modernist studies

Essay Collection  

Abstracts/Expressions of interest are invited for an essay collection: British Theatre and the 1920s

These new essays will explore British theatre in the 1920s across a spectrum of genres and locations. The book’s focus is on theatre in a broad sense, encompassing a range of performance cultures and demonstrating some of the major ways in which theatre operated within the broader culture and society of the time.

 Topics might include (but are not limited to):

The dramatic legacy of WWI

Political theatre

Melodrama

Moderns and Others: genre, gender, faith and form in noncanonical British literature  

(deadline 3rd November 2023) 

The John Dos Passos Society is proud to announce its 2024 biennial conference in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, at the stunning fifteenth-century Villa Cà Erizzo Luca, where Dos Passos was stationed as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in the winter of 1918.

Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence  (2001) was not a blockbuster in the sense of Jaws, E.T or Jurassic Park (the other films covered in this book series) – it did however make a heavy return on its near $100 million budget and received critical praise in the media. The film is the product of several authors: science fiction writer Brian Aldiss on whose short story ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’ (1969) the film was based; Stanley Kubrick, whose project it had been initially before passing it over to Spielberg in the wake of Jurassic park, Spielberg made and released the film two years after Kubrick’s death.

Spiritual Responses to American Literary Modernism~ Call for Chapter Proposals

At the end of 1920, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, This Side of Paradise, explored the crises of a new generation who had “grown up to find all Gods dead… all faiths in man shaken.” Scholars and theologians concur that American literature, like the culture at large, was undergoing a passage from a spiritual to a secular outlook throughout the 1920s and 30s. This transition was so dramatic and widespread that that the years between 1925-1935 have been termed “the American Religious Depression.” Indeed, many texts from these two decades present their own version of the larger cultural secularization thesis.

Call for Papers, CEA 2024: Atlanta

March 21–23, 2024

Westin Buckhead Atlanta

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on IRISH, SCOTTISH, AND WELSH LITERATURE for our 53rd annual conference.

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

W. B. Yeats

We are especially interested in presentations that incorporate topics related to the conference theme of TRANSFORMATIONS, but we will consider all proposals.

The keyword for the 2024 NeMLA convention is “surplus”—for critical and creative work that, in addition to the commonly associated meanings of profit and value, can be more broadly construed as excess or excessive, as surfeit, or what is leftover, or unwanted. 

"Beyond the Capitals of Decadence" - Seminar @ ACLA 2024 

Organizers: Florian Zappe &James Dowthwaite

CALL FOR CHAPTERS. The humanitarian Crisis in the 21st century: challenges of liberal democracies to deal with the humanitarian crisis 

Publisher: Nova Science Publishers

Maximiliano E. Korstanje- University of Palermo, Argentina

Christina Akrivopoulou – Hellenic Open University, Greece – Editor in Chief of Int. Journal of Human Rights and Constitutional Studies.

Ambiguous and paradoxical, the concept of hospitality has been extensively explored in its social, political, and ethical dimensions. In his cycle of seminars on hospitality (1995-97), Jacques Derrida reconstructs hospitality’s conceptual history, highlights its complexities and contradictions, and underlines the imbrication between hospitality and hostility. Building on Derrida’s reflections, works such as Rosello’s Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (2001), McNulty’s The Hostess: Hospitality, Femininity, and the Expropriation of Identity (2006), and Baker’s Hospitality and World Politics (2013) have considered the global, transnational, and gender aspects of hospitality.

The poetic term “strophe” carries a long-standing implication of movement. It refers to the first part of an ode and is defined as a unit of movement with a song performed in Ancient Greek Tragedy by the chorus as it turned one way (strophe), then another (antistrophe) and then stood in its track (epode). In subsequent definitions, it came to be associated with the song of troubadours and became known for its flexibility in discussing poetic performance with music, dance, gesture and breath. Apart from strophe, movement is also implied in the description of other poetic terms.

Remembering “the magic of the B.B.C. box” long after he had left for London, George Lamming described the event of a Caribbean Voices broadcast: “West Indian writers would meet in the same house and listen to these programmes,” absorbing “the curriculum for a serious all-night argument” and then wrangling “among themselves and against the absent English critic.” With venues for print often vanishingly small, radio assumed an outsized importance for postcolonial writers in the middle of the twentieth century, offering larger audiences, steadier remuneration, and programming with a generative mix of stories, poems, drama, and criticism. How did wireless outlets, and networks, shape literatures emerging from the protracted end of European empires?

This proposed edited collection on Michael Cimino will represent the first, full critical engagement with the work of this divisive figure: acclaimed and lionised with The Deer Hunter (1979 Oscars for Directing and, presented by John Wayne, Best Picture), dismissed and demonised with Heaven’s Gate, condemned for The Year of the Dragon, and marginalised and forgotten thereafter, only to be haltingly reappraised shortly before his death in 2016 (with tributes at the Venice and Locarno film festivals).