modernist studies

At the 2nd International Laurence Sterne Foundation Conference (26-28 October 2017, in Bydgoszcz, Poland) Prof. Peter de Voogd will be convening the panel "Sterne and (Post)Modernism revisited".

Paper proposals should be sent to peterdevoogd@fastmail.fm and j.lipski@ukw.edu.pl; the deadline is 15 July 2017.

The panel will cover various aspects of Sternean echoes in later literature, revisiting some of the issues addressed in the collection "Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism" (ed. Peter de Voogd, David Pierce; Rodopi, 1996).

This session welcomes papers that will investigate the range of comedic forms embedded within African American literature. On the heels of the twentieth anniversary of the release of Saidiya Hartman’s seminal monograph Scenes of Subjection, this panel’s exploration of the use of humor in black literature offers a new critical framework for exploring the ways that spectacles of violence have continued to undergird representations of black performance in contemporary critical thought. From the auction block to the jazz stage, “blackness” manifests epidermally and externally, often through public articulations of shared racial grief. As such, recent critical work has often framed humor as a tactical response to racial violence.

While the study of modernism typically focuses on avant-garde formal experimentation, the collected volume of essays, Resistance and Reform: Modernist Women and American Social Engagement, offers an important corrective by insisting on a reassessment of the roots of modernist experimentation and innovation. This volume will include essays that analyze the careers and writings of modernist women writers during the first half of the twentieth century whose artistic productions were closely tied to or invested in various forms of social engagement, community activism, political resistance, or cultural change.

We seek short provocative essays addressing the topic of “Modernism on the World Stage” for a prospective, peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform.

Since the plays of Sean O'Casey are ripe for analysis beyond historical/new historical readings that examine them in light of Irish nationalism, I am seeking abstracts for a possible panel on O'Casey for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 (http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com/) on February 22-24, 2018.  O'Casey's work, both that which focuses on the years just before and after Irish independence and that written during his years in England, offers varied resources for scholarship from the perspectives of colonialism/postcolonialism, Marxist theory, and gender analysis.