CFP: Therapeutic Modernisms

Fifth International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies

Université Grenoble Alpes, France

19-21 June 2024

Organizers: Hélène Aji, Nicholas Manning, Benoît Tadié

This Fifth International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies will focus on the ties between therapeutic discourses and practices and modernist arts and literature.

The desire to interrogate the diverse forms of potentially therapeutic modernisms and modernist therapeutics—in the pluralized sense of both of these terms—aims to contribute to the writing of an alternate history of modernist production from 1900 to 1960. Such a history may seek to integrate and value figures such as Djuna Barnes, H.D., Robert Duncan, or Zora Neale Hurston as fundamentally engaged in explorations of the promises and failures of art and literature as a therapeutic enterprise. It may also seek to view the work of canonical modernist authors—such as Virginia Woolf or W.B. Yeats—in a new light, as being intimately (though often critically or ambivalently) involved in the potentialities of a therapeutic vision or project.

Proposals of 300 words maximum for individual papers, and 1000 words maximum for joint panels and roundtable discussions, must be sent for consideration before September 15 2023 to the following addresses : helene.aji@ens.psl.eu ; benoit.tadie@parisnanterre.fr ; nicholas.manning@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr

A response as to the proposal’s acceptance will be given before October 15 2023 at the latest.

The complete Call for Papers may be found at the following URL: https://sem-france.org/2023/03/29/elementor-2176/?lang=en

Nicholas Manning Professor of American Literature (UGA/IUF)