modernist studies

"[A] mode of writing is an act of historical solidarity…it is the relationship between creation and society, the literary language transformed by its social finality, form considered as human intention and thus linked to the great crises of History." - Roland Barthes

CFP: Eliot at the American Literature Association

The T. S. Eliot Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2011 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 26-29, at the Westin Copley Place in Boston. Please send proposals or abstracts (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Professor Nancy K. Gish (ngish@usm.maine.edu). Submissions must be received no later than January 15, 2011.

For information on the ALA and its 2011 conference, please see http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/english/ala2.

This seminar seeks to examine world literature in the wake of German Romanticism. German Romanticism has often been seen as a response to a philosophical crisis that emerged from Kant's formulations of theoretical and practical reason. Because, from the standpoint of theoretical reason, phenomenal nature is always "contingent" and subordinated to the laws of causality, the world of nature is, by definition, not free. But Kant also maintains that freedom, in its resistance to phenomenal desires and causes, is the unique trait or mark of a humanity that is distinguished from animals and machines, though freedom itself cannot ever appear in nature, and thus cannot be theoretically known as such.

This seminar considers the production of narrative in post 1950 cinema as it relates to aesthetically and politically charged questions of globalization and the desires for Utopia.

Queer Studies Easter Symposium
11 April - 17 April, 2011 Mexico City

Conference Languages: English, Castilian, German, French and Nahuatl

Conference Homepage:
http://www.enkidumagazine.com/chics/queerstudies/qs_11_intro_en.htm
Deadline for submission of paper proposals: 15. November 2010

Cultural criticism and film history once approached melodrama as a failed and lowbrow form of tragedy characterized by excessive rhetoric, one-dimensional characterizations, and schematized moral polarizations. Subsequently, feminist studies re-framed debates about melodrama by studying it as a genre addressed to and about women. Moving from a focus on domestic and family dramas, scholarship of the last few decades now exhibits a newfound interest in melodrama as a mode representative of socio-cultural conditions, particularly in transcolonial and transnational contexts.

The Battle of the Brows: Cultural Distinctions in the Space Between, 1914-1945
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
June 16-18, 2011

2011 Northeast Modern Language Association
7-10 April
New Brunswick, NJ, Hosted by Rutger's University

Taking Natalie Clifford Barney's "Academy of Women" as an example of what Tirza Latimer characterizes as "women converging in Paris between the wars to establish the terms of on-going debates about representation, sexuality, and the politics of gender," this panel will explore works written by women in Barney's circle AND works written within the broader context of transnational women's writing in twentieth-century Paris. Please send 200-300 word abstracts to Chelsea Ray @ chelsea.d.ray@maine.edu. by 14 October.

The Queer Studies Coalition at Stanford University announces

Queer Horizons
Undergraduate Queer Studies Conference

2011 Mardi Gras Conference

Special Topic Panel: "Traumadies: Where Trauma and Comedy Converge."

North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC
February 25-26, 2011

At our second annual Association of English Graduate Students Symposium, we wish to explore the many ways that identity manifests itself as an object for study. The concept of identity permeates every text, from its narrator's organizing gaze to the the genre in which it is catalogued. Indeed, we invite you to question the term "text" itself, as "text" has come to be identified as anything from a novel to a Facebook page to a film.

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Proposals are now accepted for the ACLA panel titled "Migrations".
March 31 - April 3, 2011: Vancouver, Canada

Papers for this session should explore the issue of migration in the broadest sense of the term. Potential topics can include:

- migrations of texts and of concepts;
- translations and mistranslations;
- migrating genders and identities;
- queer migrations;
- migration and citizenship in world literature; or
- (im)migration narratives.

We are particularly interested in papers that explore connections between multiple forms of migration. Analyses of literary works, theoretical essays, films, and the visual arts are equally welcome.

Eudora Welty Society, Call for Papers
American Literature Association Conference
May 26-29, 2011, Boston, MA

Violence in the Fiction of Eudora Welty

Red Feather Journal invites critical and/or theoretical examination of the child image to further our understanding of the consumption, circulation, and representation of the child and childhood throughout the world's visual mediums. The journal welcomes submissions that examine a broad range of media: children's film, Hollywood film, international film, Television, the Internet, print resources, art, or any other visual medium.