Mobility/Stasis/Modernity in the Space Between, 1914-1945

Submissions are invited for the eighth annual conference of The Space
Between: Literature and Culture, 1914-1945, at Bucknell University,
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, June 8-11, 2006.

Acceleration, terminal velocity, downward-spiral, displacement, paralysis,
collision, modernity. The years 1914-1945 were marked by wars colliding
with peace movements, by the formation of new nations, the dissolution of
old empires, and the voluntary and forced movement of people from ancient
homelands to modern and nascent nation-states. Mobility, exile, migration,
diaspora, and expulsion produced expatriates and immigrants, the return of
the soldier, the lost generation, the exile of surplus women, and the
liberation of others. Speed and slow-motion, fragmentation and revolution
transformed people, technology, and art.

 From army "mobilization" in August 1914 to the liberation of death camps
and nuclear annihilation in 1945, the interwar and war years witnessed
political, economic, and cultural upheavals that in concert with
technological revolutions in transport and warfare revolutionized the
movement of masses and the creation of art, literature, film, and other
media. Planes, underground shelters, tanks, and skyscraper elevators
altered social relations and destabilized class, cultural, and racial
barriers­as did, in far more dire ways, trench warfare, air raids, and
transport to concentration and death camps. New media such as the cinema,
the newsreel, and the wireless enlarged viewers' perceptions and eradicated
distances, confronting audiences with the excitement and terror of far-away
places. Such physical, political, and cultural eruptions, confinements and
displacements produced new forms of literature and art.

This interdisciplinary conference will explore the contexts,
manifestations, effects, and representations of motion and stasis during
the years 1914-1945. What did it mean to live, work, create, and be killed
at the center of these turbulent times? We are eager to explore the
multiple ways in which the mobility and immobilities of the period found
their way into cultural production.

Keynote Speaker: Roberto Dainotto is Associate Professor of Romance Studies
at Duke University. His publications include "Place in Literature: Regions,
Cultures, Communities" (Cornell UP, 2000) and "Europe (in Theory)" (Duke
UP, forthcoming). He has edited "Racconti Americani del '900" (Einaudi,
1999), and "Mediterranean Studies" (with Eric Zakim, MLA Books,
forthcoming). His new book-project, ""Nouveau Riches with Fords and
Chevrolets": Italian-Americans and the Contemptuous Motherland" looks at
representations of Italian-Americans in Italian culture, where they
consistently appear as allegories both of an uprooting modernity, and of
the unresolved "southern question" of Italy's failed modernization

  Please send 300-word abstracts by February 1 to Roger Rothman
(rrothman_at_bucknell.edu).

Phyllis Lassner
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. USA
phyllisl_at_northwestern.edu.

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Received on Sat Jan 21 2006 - 14:15:20 EST