modernist studies

Panel: Afro-diasporic Futures Before Afrofuturism

Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Conference

March 5-8, 2020 

Boston, MA

Seeking papers on the politics of futurity in Afro-diasporic writing from before the mid-twentieth century for the following guaranteed session at NeMLA 2020. Abstracts due by September 30 on NeMLA's website. Visit https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17890 to submit.

The Carson McCullers Society is pleased to announce an open call for panel papers on any topic related to the life and works of Carson McCullers for one of two guaranteed panels at the American Literature Association (ALA) conference in San Diego, California, on May 21-24, 2020. Papers that approach McCullers’ works from interdisciplinary, comparative, and disability or gender studies perspectives are especially sought; however, all topics will be considered.

Pulp magazines were a series of mostly English-language, predominantly American, magazines printed on rough pulp paper. They were often illustrated with highly stylized, full-page cover art and numerous line art illustrations of the fictional content. They were sold at a price the working classes could afford, though they were popular with all classes, including president Woodrow Wilson. The earlier magazines, such as All-Story, were general fiction magazines, though later they diversified and helped solidify many of the genres we are familiar with today, including western, detective, science fiction, fantasy, horror, romance and sports fiction.

Clerks, bureaucrats, copyists, scriveners, archivists, bookkeepers – they are, along with the repositories of written facts they work and sometimes live in, organs of the greater corpus of the archive. This human machinery of archons (Derrida) is hidden in full display, at once peripheral and essential to the archive, managing its material flows, embodying the Law, maintaining and guarding the archive’s very possibility of existence.

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.

Literature and Event: Reformulations of the Literary in the 21st Century

Humanities Research Centre, University of Warwick

Saturday 15th February 2020

Keynote: Prof. Derek Attridge (York); Prof. Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) 

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.

“No Kind of Place”: Location, Migration, and Imagination
The International Flannery O’Connor Conference

St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto, Canada,

June 18-21, 2020

Call for Papers

The International Lawrence Durrell Society requests proposals for 20-minute presentations on fictional, dramatic, or poetic cycles from the modernist era. Such cycles may include explicit trilogies (tetralogies, etc.) or works connected in more implicit ways. Potential subjects include:

As Maria Corti has written, the strength of all artistic avant-gardes may be found in their “foolish squandering of the past” and of how literature plays host, in precise historical moments, to writers who consider their role irreconcilable with those who preceded them; who believe it is their destiny to live among the gravestones of tradition; and believe they are engaged, in “incandescent conversation,” with the future. The panel invites participants to debate the enduring contributions of the Italian neo-avantgarde against the background of social and political upheaval that characterized Italy in the 1960s.

NeMLA Annual Convention

5-8 March, 2020

Boston, MA

This roundtable endeavors to assess the influence of Donald Trump’s presidency on literature in the US and around the world. Three avenues of inquiry will be featured. First, how has the Trump presidency influenced literature in the US since 2016? Second, are there commonalities between writing in the US and writing internationally owing to the Trump presidency? Finally, focusing on non-US writing, are there perspectives or themes in global literature that are not at all present in US writing that have occurred in the wake of Trump’s presidency?

One of the strengths of comparative literature is that by definition it offers a pluralistic perspective on concrete world events.

Special Issue  

The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945

Call for Essays:

Cinema in the Space Between: An International Approach

The Space Between: Literature and Culture 1914–1945 is the annual peer-reviewed digital journal of the Space Between Society, focused on interdisciplinary scholarship of the two world wars and the decades between.

Deadline for submission: December 31, 2019

After ‘Emancipation’: The legacies, afterlives and continuation of slavery.

University of Nottingham, 21-23 June 2020.

The University of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery (ISOS) is a multidisciplinary centre which pursues research on both historical and contemporary slavery and forced labour in all parts of the globe and through all periods.