Dear Colleague,
We hope you will attend the second conference of the
_Modernist Studies Association_, "New Modernisms II,"
October 12-15, 2000 at the University of Pennsylvania.
This announcement lists the 27 available seminars,
describes the procedure for seminar registration, and
gives important new information on the conference
program, our upcoming affiliation with the journal,
_Modernism/Modernity_, deadlines, membership and MSA
dues.
Updated information on plenaries and seminars will be
posted on our website
<http://www.psu.edu/dept/english/MSA/msa.htm>
and will appear in our hard copy brochure (still in
production).
MSA Executive Committee
Michael Coyle
Cassandra Laity
Gail McDonald
Mark Morrisson
Bob Perelman
Sanford Schwartz
________________________________________________________
New Modernisms II
The Second Annual Conference of the Modernist Studies
Association
October 12-15, 2000
The University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA
ABOUT THE CONFERENCE
The recently founded Modernist Studies Association is
devoted to the study of the arts in their social,
political, cultural and intellectual contexts from the
late-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth
century. The organization seeks to develop an
international and interdisciplinary forum to promote
exchange among scholars in this revitalized and rapidly
changing field.
PLENARY SPEAKERS (two speakers in dialogue)
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University) and
Michael North (University of California-Los Angeles)
Janet Lyon (University of Illinois-Urbana) and
Peter Wollen (University of California-Los Angeles)
Robert O'Meally (Columbia University) and
tba
PANELS (a chair and three twenty-minute presentations)
DEADLINE FOR PANEL PROPOSALS HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MAY
31ST
Featured panels will include:
WORKING IN _THE NEW AGE_: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION (on
on-line editions of 20th century journals) co-chaired by
Robert Scholes (Brown University) and Sean Latham (Brown
University), with Lee Garver (University of Chicago),
Michael Groden (University of Western Ontario), Robert
von Hallberg (University of Chicago), Wallace Marin
(University of Toledo) and Robert Spoo (Yale Law).
POUND/STEVENS REVISITED, with Marjorie Perloff (Stanford
University), Douglas Mao (Princeton University) and
Patricia Rae (Queens University-Ontario)
QUEER THEORY, with Joseph Allan Boone (University of
Southern California), Colleen Lamos (Rice University)
and
Tim Dean (University of Illinois-Urbana)
DEFINITIONAL ISSUES OF MODERNISM/MODERNITY, with
Marianna Torgovnick (Duke University), Thadious Davis
(Vanderbilt University) and Susan Stanford Friedman
(University of Wisconsin-Madison)
JAZZ
WOMEN SURREALISTS
DUCHAMP
SEMINARS (small group discussions--max of 15--based on
brief papers (5 pages) that participants submit in
advance of the meeting)
SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS
Charles Altieri English University of
California, Berkeley
Modernist Experiments and Structures of Feeling: This
seminar will concentrate on how and why modernists break
from established grammars (practical and aesthetic) for
dealing with affects. What models can we propose for
interpreting the changes attempted and what languages of
value become available for and through those
experiments?
David Brownlee Art History University of
Pennsylvania
Modernism and Post-Modernism in Late Twentieth-Century
Architecture:
This seminar will explore the periodization of
post-World War II architecture, with an eye to
distinguishing its modernist and anti-modernist
tendencies and to defining "architectural
Modernism," both as a stylistic descriptor and as a
constituent of broader cultural patterns. The seminar
will be loosely affiliated with research now being done
in the Architectural Archives of the University
of Pennsylvania in preparation for a retrospective
exhibition on the work of Robert Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown, scheduled to open at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art in 2001.
Jessica Burstein English University of
Washington
Fashion and Modernism: We will investigate the exchanges
between fashion and literary aesthetics; artistic
modernism and histories of fashion or design. Focus
could be on clothing, periodicals like VOGUE (American
or British), or literary representations of the
sartorial. Larger issues may concern high and low
culture, representations of the clothed body,
and sartorial aesthetics.
