modernist studies

The word boredom has been in circulation since Ancient times, in the shape of a variety of synonyms --acedia, taedium vitae, horror loci, melancholy, ennui, spleen-- and bearing a theological stamp, since it was believed to be a demonic sin in the Christian tradition. In modernity, however, for the “enlightened subject” (Goodstein, 4), as a response to social and economic transformations, boredom has become a secular experience concerned with temporality, signifying loss of meaning and feeling of emptiness in the pace of modern life. In critical circles, boredom remains a hybrid phenomenon that brings together a variety of contradictory definitions.

The 3rd Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium:

Faulkner, the Twenties, and Modernism

Royal Holloway, University of London

May 28th, 2020, *ONLINE*

*Having taken into account the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have decided that it would be in the best interests of our applicants to cancel our upcoming Faulkner Studies in the UK Colloquium from occuring face to face.

DEADLINE EXTENDED - NOW MARCH 18, 2020. This panel pursues MSA's conference theme this year, "Streets," by discussing "Street Smarts."  

Modernism has its smart sets, not just Mencken’s but in Stein’s salons and Woolf’s Bloomsbury, and in the serious philosophical engagements (and antipathies) of T.S. Eliot, Dora Marsden, Samuel Beckett, and others. But how do “street-smarts” inform conversations about modernism’s epistemological and intellectual positions? How do the streets, with their marginal figures and spaces, refine critical views of what counts as knowing? How do the streets re-orient epistemology with a phenomenology of everyday things? 

The T. S. Eliot International Summer School

4-12 July 2020, University of London

Director: Professor Anthony Cuda | Deputy Director: Elizabeth Micakovic

The 29th Annual Conference of the Arkansas Holocaust Education Committee

October 15, 2020 at the Holiday Inn & Northwest Arkansas Convention Center, Springdale, AR

For almost 30 years, the Arkansas Holocaust Education Committee has sponsored a Holocaust education conference that draws hundreds of students and teachers from the local area and that has drawn survivors and presenters such as Deborah Lipstadt, Henry Friedlander, and Judith Cohen.

At the daylong conference, participants—mostly secondary students—attend a demanding and wide-ranging program, including an overview of the Holocaust, a presentation by a survivor, and two seminar-style breakout sessions.

In keeping with the Modernist Studies Association 2020 conference theme of the “streets,” the Carson McCullers Society is pleased to sponsor a roundtable discussion series about southern modernist women writers and the streets. The roundtable panel is intended to spark conversation among Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Margaret Walker, Katherine Anne Porter, Kate Chopin, Anne Spencer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lillian Hellman scholars, among others, about the innovations and interventions of southern modernist women writers in creating street scenes and characters.

Extended Call for Papers: Now due April 2020

Surveillance and Social Justice: Big-data politics, predictions, and potentials

Edited by Dr Leanne McRae (Curtin University), and Associate Professor Mike Kent (Curtin University)

Abstracts Due: 1 April 2020

 https://sites.google.com/site/cultware/current-research/surveillance-and...

Pedestrian Modernisms – Politics and Poetics of Walking

MSA 2020, Brooklyn, USA

Please send 300-350 word abstracts to S.Sengupta@sussex.ac.uk or dasapala1@gmail.com by 15th March, 2020. 

Back Talk: Women’s Writing, Modernism and Resistance 

The Third Modernist Network Cymru Conference 

Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK 

17-18 June 2020 

Keynote speakers: Prof. Kirsti Bohata (CREW, Swansea University), Prof. Diana Wallace (University of South Wales) 

Co-organised by Josie Cray, Elizabeth English and Siriol McAvoy

The Politics of Escapism

Panel at the 2021 MLA Convention

TOronto, DC, January 7-10, 2021

Co-Organizers:

Greg Sharzer, University of Toronto (gsharzer@gmail.com); Keith O'Regan, York
University (keith.oregan@gmail.com)

Escapism, the desire to abandon a difficult present for an ideal alternative,

Midway through New Grub Street (1891), Reardon reunites with his wife Amy. In preparation, he leaves behind his overcoat. This attire, once “fairly good,” is now long past its prime, “the edges of the sleeves were frayed, two buttons were missing, and the original hue of the cloth was indeterminable.” Reardon knows Amy well, but not well enough: her attention at the meeting is quickly directed to “his muddy and shapeless boots,” and her desire for “a renewal of amity” conflicts with her shock over her husband’s appearance: “[S]uch attire degraded him in her eyes; it symbolised the melancholy decline which he had suffered intellectually.

Call for Proposals

Millay, Lowell, Teasdale, and the ‘Sentimental’ Modern Poet

Modernist Studies Association

Brooklyn, NY

22-25 October 2020

Organized by Sarah Parker (Loughborough University) and Francisco E. Robles (University of Notre Dame)

We invite submissions to an interdisciplinary conference on working -class fiction, to be held at the University of Birmingham in June.

In a recent Guardian article Tim Lott laments the death of the English working-class novel and likewise that of the English working-class literary novelist. He qualifies his pronouncement, by remarking the delineation ‘English’ is used advisedly, for ‘the same is not true of Scotland’. Nevertheless, he may have also appended the modifiers ‘White’ and ‘Male’ before ‘English’ so as to complete the chain of associations traditionally linked to working-class writing.

Resources for American Literary Study, the leading journal of archival and bibliographical scholarship in American literature, is inviting submissions for 2020. Covering all periods of American literature, RALS welcomes both traditional and digital approaches to archival and bibliographical analysis. The journal also welcomes pedagogically focused submissions examining archival study in the classroom. Due to the nature of the journal, there is no minimum or maximum length for submissions, and we encourage innovative projects and approaches that will serve as resources for the field.