modernist studies

This panel brings together diverse readings of the hotel as a peculiarly evocative transfer point in narratives of modernity and postmodernity. It examines the uncanny power of the hotel to symbolize many of the key attributes of modern and contemporary writing, cinema, art, and, indeed, subjectivity: freedom, mobility, anonymity, alienation, limitless self-recreation (to name a few).

To whom does aestheticism belong? Traditionally critiqued as an outgrowth of western bourgeois culture, aestheticism, with its assorted attributes (including aesthetic detachment, disinterestedness, and autonomy) seems ill equipped to respond to our contemporary concerns with marginalization, power imbalances, and the reproduction of hegemonic structures. And yet, the commitment to aesthetic detachment continues to pop up in seemingly unlikely places—in various corners of postcolonial literary production and in the writings of political exiles and Holocaust survivors. We therefore ask to whom aestheticism belongs today, who makes use of it, to what ends, and under what circumstances?

Several examples of literature produced from the late Victorian age narrate great concerns about the future and the destiny of humanity, concerns that would be significantly exacerbated in the twentieth century by the First World War, soon followed by the Second, the unspeakable savagery of Nazis, the nuclear detonations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, last but not least, by the terror of a nuclear apocalypse during the long Cold War. Modernism appears thus as a cultural movement that, as Vincent Sherry maintains, “works most indicatively within an imaginative concept of time interrupted”, of a time that presents itself basically as provisional and utterly deprived of a future.

Catherine Malabou places her signature concept of “plasticity” within the material encounters between the Kantian, Hegelian, and Derridean threads of the continental philosophical tradition and emerging developments in neuroscience, epigenesis, and political organization. Her recent work has demonstrated the relevance of these encounters to fields as diverse as trauma studies, gender and queer studies, hermeneutics, anarchism, postcolonialism, artificial intelligence, evolution, anthropogenic climate change, sexuality, and affect studies, to name just a few.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Reconfiguring Corporeality in 21st Century

How would it be possible to think the reality of the mind, of the I-subject, without a lived body?

—    Husserl

Subject: Call for Papers: Confluence at CEA 2023 (War Literature and Trauma Panels)

Call for Papers, Confluence at CEA 2023

Special Topic: War Literature and Trauma

March 30-April 1, 2023 | San Antonio, Texas

Sheraton Gunter Hotel, San Antonio | 205 East Houston Street, San Antonio, TX 78205

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Confluence for our 53nd annual conference. Submit your proposal at www.cea-web.org

'The Social Hieroglyphic': Modernist Reading Practices and their Afterlives  

CFP: Modernism and Literature: A (Re)consideration

Proposals due October 31, 2022

OVERVIEW:

CFP: Modernism and Literature: A (Re)consideration

Proposals due September 1, 2022

OVERVIEW:

The Review of English and American Literature

Call for Papers

Special Issue: The Plantationocene

Deadline for Submissions: March 10, 2023

Coming to Charlotte Brontë's 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, for the first time, one may be struck by its apparently forward-looking elements, ones that do not seem to line up with expectations for early Victorian novels. In terms of the novel's explorations of inner consciousness, one observer finds that Jane Eyre is a precursor of modernist authors such as Proust, Woolf, and Joyce. Furthermore, Jane's keen awareness of women's equality with men in terms of the right to education, access to the wider world, and happiness in a relationship has distinctly feminist overtones. But may Jane Eyre be classified as a modernist and feminist work of literature?

Primary Area / Secondary Area

Comparative Literature / World Literatures (non-European Languages)

Chair(s)

Sneha Chowdhury (Brown University) 

Mantra Mukim (University of Warwick) 

Abstract

The Review of English and American Literature

Call for Papers

Special Issue: In/hospitality

Deadline for Submissions: December 31, 2022

In Our Time: F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 21st Century 

Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden June 26-July 2, 2023

Niklas Salmose, Site Director; Helen M. Turner, Program Director

As we move through the 2020s, anticipating and celebrating centennial milestones in the life and career of F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is easy for us to view him as a writer defined by his historical moment. This conference aims to position Fitzgerald as a figure relevant to contemporary theoretical, social, and political concerns. Just as the 1920s were a period of flux and transition, our current decade is proving equally as turbulent. What does this writer have to say to readers living through a period of change and uncertainty?