Invited participants: Jennifer Wicke and Jane Garrity
Anne Charles English University of New Orleans
Sapphic Modernism: This seminar will apply some of the
key concerns in the field of lesbigaytrans/queer
literary studies to the Sapphic Modernist critical
enterprise in order that we may, while recognizing
the limitations of the formulation of literary
constructs, discover and describe features that might
constitute "Sapphic Modernism."
Invited participants: Diana Collecott and Cassandra
Laity
David Chinitz English Loyola University Chicago
Modernism, Poetry, and Culture: What historical forces
have held these terms apart? How can a "cultural"
approach to modernist poetry animate close textual
analysis, and vice-versa? What happens when modernist
poetry is viewed through a culturalist lens?
Michael Coyle English Colgate University
and Bernard Gendron Philosophy University of
Wisconsin Milwaukee
Modernism and Jazz: What happens when we conceive of
jazz as a distinctly modernist art form: what are the
relations between jazz, in its many forms, and modernism
(literary or otherwise), in any of its various
constructions?
Marianne DeKoven English Rutgers University
Postmodern Modernism: How has postmodernism both
actively and retroactively reshaped our understanding of
modernism, through critique, redefinition, suppression,
resuscitation, retrieval, refunction, reconception? how
does this revisionary postmodern modernism continue to
change with shifts in postmodern preoccupations?
Laura Doyle English University of Massachusetts
Race, Modernism, Modernity: How does post-Enlightenment
modernity emerge through racialized
encounters/narratives and give rise to a modernism
symptomatic of that history? Possible topics:
disjunctive splicings of canonical/sentimental with
"folk"/subaltern; politics of insistently non-modernist
practices; modern self-knowing and modernist, racial
self-fashionings; racial panopticons/passings; diasporic
modernist urban epics.
Invited participants: Phillip Brian Harper, Peggy
O'Brien, Radha Radhakrishnan, Marlon Ross
James English English University of Pennsylvania
Modernism and Prestige: This seminar aims to explore
modernism in relation to various forms and hierarchies
of cultural prestige. How was prestige distributed
among the arts and among individual artists and
authors during the modernist period? What critical
approaches today offer the best route into these issues?
Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi Sociology University of
California, Santa Barbara
Fascism and the Avant-Garde: This seminar will explore
the relationship of the intellectual and artistic
avant-gardes to fascist culture and politics. Why were
so many avant-garde figures attracted to fascism?
And should they be evaluated as "fascist"?
Norman Finkelstein and Tyrone Williams English
Xavier University
Diaspora: Exile, dispersion, and the loss of homeland
and cultural roots are some of the most common,
devastating, and (ironically) inspiring experiences
represented in modernist literature and art.
We invite papers on all aspects of diaspora as it
manifests itself in modernist thought and cultural
production.
Nancy K. Gish English University of Southern
Maine
and Keith Tuma English Miami University
Languages and Legacies of Modernism: "Britain" and
Ireland: Recent alternative poetries point back to
neglected modernists like Brian Coffey, Lynette Roberts,
and Veronica Forrest-Thomson, and to diverse
experimental forms. How can we read the work of such
precursors beside contemporary poetry and canonical
modernism?
Invited participants: Alex Davis, Romana Huk, Steven J.
Matthews, and Peter Middleton
Mary Gluck History Brown University
Modernism and the City: Why is the city the most
frequently evoked context for the modernist project?
What is the relationship between modernism and the city,
considered in its multiple guises as the social spaces
of the modern metropolis, the aesthetic spaces of the
urban text, or the cultural spaces of commercial mass
culture?
Eileen Gregory English University of Dallas
Models of the Classical in Modernism: Modernism and
classicism are deeply affiliated. A political and
philosophical as well as literary act, classical
appropriation suggests complex genealogies with
decadence, Romantic hellenism, Augustan humanism,
Renaissance hermeticism. This seminar considers models
and genealogies operative within modernist writers'
citation/translation/revision of classical texts.
Invited participants: tba.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson Art and Art History
University of Texas
and Bruce Clarke English Texas Tech
University
Modernism and Science: What roles did science play in
the development of new forms of art and literature in
the first half of the 20th century?
This seminar invites papers on modernist artists and
writers who drew inspiration from science before and
after Einstein. We are particularly interested in
methodological issues: how does one make valid
connections between these two areas of cultural
production?
