modernist studies

Paper proposals exploring the role of women in times of war are invited for a Special Topic Session at the upcoming Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association convention. Although this is currently an open topic, proposals which examine various aspects and effects of wartime traumas and/or traumatic memories are particularly welcome.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a brief CV to Natalie Carter (nlcarter@gwmail.gwu.edu) at The George Washington University, by March 01, 2011. Receipt will be acknowledged, and notifications will be sent by March 15.

'Beauty can be a double-edged sword – as capable of destabilizing
rigid conventions and restrictive behavioural models as it is of
reinforcing them.' --Eleanor Heartney (2000)

Throughout history, the notion of 'party' has served as a site for exploring prevailing liminalities: from ideological display to decorous intimacies to social multitudes, the party has served as a means of further repressing or extolling self within private and public domains, projecting identity formations of the other, or combating the enigmatic reflections of the public world. The dialectic of inclusion and exclusion—who is invited into a space, a sphere, an identity—has been used as a social tool and political wedge while at once advancing the bounds of restraint within prescribed modes of behaviour.

Human Rights, Literature, the Arts, and Social Sciences
International Conference,
Central Michigan University,
Mt. Pleasant, MI
November 10-13, 2011

More than fifty years after the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the attainment of universal human rights remains elusive. The persistence of repressive and discriminatory national policies, cultural practices, wars, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, rape, and other forms of violence threaten the maintenance of human rights.

The AnaChronisT 15 (2011) invites research papers, interviews, and book reviews on literatures in English for its next issue, to be published in Winter 2011/2. Papers are to be sent to The AnaChronisT (Department of English Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, H–1088 Budapest, Rákóczi út 5.) by Tuesday, 26 April 2011.

The AnaChronisT http://anachronist.atw.hu/ welcomes submissions by graduate and doctoral students as well as academics. The requirements of application are as follows:

- one hard copy of the essay sent to the above address;

This session poses photography as a formal inquiry, a provocation, and a "wound" for literary and cultural studies. What is a photograph, and how do we continue to read and write with it?

250-word abstracts to riordan@umn.edu or julia.faisst@gcsc.uni-giessen.de by 10 March 2011

*Please note: This is a special session pending MLA approval*

REVISED CALL FOR PAPERS

Interacting with Immersive Worlds: Third Brock University Conference on the Interactive Arts & Sciences

BROCK UNIVERSITY, ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO

JUNE 13th - 14th, 2011

http://brocku.ca/conferences/immersive-worlds

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS EXTENDED NOW FEBRUARY 28th 2011

NEW CONFERENCE FEATURES:

Additional keynote address by Michael Schmaltz, President, Digital Extremes

http://www.digitalextremes.com/

Behind, beside or within the Unreal Cities of modernism, are there also Unreal Natures? Among the sparks, ghosts and shells of the human, are there also Unreal Animals? Abstracts are solicited for an MSA 13 panel of three to four papers that consider non-realist, avant-garde or fantasy representations of nature and the animal in modern literature, comics, painting or other arts. How are such representations susceptible to the ecological or economic discourses of ecocriticism, or to the biopolitical stakes of human-animal studies? Send a paragraph abstract and scholarly bio of 2 to 3 sentences to Glenn Willmott at gw12@queensu.ca by April 7, 2011.

The Rest Is Silence

Sometimes silence is not golden – just yellow.
Anon.

When they hold their tongues, they cry out.
Cicero

Submissions due May 15, 2011 to aciswest2011@gmail.com

This is a proposed panel for the 2011 Modernist Studies Association Conference. A complex network of complicities and parallelisms between writing and emerging media—photography, film, sound recording, and the like—have been associated with modernism, a period roughly analogous with Walter Benjamin's paradigmatic "age of mechanical reproduction" (or "technological reproducibility"). Modernist poets and novelists—Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Guillaume Apollinaire, Louis Zukofsky, H. D., Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, James Agee, John Dos Passos, and Richard Wright, just to name a few—often refer to and draw upon such media in formulating their own representational strategies.

Seeking papers that explore the often ambiguous nature of satire's object, the lines that blur between satire and celebration, and the difficulty of predicting or controlling audience response.

Recent studies, such as "The Irony of Satire," suggest that perception of satire's object often rests in the reader's or viewer's own biases. This panel is interested in exploring the implications of this ambiguity in the production, deployment, and teaching of satire. How does this affect satire's admittedly subversive purpose? Is this satire's power, its limitation, or both?

250-word abstract by 15 March 2011

The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) Conference is being held November 5-6, 2011, at Scripps College in Claremont, CA. PAMLA has over a hundred approved sessions on a wide range of literary and language topics. For the list of sessions, guidelines for how to propose a paper, and the online paper proposal form, please go to: http://www.pamla.org/2011/

For any questions about PAMLA, please email PAMLA Executive Director Craig Svonkin: svonkin@netzero.com

CFP: Modernist Ethics (MSA 13 Buffalo, NY; 6-9 October, 2011; deadline April 1 2011)
I am seeking papers that address how modernist fiction articulates ethics, challenges existing ethical models, and explores areas of ethical ambiguity. Possibilities:
• tensions or continuities between early-twentieth-century ethicists (e.g., Spencer, Moore) and the ethics of modernist fiction
• tensions or continuities between modernist fiction and contemporary ethics (e.g., Levinas, Derrida, Badiou, Zizek; or Nussbaum, Rorty, et al.)
• the ethics of particular writers or even of particular works – what do they posit, what leave unsaid or indicate is unsayable?