modernist studies

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.

This panel explores forms of dissent adopted by twentieth-century transatlantic avant-gardes as a means of challenging traditional genres and social codes. Since the inception of European experimentalism during the first decades of the twentieth century, a series of art movements engaged in radical production that questioned the established state of affairs. From the Cubist adoption of multiple viewpoints, through the Futurist celebration of technology and speed, the Expressionist distortion of form, to the Dadaist sense of provocation and the irrational juxtaposition of images in Surrealism, avant-garde art and literature has set precedents on an international level of exchanges.

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.