Gail McDonald English University of North
Carolina at Greensboro
Feeding Modernism: Food (and drink) in modernism.
Possibilities:
cookbooks as manifestos, the role of cafis,
modernization of food technologies, literary depictions
of eating, food fashions and fetishes. Also food and
the politics of colonization, wartime scarcity and
rationing, food as status-marker, food as entertainment.
All disciplinary approaches welcome.
David McWhirter English Texas A & M University
Modernist Abstraction: The varied modalities, histories,
and politics of formal abstraction in modernist
literature, visual arts, film, theater, music, dance;
examinations of individual works/movements, particular
formal structures/mechanisms, and/or key critical
terms/constructs. Interdisciplinarity encouraged.
Cristanne Miller English Pomona College
Crossing Boundaries in the Arts: Cross-fertilization and
international exchange played a crucial role as the arts
reinvented themselves for the twentieth century. How
did
modernist poetry absorb and transform innovation from
visual arts, music, film, and photography?
Invited participant: Bonnie Costello
Robert Morgan Music Yale University
Coherence and Incoherence in Modernist Literature, Art,
and Music: In what ways do modernist artists forge a
dialectical relationship between coherence and
incoherence in their work? For example: How do they
respond to the seemingly conflicting claims of
uniqueness and universality? How do they combat
incoherence in pursuit of such modernist traits as
difficulty, complexity, and inclusiveness? Papers
on any aspect of the issue, dealing with any artform(s),
welcome.
Carol Oja Music College of William and Mary
Spirituality and Early 20th-Century Modernism:
Intersections between alternative spiritual writings of
the early 20th-century especially those connected with
theosophy and modernism. With certain American
composers of that period, these belief systems provided
a way of rationalizing musical experiments. This
seminar will consider that tendency as found among
creative artists working within a broad spectrum
of art forms and in different countries.
Brian Richardson English University of Maryland
Modernism and the Reader: Relevant topics include
modernism's implied reader(s) and their roles, gender
and reading, hermetic texts, minority audiences,
characters as readers, queer reading, film and theater
audiences, excluded readers, postmodern readers and
rewriters, misreading, re-reading, unreadability, etc.
Invited participants: David Kadlec, R.B. Kershner,
Patrocinio Schweickart
John Paul Riquelme English Boston University
Modernist Orientalism: Theories and Interpretations:
This seminar will focus on theoretical contexts for
interpreting modernist works with attention to the
exotic and on representations of the exotic in British,
Irish, American, and European art and literature from
Gerome and Wilde forward.
Luca Somigli Italian University of Toronto
The Genres of Modernism: What is the function of genre
in modernist literature? Issues include: the rise of
new genres; the influence of the other arts and the new
media; the recuperation of popular genres;
the relative symbolic capital of different genres.
Invited participant: Michael Coyle
Leon Surette English University of Western
Ontario
Literature and Economics: An Unholy Alliance?: Papers
are invited on all aspects of relations between the arts
and economic thought from the radical right typified by
Social Credit (and Modernism) through the conservative
middle typified by Keynes, to the radical left typified
by Marx (and Postmodernism).
Invited participants: Hildegard Hoeller, Alec Marsh
Denise Von Glahn Music Florida State University
Futurism: This seminar will consider the relationship
between Futurism and Modernism, and explore the ways
Futurism manifests itself in music, art, and literature
in the United States and Europe in the early decades
of the twentieth century.
Wallace Watson English Duquesne University
Modernism and the Movies: Likely topics for discussion:
the participation of cinema in early twentieth-century
literary and other artistic avant-garde movements;
modernist strategies in postwar European new wave
cinemas; commercial considerations; adaptations of
modernist fiction.
Invited participants: Peter Christensen, Carole Dole
Barrett Watten English Wayne State University
and Rachel Blau DuPlessis English Temple
University
Avant-Garde and Cultural Studies: Have cultural studies
methods led to an exclusion of avant-garde social
formation and works of cultural production, generally in
favor of mass cultural forms? What elements of
the avant-garde participated in the formation of
cultural studies methods, and in what ways ought their
legacies to continue?
