Crossing Boundaries: Literary and Linguistic Intersections in Modernist Studies

Roma Tre University

Department of Foreign Languages, Literatures and Cultures

Sala Ignazio Ambrogio

Via del Valco di San Paolo, 19 – Rome

22-23-24 May 2024

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Václav Paris (City University of New York)

Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia)

Call for Papers

In the last few years, revaluations of modernism(s) – from Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2021) to Mao’s The New Modernist Studies (2021), or Rabaté and Spiropoulou’s Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (2022) – have considerably developed, showing a marked “expansive tendency” (Mao and Walkovitz 2008: 737). The claims of recent revisionist studies concerning a variety of modernisms (diversely defined as “global”, “transnational”, or “postcolonial”) encourage reflection on both canonical and present forms of modernist poetics and works in cultural, linguistic, and media terms. As Latham and Rogers have also remarked, consistently with an ongoing and retroactive consideration of the canon, locating modernism in an “alternative historical model where technology and aesthetics intertwine” allows modernist studies to “become radiant, expansive, and pervasive” (2021: 296), which also implies detecting a persistence of modernist impulses towards renovation into both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Perloff 2002; Mathias and D’Arcy 2015), in terms of theory as well as practice.

Far from merely re-examining canonical works or expanding the canon, what is most centrally new in the new modernist studies, Friedman (2009) reminds us, is its openness to views associated with other studies’ approaches, be these gender, race, media, or popular culture studies. Moreover, the new modernist studies’ widening of its range of primary interests has been inextricable from an effort to enlarge the toolkit of methods and perspectives through which these new modernisms could be investigated. In line with this view is also Pressman’s suggestion that modernism is a “creative strategy” – rather than just “a temporal period or movement” – which is “centrally about media” (2021: 298-99). It is mainly for this reason that modernism’s broad and transitional nature, together with its experimental and (inter)medial turn, have highly prompted new theoretical and methodological approaches. Crucially, critics have illustrated how scholarship in different areas continues to furnish new paradigms and lenses, reflecting explicitly on boundary crossings and cross-field interchanges. They have also emphasized how other disciplines – such as linguistics, stylistics (e.g. Balossi 2014), or translation studies (e.g. Bosseaux 2007; Parks 2014) – may intersect at, as well as with, literary and cultural studies, thus demonstrating the continuing productivity of modernist studies’ porousness.

In accordance with claims that modernism’s original pursuit of interdisciplinarity should be revived and intensified, this conference aims to provide a venue for an extensive exploration of literary and linguistic intersections in (the new) modernist studies. It therefore proposes to bring together academics and practitioners from the areas of both linguistics and literary criticism, so as to rethink and discuss new trends in approaching the early twentieth century. Research which investigates either of the areas (literary studies and linguistics) is welcome, but we would especially appreciate any kind of criss-crossing or interdisciplinary approach integrating the two domains.

With its interdisciplinary focus, the conferenceinvites contributions from researchers in linguistic, literary, cultural and translation studies, as well as from scholars in neighbouring disciplines with an interest in the modernist period. We therefore welcome original paper proposals that explore broad areas of intersection between linguistic and literary studies using a wide range of scholarly approaches and methodologies. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Modernism’s aesthetic boundaries

• Renovation of genres
• Cultural, literary and linguistic varieties of modernism(s)
• Remediating modernism: new technologies, new media
• Modernism high and low: intersections with mass media and popular culture
• Temporality, visuality, spatiality in modernist poetics and its relation to screen textuality in the contemporary networked age
• Imbrication of media, linguistic and stylistic approaches in modernist works

• Intertextuality/interdiscursivity/intermediality
• Modernist practices of boundary crossing (temporal/chronological, spatial/geographical, social, cultural, thematic, formal, linguistic)
• Modernism’s transnational turn and reception studies

