modernist studies

"The first swallows of a recognisably contemporary philosophy and theory took their flight," writes Frederic Jameson, in [Georges] Bataille’s journal Critique.1 They nested in still other journals whose names continue to hold an almost talismanic power over their fields (Tel Quel, Merkure, Présence Africaine, Cahiers du cinéma, and Screen), as well as a later generation of journals born out of theory’s first American heyday in the 1970s (Signs, SubStance, Semiotext(e), Critical Inquiry, October, and Diacritics), not to mention book series published by university and small presses committed to theory’s translation into English and proliferation throu

In the very first issue of Comparative Literature René Wellek challenges A. O. Lovejoy’s insistence that the explanatory power of traditional periodization has been exhausted. In the pages of PMLA, Lovejoy had advocated that literary critics think in terms of “Romanticisms” in the plural rather than “Romanticism” in the singular. “I propose to show,” Wellek counters, “that there is no basis for this extreme nominalism, that the major romantic movements form a unity of theories, philosophies, and style, and that these, in turn, form a coherent group of ideas each of which implicates the other.” Nearly seventy years later, the question of periodization has become central to literary studies once again.

The Languages of Truth
ACLA 2018
https://www.acla.org/languages-truth

Organizers: Jan Mieszkowski (Reed); Julia Ng (Goldsmiths, U of London) 

Sounding Transnational Literature

American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Annual Meeting

March 29 – April 1, 2018, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA

Co-organizer: Julie Cyzewski, Murray State University

Co-organizer: Lisa Hollenbach, Oklahoma State University

https://www.acla.org/seminar/sounding-transnational-literature

Since the 1960s, marking a transition from a Friedian conception of artistic modernism to one turning around John Cage and his New York circle, performance art has forged a strong relationship to moving-image art writ large. Responding to technological developments across imaging, motion-capture, and virtual or augmented reality research, performance artists have created increasingly sophisticated works that defy ready classification.