PANEL/SEMINAR GUIDELINES AND FORMAT
The design of the conference should allow each
participant to attend the plenary sessions and
participate in a seminar and/or panel.
SEMINAR REGISTRATION
Individuals may submit a ranked list of two or three
seminars and/or a proposal for a panel. Since we can
accept only a limited number of panel proposals, we
encourage all prospective participants to consider
participation in one of the 27 seminars listed. Seminar
assignments will be made on a first-come, first-served
basis; the sooner you submit your selections, the better
your chance of receiving your first choice.
PROPOSING A PANEL
If you choose to submit a proposal for a panel, we
encourage you to register for seminars at the same time.
If your panel proposal is not accepted, you are still
guaranteed a place in one of the seminars. If your
proposal is accepted, you still have the option of
participating in a seminar. THE DEADLINE FOR SUBMITTING
PANEL PROPOSALS IS MAY 31ST. Please include the
following information: 1)your name, session title,
professional affiliation, mailing address, phone
number, fax and e-mail address; 2) the names and
affiliations of the other members of your session;
3)a 250-word abstract on the topic.
The program committee will notify those who have
submitted proposals by June 15.
Send seminar rankings and/or panel proposals with SUMMER
ADDRESS (if applicable)to:
Bob Perelman
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104
e-mail: <[log in to unmask]>
(please paste into e-mail; no attachments)
fax: 215-573-2063
CONTACT INFORMATION
(Please check website first for answer to FAQs)
for information on seminars: Gail McDonald
<[log in to unmask]>
for information on panels: Cassandra Laity
<[log in to unmask]> or Michael Coyle
<[log in to unmask]>
MEMBERSHIP NEWS AND NOTICE OF DUES
The MSA is delighted to announce that the Association
has affiliated with the distinguished journal,
_Modernism/Modernity_. MSA officer, Cassandra Laity
(Drew University), will join Robert von Hallberg and
Lawrence Rainey (University of York-UK) as a co-editor
of the journal, responsible for an additional fourth
issue of essays based on work presented at the
conference. Members for the year 2000-2001 will receive
the annual four issues of _Modernism/Modernity_
beginning with 7#3 (September, 2000) to 8#3 (September,
2001). The first conference issue will be 8#3
(September, 2001). (See below for dues notice and
information on membership in the MSA)
We would like to take this opportunity to announce an
upcoming SPECIAL ISSUE of _Modernism/Modernity_ to be
co-edited by Cassandra Laity and Robert von Hallberg on
the topic GENDER AND WORLD WAR I. For this special
issue we will be looking for essays in the social
sciences as well as the humanistic disciplines. We
intend as well to have essays in several national
cultures. Please send submissions to either address:
Robert von Hallberg
_Modernism/Modernity_
Department of Germanic Studies
University of Chicago
1050 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Cassandra Laity
_Modernism/Modernity_
Department of English
Drew University
Madison, NJ 07940
DUES
Beginning in April, 2000 membership in the MSA is $50.00
for regular members and $30.00 for graduate students.
Membership in the MSA will afford all members the
following:
1) admission to the annual MSA conference
2) four issues of _Modernism Modernity_ at a reduced
subscription rate (of nearly $10.00 per year) and free
electronic access to the journal through _Project Muse_.
3) a website (in progress), to be hosted by Johns
Hopkins University Press, which will provide conference
updates, membership directory, and future items such as
MSA _Newsletter_, notice of MSA nominations and
elections, publication announcements, syllabi, etc.
You must be a member to attend the conference in 2000.
Dues are tax-deductible as a contribution except for
$26.00 attributable to _Modernism/Modernity_, which
may be a professional deduction. Dues paid now will
apply to the cycle beginning April, 2000 through
September, 2001.
Please make checks or money orders payable to
Modernist Studies Association. Send $50.00 if you are a
regular member or $30.00 if you are a graduate student
and include rank, affiliation (if any), e-mail, fax and
mailing address to:
Mark Morrisson
Treasurer, MSA
Department of English
Penn State-University Park
State College, PA 16802
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