modernist studies

Giorgio Agamben is one of the most compelling contemporary theorists of literature. Yet despite ever intensifying interest in Agamben’s work, his studies of literature and poetics remain a less explored dimension of his corpus. This seminar seeks spirited contributions that engage with Agamben’s reflections on literary texts, as well as those mobilising the concepts and interests of his aesthetics into new readings. Papers addressing the connections between literature and other aspects of Agamben’s thought (such as sovereignty and biopolitics) are welcome, as are explorations of his writing’s intellectual and historical contexts – including its affinities with the work of thinkers such as Benjamin, Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Hamacher.

Since the nineteenth century to the present, fragmentary writing has been widely deployed in literature and philosophy (i.e. Ernst Bloch, Schlegel, Mallarmé, Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Kafka, Beckett etc.) as a strategy to disrupt the idea of totality by and through writing. Fragmentary writing as an incomplete totality, bears absent voices and traces and alludes to a whole.

By the turn of the twentieth century, the ‘new astronomy’ had developed into a proper scientific discipline, with its own sets of instruments, its own journals, its own jargon, and its own interpretative authority. With the acceleration of new discoveries and insights into stellar phenomena, the emerging mass media ensured that this astronomical knowledge fascinated an even wider audience in the late 19th and early 20th century. At the same time, literature across Europe responded to the fascinating astronomical developments in a variety of modes, styles, and genres.

With the invention of photography in the mid-19th century, reality no longer depended on the autonomous interpretation of the subject's view, but was instead objectively perceived and recognizable. Contrary to painting, photography fueled changes in perception and perceived reality by realistically reproducing the object as it exists. Now, the 21st century stands under the aegis of the image, a culture dominated by pictures, visual simulations, illusions, copies, and reproductions—creating an inflection point where visual paradigms compete with and even threaten traditional practices.

NeMLA, Boston, MA. March 5-8

In a 2011 Economist Prospero blog entitled "After the Unthinkable," the effects of 9/11 on literature was compared to those of World War II in that it "will continue to be a marking point." As we approach the twentieth anniversary of September 11, 2001, this panel seeks to move beyond representations of the day itself to explore the various nuances of post-9/11 literature by looking at how the long political and cultural aftermath have left their mark on literary and visual culture.