modernist studies

Throughout recorded history – traversing time and space, cultures and nations – the notion of community has fostered both collaboration and conflict. Communities, much like the individuals who inhabit them, come into being, evolve and eventually disappear. As such, they are the philosophical, social, cultural and political representations of their members. Whether defined by their geographical borders or collective identities, they share common goals, beliefs and needs. The significance of community building, community belonging and community intersections is thus filtered into literature, art, music and film.

CFP: ATHE Performance Studies Focus Group Emerging Scholars Panel
DEADLINE EXTENDED! New deadline: February 15, 2011

The Performance Studies Focus Group at the Association of Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) conference invites submissions of papers for its Emerging Scholars' Panel. The theme of the conference is 'Performance Remains, Global Presence: Memory, Legacy, and Imagined Futures' and it takes place at the Palmer House Hilton Hotel in Chicago, Illinois from August 11-14, 2011.

In The Writing of Fiction, Edith Wharton says that the difficult task of the short story is "to suggest illimitable air within a narrow space." This is not a strictly formal imperative: in the more than 85 short stories she published in her lifetime, Wharton returned again and again to the themes of suffocation, entrapment, and entombment. Her chronicles of life in New York, Paris and Italy, her war stories and her ghost stories are not simply illustrations of a state of society (although they are that too), nor are they merely portraits of individuals in moments of strife.

This is an extended deadline for the book collection, Encountering Buddhism in Twentieth-Century British and American Literature. We are compiling an edition of essays which will contribute to a coherent and critical examination of British and American literature's engagement with Buddhism in the twentieth century. We aim to show how twentieth-century literature has been influenced by Buddhism, and has been a major factor in bringing about Buddhism's increasing spread and influence in the West. Buddhism's influence on a range of key literary texts will be examined in the context of those societies' evolving modernity.

'Anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor - or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant'

(Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005)

Whilst questions of human subjectivity and/or identity remain a persistent focus in literary and cultural studies, this one-day postgraduate symposium aims to consider how we might explore and account for agency from unexpected sources. Papers, plenaries and discussions at this symposium will place the non-human, the object, the supposedly 'lifeless' at the centre, with a view to casting new light on and rethinking definitions of human agency and identity from an unconventional, askance perspective.

Inviting papers on the intersections between autobiography and political discourse in African literatures. Topics may concern circulation, audience, and form in any period. Submit 300 word abstract and short bio to taiwo.adetunji.osinubi_at_umontreal.ca
(Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi, Études anglaises, Université de Montréal) by March 5.

We are welcoming graduate and undergraduate student papers or full panel proposals that address any area of literature (British, American, world, colonial and post-colonial, medieval, modern, contemporary, etc.), rhetoric, composition, or pedagogical studies. Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to xialpha.utc.conference@gmail.com. Submissions must include name, institutional affiliation, student status (graduate or undergraduate), contact information (name, phone number, address, email address), and a list of any audio/visual equipment needed for your presentation. Presentation time should be limited to 20 minutes (usually about ten pages).

The Theory Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its seventh annual interdisciplinary spring conference:

Repetition and Revolt
Featuring keynote speaker Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto)

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
April 14-16, 2011

Woolf's novels and essays often sustain a central tension between individuals' freedoms or agency and what they perceive groups to demand of them. For example, A Room of One's Own displays the tensions between intellectual freedom and the mind of the crowd, while Orlando wrestles in ambushes set up by means of unstable identity categories. This approved special session looks for papers that discuss Woolf's concerns about the impact of group life on her characters, or that place her literary agonists in proximity to group-driven events and trends between the wars.

Negation and Negativity: Theory, Form, and Representation
June 3, 2011
Los Angeles, CA

Keynote Speakers:
Sianne Ngai, UCLA Department of English
Joseph Bristow, UCLA Department of English

"Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing?"
I remember
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"
-T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

When an author writes a literary text either wholly or partly in dialect, he or she is making a conscious choice to represent something other than the standard language. This conference invites papers that explore this process. We welcome papers from across different periods, different genres and different geographical locations, including regional, social and world dialects. Questions that might be addressed include, but are not restricted to:

The 19th annual
Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM)
will be held April 1-2, 2011
at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb,Illinois.
Keynote speaker:
Dr. Emily Auerbach, University of Wisconsin-Madison,
author of Maestros, Dilettantes, and Philistines (1989) and Searching for Jane Austen (2004); Director of the UW Odyssey Project; and Project Director of the "Courage to Write" radio series.
This year's theme is The Power of the Humanities. Inspired by Dr. Auerbach's keynote address and her work across the humanities, the organizers encourage research that examines the influences of language and literature that have significantly altered those disciplines and people's lives.

3rd Global Conference
Fashion: Exploring Critical Issues
Thursday 22nd September – Sunday 25th September 2011
Mansfield College, Oxford, United Kingdom

This panel invites papers for a session dedicated to both William Carlos Williams's A Voyage to Pagany and Williams's association with the little magazine, Pagany (1930-1933). Abstracts may include, but are not limited to, the following topics: travel writing, transatlantic modernism, cosmopolitanism, expatriates, nativism, romance, realism, landscapes, Paris in the 1920s, American modernism in Italy, collectivities, little magazines, the serialization of White Mule, or Williams in connection to other Pagany contributors, including Dos Passos, Caldwell, H.D. or Zukofsky.

Send 300 word abstracts to JillRichards@Berkeley.edu by March 10.