• Modernist literature/non-literary texts in translation
• Modernist authors and/in translation
• Translation theory and practice in the early twentieth century
• Transnational/transcultural/multilingual/multimodal approaches to early twentieth-century literary/non-literary texts
• Stylistic approaches to literary/non-literary texts
• Translational stylistics
• Historical pragmatics/stylistics
• (Critical) Discourse Analysis and (early twentieth-century) texts and genres

Submission Guidelines

Proposals of about 300 words (excluding references), accompanied by a short bio-bibliographical note (max. 150 words), may be submitted to both Annalisa Federici (annalisa.federici@uniroma3.it) and Savina Stevanato (savina.stevanato@uniroma3.it) by no later than 31 October 2023. Individual/joint papers will be allotted 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes for discussion at the end of each panel. The conference language will be English. Selected peer-reviewed papers will be published in ETS Anglica series – Studies and Texts (https://www.edizioniets.com/view-collana.asp?col=anglica).

Important Dates and Info

Abstract submission: New extended deadline 31 October 2023

Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2023

Registration fee for participants (including conference folder and coffee breaks): € 70

Conference venue: Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere (https://lingueletteratureculturestraniere.uniroma3.it/).

Scientific Committee

Richard Ambrosini (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Barbara Antonucci (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Chiara Degano (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Lucia Esposito (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Annalisa Federici (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Enrico Grazzi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Maddalena Pennacchia (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Iolanda Plescia (Università degli Studi di Roma La Sapienza)

Rossana Maria Sebellin (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata)

Savina Stevanato (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Sabrina Vellucci (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Serenella Zanotti (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Organizing Committee

Annalisa Federici (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Savina Stevanato (Università degli Studi Roma Tre)

Selected Bibliography 

Ardis, A. (2002). Modernism and Cultural Conflict, 1880-1922. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Arrojo, R. (2018). Fictional Translators: Rethinking Translation Through Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

Balossi, G. (2014). A Corpus Linguistic Approach to Literary Language and Characterisation: Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Boase-Beier, J. (2006). Stylistic Approaches to Translation. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.

Boase-Beier, J., Fawcett, A., and Wilson, P. (eds.) (2014). Literary Translation: Redrawing the Boundaries. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bosseaux, C. (2007). How Does It Feel? Point of View in Translation: The Case of Virginia Woolf into French. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

Bru, S., Ørum, T., Hjartarson, B., Berg, H., Nicholls, P., Nuijs, L. (eds.) (2011). Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde, and High and Low Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter.

Doyle, L., and Winkiel, L. (eds.) (2005). Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism, Modernity. Bloomington: Indiana UP.

Forster, C. (2022). Modernism and Its Media. London: Bloomsbury.

Friedman, S.S. (2009). “Afterword” to Disciplining Modernism, ed. P. Caughie. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Latham, S., and Rogers, G. (eds.) (2015). Modernism: Evolution of an Idea. London: Bloomsbury.

Latham, S., and Rogers, G. (eds.) (2021). The New Modernist Studies Reader. London: Bloomsbury.

Manganaro, M. (2002). Culture, 1922: The Emergence of a Concept. Princeton: Princeton UP.

Mao D., and Walkowitz, R. (2008). “The New Modernist Studies”. PMLA 123(3): 737-48.

Mao, D. (ed.) (2021). The New Modernist Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Mathias, N., and D’Arcy, M. (eds.) (2015). The Contemporaneity of Modernism: Literature, Media, Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Nelson, B., and Maher, B., (eds.) (2013). Perspectives on Literature and Translation: Creation, Circulation, Reception. London and New York: Routledge.

Parks, T. (2014). Translating Style: A Literary Approach to Translation. A Translation Approach to Literature. London and New York: Routledge.

Perloff, M. (2002). 21st-Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Pressman, J. (2021). Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Rabaté, J.-M., and Spiropoulou, A. (eds.) (2022). Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury.

Ross, S., and Lindgren, A. (eds.) (2017). The Modernist World. London and New York: Routledge.

Scholes, R. (2006). Paradoxy of Modernism. New Haven and London: Yale UP.

Scott, C. (2018). The Work of Literary Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Susam-Sarajeva, S. (2006). Theories on the Move: Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.