modernist studies

The Crisis of the Confined Body is a graduate student conference that will join five Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish), fostering a comparative approach to studies of the body in confinement, isolation and extraction. The conference will offer critical examinations of the body and its contingent relationship to spatial, temporal, cultural and/or linguistic parameters. A theme that lends itself to multiple fields, The Crisis of the Confined Body will promote interdisciplinary collaborations between the humanities, visual arts, and sciences, engaging points of overlap as well as lines of divergence. We encourage presentations that engage a comparative and/or interdisciplinary approach.

Thinking Gender is a public conference highlighting graduate student research on women, sexuality and gender across all disciplines and historical periods. We invite submissions for the February 11, 2011 conference. Submissions are due Friday, Oct 22, by midnight. Please see the following address for full CFP and submission guidelines:

http://www.csw.ucla.edu/research/thinking-gender/thinking-gender-2011

Contact email: thinkinggender@women.ucla.edu

AGSE Call For Papers— Upon A Precipice

The Associated Graduate Students in English (AGSE) at California State University Northridge is currently accepting proposals for its annual graduate conference to be held on April 16, 2011.

PCA/ACA & Southwest/Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations
Joint Conference
April 20-23, 2011
San Antonio, TX
http://www.swtxpca.org
Proposal submission deadline: December 10, 2010
Conference hotel: Marriott Rivercenter San Antonio
101 Bowie Street
San Antonio, Texas 78205 USA
Phone: 1-210-223-1000

Papers are now being accepted on topics related to European popular culture and literature. All approaches and time periods are welcome.

University of Calgary's Free-Exchange Committee will be hosting its annual, interdisciplinary graduate student conference March 4-6 2011 at the University of Calgary and is looking for contributors to critically engage with and explore this year's theme of "working toward leisure."

"We give up leisure in order to have leisure." —Aristotle

Julia Kristeva's work on abjection reminds us that horror is often keyed to things that decompose, rot, or lose their form. This formal concern is a literary one as well: fictions of horror also revel in de-composition, that is, in significations that lose their composure, in letters that refuse to convey, or in utterances that seem to be without subject or object. Horror Studies is seeking essays for a special issue devoted to horror and textuality that will address problems of textual decomposition. In the twentieth century's turn to the film image as arguably the primary vehicle for horror, "Decomposing Fictions" will address how theories and practices of textuality resonate with or operate differently from the visual horror image.

Accepted Seminar: "Empire on its Ear"

BATTLEGROUND STATES
COLLAPSING CULTURES & DARKENED DREAMSCAPES:
SOCIETIES AND IMAGINATIONS IN A STATE OF DISORDER
CALL FOR PAPERS FEBRUARY 25-26, 2011

Call for Papers: Two-day Symposium

'Nabokov and Morality'

University of Strathclyde, 5th & 6th May 2011

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Michael Wood (Princeton)

Papers are invited for a two-day symposium at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow on the 5th & 6th May 2011. The event will involve 15-20 speakers over two days and be based on papers/presentations of 20 minutes each plus 10 minutes for questions. Both days will conclude with a roundtable discussion.

This symposium offers an opportunity to focus the mind on Rose Macaulay's writing in her life, and to consider her work in its cultural context.
The day will be organized as a series of 20-minute papers, beginning with a talk by Sarah LeFanu, Macaulay's most recent biographer, on researching Macaulay's life, and is open to all who have an interest in Macaulay, as a forum to discuss how they have been drawing on her life or writing in their own research, in their own writing, or in another aspect of culture or criticism, perhaps travel writing or journalism.

"[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.