modernist studies

For a proposed volume celebrating The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, co-editors Jayme Stayer and Anthony Cuda are soliciting abstracts for original essays on aspects of Eliot’s work that pertain to his non-fiction prose. The volume will be dedicated to the General Editor of The Prose, Ronald Schuchard, to honor his influence in the fields of Eliot studies and modernism. Essays may fall into the following categories, but are not limited to what is described here:

In a 1968 interview, John Dos Passos commented on what he saw as the growing marginalization of his work by recalling a conversation he once had with Ernest Hemingway. “He always used to bawl me out for including so much topical stuff,” Dos Passos remembered. “He always claimed that was a great mistake, that in fifty years nobody would understand. He may have been right; it’s getting to be true.”

Announcing

The 2019 First Book Institute

June 2-8, 2019

Hosted by the Center for American Literary Studies (CALS) at Pennsylvania State University

Co-Directors

Sean X. Goudie, Director of the Center for American Literary Studies and Winner of the MLA Prize for a First Book

Priscilla Wald, R. Florence Brinkley Professor of English and Women’s Studies, Duke University, and Co-Editor of American Literature

Since the 1980s, when the Jameson-Ahmad debate over how to read literatures putatively labeled as “third-world” and the notion of empire writing back to European literary traditions held sway in postcolonial studies, new contexts and ways of reading postcolonial and Anglophone literatures have been introduced and taken up. John J. Su’s Imagination and the Contemporary Novel (2011) and Mrinalini Chakrovorty’s In Stereotype (2014), for example, demonstrate that analyzing aesthetic and fictional representations of life in postcolonial realities brings into light the transnational aspect of contemporary literary production and the global marketplace with Anglo-American tastes and trends, both of which require further contextual consideration.

Rebel? Prophet? Relic?

Perspectives on George Orwell in 2019

University College London (UCL)

24-25 May 2019

John Rodden closes the preface to his 1989 book, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of ‘St. George’ Orwell with the assertion:

Orwell poses unusual, and valuable, difficulties by virtue of the complex, highly personal response to him by readers; and he offers unusual, if complicated, opportunities by his politicized reception and the diversity of his audiences. The rare and auspicious fact is that Orwell has been both an extraordinarily popular serious writer and a critically acclaimed one. (xiii)