modernism 1922 celebrating distinctions 

14-17 September 2022 free online event 

Call for Papers 

The conference Modernism1922: Celebrating Distinctions will honour 1922 as annus mirabilis for modernism. 

In 1922, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories appeared in print for the first time. R.M. Rilke’s Duineser Elegien were completed. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had its first ‘non-piratic’ edition. Piet Mondriaan’s neo-plastic paintings and writing peaked. It was the year in which modernism was blooming in different art forms across the globe — cf., Brazil’s ‘Semana de Arte Moderna’, the Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta, Modanizumu in Japan. 

As within each modernist work of art so among modernist events, there is both diversity and mutual influence. This conference aims to uncover new views on what set the 1922 modernist events apart, but also on how they compare and impacted each other, e.g., with regard to art ideology, aesthetics, philosophy, religion. Keynote speakers are:

Clare Hutton (Loughborough University), Women and the Making of Ulysses

James C. Klagge (Virginia Tech), Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Great War

Philomeen Lelieveldt (Netherlands Music Institute), Ido Eyl’s visit to the French Musical Avantgarde

Michael North (UCLA), 1922: A Centenary Dismemberment

We welcome papers from different disciplines, particularly those that pursue an interdisciplinary approach to this seminal modernist moment. Please submit a 250-word proposal and short biography (as a pdf or docx attachment) before 16th June 2022 to: gchase@holycross.edu and jaap.vanderdoes@ru.nl. We also welcome artistic contributions - short film, music and visual arts.