published so far in this series include: Preston Sturges, Amy Heckerling, Delmer Daves, Kelly Reichardt, Elaine May, Spike Jonze, William Castle, Barbara Kopple, and Budd Boetticher, among others.

Declinations of Risk

An Archeology of Aesthetic-Literary Imaginaries from the 20th Century to the Present

28-30 March 2022, University of Turin

Organised by: Department of Humanities, University of Turin in collaboration with the ANR Project ALEA

We invite chapter proposals for a collection of critical essays that examine how women vigilantes, anti-heroines and outlaws of this era were represented in movie serials, radio dramas, films, comics, and pulp fiction.  

As this will be a multidisciplinary collection, we encourage submissions from scholars in any of the numerous fields that examine the representation of women in American popular culture from 1865-1940. The call is open to a broad spectrum of methodological and critical approaches, and we invite submissions from seasoned as well as emerging scholars.  

As early as the 1920’s, Robert Musil remarked on the enormous effort it takes to stand still in a world that demands constant motion. Reflecting on the zooming street he sees through his window,the protagonist of Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften comments:

“Könnte man die Sprünge der Aufmerksamkeit messen, die Leistungen der Augenmuskeln, die Pendelbewegungen der Seele und alle die Anstrengungen, die ein Mensch vollbringen muss, um sich im Fluß einer Straße aufrecht zu halten, es käme vermutlich… eine Größe heraus, mit der verglichen die Kraft, die Atlas braucht, um die Welt zu stemmen.”

E. M. Forster had something aesthetic in mind with that famous phrase, but it applies as well to more practical or material kinds of systems, networks, and patterns in American fiction, from the whaling industry in Moby-Dick (and the Pequod as metonym for that industry) to the various networks - transportation, financial, criminal, political, logistical, electronic - explored in the work of writers like Frank Norris, Philip K. Dick, Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, William Vollmann, and Jonathan Bayliss.

In Episode 9 of James Joyce's Ulysses, “Scylla and Charybdis,” Stephen Dedalus develops a theory about the origins of Shakespeare’s works that is both original and controversial. It is in the National Library of Ireland that Dedalus, in a wild and winding conversation, develops his ‘Hamlet theory’. The episode stages the strong and sometimes comic appeal of a biographical approach to Shakespeare’s works and, at the same time, casts Dedalus – Joyce’s alter ego – variously as Hamlet, Hamlet’s father, Shakespeare, and as a modern-day Ulysses.

Cadernos de Literatura Comparada, no. 46 (June 2022)

Modernisms Revisited II: 1922-2022

In 2022, we will celebrate the centenary of the Modern Art Week, consensually hailed as a landmark in Brazilian art and literature and as the event that gave rise to Modernism in Brazil. As Alfredo Bosi has noted, the Week was “the meeting point of the various trends that had been taking hold in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro since the First World War and the platform that allowed the consolidation of particular groups”, which, in the following years, would significantly change the direction of the country’s intellectual production.

CCLA  Annual Conference, June 21 – 24, 2022 

Call for Panel Paper Presentation: “Post-Magical Realism in the Post-truth Era.” 

The Canadian Comparative Literature Association invites contributions to the 2022 annual conference on the theme of “Divergence and Convergence in Comparative Literature” within the context of equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism from June 21 to 24, 2022.

***The deadline for paper submissions to ACLA 2022 has been extended to Nov 30, 2021.***

 I am recruiting contributors for a collection of scholarly essays with the working title Starcrossed Century: Astrology in Global Society from World War One to Covid. The book is designed to address the identification of the history of astrology with "premodern" history. The historiography of astrology is very active and intellectually exciting, but it focuses almost entirely on the period before 1800. Yet never have there been more astrological believers and practitioners than today. So far I have committments for two essays, one (by me) on American astrologers and COVID, and one on astrology and identity in the sixties counterculture. I want to avoid too heavy a focus on the Anglophone world (although I would love a serious essay on astrology

We’d like to invite humanities scholars to contribute to our edited volume, Humour in Times of Confrontations, 1901 to the Present, to be published in 2022/23 by Routledge in the Humour in Literature and Culture series.

We are pleased to announce this call for paper for the proposed anthology in this emerging field of Digital Humanities.  We are seeking academics and professionals in the field who might like to send us a scholarly abstract for consideration for inclusion in the book. The aim of this scholarly collection is to bring forth how digital humanities has shaped humanities studies and our culture.

Concept note:

The Evelyn Scott Society invites abstracts of 1-2 pages on the American writer Evelyn Scott (1893-1963).

Papers may focus on any of her works (novels, memoir, poetry, young adult literature), and they may take any contemporary critical approach. We are especially interested in papers that investigate the process of canonicity, the literary networks to which Scott belonged, or the role of disability in her career, but all topics will be considered. Scott participated in various and major literary currents during her writing life, including Imagism, naturalism, and modernism, and she had a wide variety of literary mentors, including Lola Ridge, Theodore Dreiser, Waldo Frank, William Carlos Williams, and Jean Rhys, among others.