modernist studies

The Global Political Novel - ACLA 2026 Montreal

updated: 
Wednesday, September 3, 2025 - 2:43pm
Aleksandar Stevic
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

Back in the mid-twentieth century, the political novel used to be a respectable field of study, commanding the attention of influential critics like Irwing Howe. These days, not so much. In fact, most scholarly books with the phrase ‘political novel’ in the title published over the past three decades or so were not written by professional critics, but rather by historians and political scientists (including Christopher Harvie, John Uhr, and Stuart A. Scheingold).

ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 8:06am
George Kovalenko (New York University)
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

ACLA 2026: Marxism & Lyric

This seminar examines the lyric as a central and contested form in Marxist literary theory. Often viewed as the genre most resistant to historical materialist analysis—associated with interiority, formal autonomy, and expressive immediacy—lyric has nonetheless emerged, across multiple Marxist traditions, as a nexus for theorizing the contradictions of subjectivity, value, and mediation under capital.

(Dis)enchanting Modernity: Witchcraft, Magic, and the Occult in Global Literatures (ACLA 2026)

updated: 
Thursday, August 28, 2025 - 8:04am
Kayla Penteliuk, Université de Montréal
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 2, 2025

In a 1918 speech at Munich University, sociologist Max Weber observed a widespread cultural loss of belief in magic and the supernatural: “the fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization, and above all, by the ‘disenchantment of the world.’… the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life." Weber’s idea of disenchantment is borrowed from the Enlightenment-era playwright Fredrich Schiller's exploration of Entzauberung, the "de-divinizing" of art, literature, culture, and existence. As Richard Jenkins clarifies, Weber's disenchantment is “right at the heart of modernity,” a product of the world becoming “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans ...

Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders

updated: 
Saturday, August 23, 2025 - 8:09am
Maximiliano E Korstanje / University of Palermo, Argentina
deadline for submissions: 
Thursday, October 30, 2025

CALL FOR CHAPTERS:  Fear as a Political Emotion: The Rise of New Violent Orders (Nova Science Publishers).

 

Maximiliano E Korstanje, University of Palermo, Argentina

Adrian Scribano, CONICET, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina

 

Robert Creeley at 100, A Celebration of His Life and Poetry

updated: 
Wednesday, August 20, 2025 - 10:51am
The Charles Olson Society
deadline for submissions: 
Friday, September 12, 2025

The Charles Olson Society will sponsor panels at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture, to take place in Louisville, Kentucky, February 16-21. 2026 marks the Centenary of poet Robert Creeley’s birth, and the Charles Olson Society will welcome abstracts pertaining to any aspect of Creeley’s life and work. Creeley was a central poet in the development of Black Mountain Poetry, and along with his life-long friend and companion in verse, Charles Olson, Creeley greatly influenced the development of American poetics after World War II. As he said, “I write to realize the world as one has come to live in it, thus to give testament. I write to move in words, a human delight. I write when no other act is possible.”

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