Seminar Registration

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MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION

SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS

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PASSING IN/AS/FOR MODERNISM
Pamela Caughie (Loyola U. Chicago)

This seminar will employ the concept of passing to represent the negotiations of identity boundaries and forms of cross-cultural identification in modernist cultural productions.

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MODERNIST COLLISIONS WITH THE POPULAR
Patrick Collier (Ball State U.)

This seminar will examine the relationship between modernism and popularculture, with particular emphasis on 1) how modernists view both popular culture and the concept of popularity and 2) how commentators in "popular" media (newspapers, radio, etc.) view modernism.

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MODERNISM AND MASS MEDIA
John Xiros Cooper (U. of British Columbia)

How do we rewrite the history of modernism today to account for its extraordinary conquest of the everyday in the age of turbo-capitalism? What does this desegregation of bohemia do to our concepts of modernism's "cultural elitism," to notions of the avant-garde, and to the inscription of aesthetic value in modernist works as a resistance to the blight of commerce?

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CLOSED LITERARY MODERNISM AND VISUAL CULTURE
Jean Gallagher (Polytechnic U.)

How have modernist writers and texts responded to changes and developments in the visual culture and technologies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries? Emerging models of subjectivity within modernist visual culture and effect on production and reception of literary texts. Models of text/image interaction.

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CANONS AND CONTEXTS: MODERNITY AND NATIONALITY IN BRITAIN
Nancy Gish (U. of Southern Maine)

This seminar will examine how different Modernist "canons" shaped the work of later poets in different ways. Our emphasis will be on the continuing importance and effect of work by Eliot, Yeats, and MacDiarmid, but other "canonical" poets and later writers from regions of Britain can also be included.

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CLOSED MODERNISM AND GEOGRAPHY
Jon Hegglund (Central Connecticut State)

This seminar invites papers that consider the relationship between modernist aesthetics and geographical knowledge. The "time-space" compression described by David Harvey and others coincides with the end of an "heroic" period of geography characterized by imperial cultures of exploration and discovery. The seminar will consider questions related to this epistemic shift in the experience and representation of space. More information is available at http://www.english.ccsu.edu/hegglund/MSAseminar.htm.

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GAY PARIS
Lynne Huffer (Rice)

This seminar will explore the historical, political, and theoretical importance of queer cultural production in Paris during the modernist period.

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GEOGRAPHIES, MODERNITIES, AND THE QUESTION OF RACE
Cyraina Johnson-Rouillier (Notre Dame)

What is the significance of the changing geography of modernism, and how does it affect our understanding of the relation between modernity and race? The tension between modernism and modernity in multiple cultural contexts.

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CLOSED TRAUMA AND ADDRESS IN MODERN POETRY
Walter Kalaidjian (Emory)

Modern literature as an important site for discerning trauma and its meanings as they are inscribed in textual practice. Because less attention has been given to traces of trauma in verse than in fiction, film, and the performing arts, this seminar will investigate the ways in which trauma registers address in modern poetry of the 20th century.

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CLOSED THE STATUS OF GENDER IN MODERNIST STUDIES
Linda A. Kinnahan (Duquesne U.) and Maeera Shreiber (Utah)

This seminar proposes- a decade after the landmark anthology The Gender of Modernism--to focus upon the status of gender as a critical category within modernist studies across the disciplines.

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GLOBALIZATION AND THE CLIMATE OF MODERNISM
Kurt Koenigsberger (Case Western Reserve) and William Kupinse (Tulsa)

This seminar will investigate the emergence and dissemination of modernism within the context of globalization.

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MODERNISM AND MASCULINITY
Dejan Kuzmanovic (Wisconsin)

In what sense could modernism, or certain manifestations of it, be described as masculine? Is it possible -- and in what sense -- to talk about modernist masculinity or masculinities?

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COLLABORATION/COLLABORATIONISM/CO-AUTHORSHIP AND MODERNITY
Holly Laird (Tulsa)

This seminar will investigate varied manifestations of both collaborative and collaborationist texts from the 1880s to the present.

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FROM TRANSPARENCY TO OCCLUSION: MAPPING MODERNISM'S SURFACES
Nana Last (Rice)

This seminar proposes the terms "transparency" and "occlusion" as a way of understanding the construction of meaning in either specific works or methodologies in architecture, the arts and humanities in the twentieth century.

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CLOSED CITATIONALITY AND COLLAGE IN POETIC, MUSICAL, AND VISUAL CULTURE
James Lastra and Scarlett Higgins (U. of Chicago)

Collage, montage, assemblage, pastiche, and documentary forms have been a key formal aspect of modernist aesthetic production since the first stirrings of the avant-garde. This seminar will explore the potential and persistence of these techniques across media, with an emphasis on their use in late modernity.

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CLOSED MODERNISM AND THE UTOPIAN
Doug Mao (Harvard)

A seminar on how modernists imagined -- or resisted imagining--healthier environments, juster orders, perfected societies, brave new worlds.

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SITES OF MODERNISM
Joseph McLaughlin (Ohio U.)

Specific physical locations of modernism as represented in literature, visual arts, geography, architecture, urban planning, ethnography, travel literature and other discourses.

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CLOSED NEW APPROACHES TO LITTLE MAGAZINES
Mark Morrisson (Penn State)

This seminar will encourage participants to approach little magazines not simply as venues for now-neglected writers, artists, musicians, but rather as a window on the culture of modernity.

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MODERNIST BOUNDARIES AND BOUNDARY CROSSINGS
Peter Naccarato (Marymount Manhattan)

The need to confront, question, and move beyond boundaries (norms and traditions, disciplines and genres, cultural and historical identities) as a central modernist concern.

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CLOSED CONTEMPORARY REVISIONS OF MODERNISM
Charles W. Pollard (Calvin College)

Questioning the narrative that contemporary writing must "oppose" modernism. How have contemporary artists renewed and revised the texts, principles, strategies, forms or techniques of modernism? Focus on instances of specific contemporary artists engaging with modernist precursors.

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THE DEGENERATION OF MODERNISM
Marilyn Reizbaum (Bowdoin)

This seminar will explore theories of degeneration (e.g., Nordau, Ellis, Lombroso) and their legacy for modernisms and modernity.

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CLOSED POSTCOLONIALITIES OF LITERARY MODERNISMS
John Paul Riquelme (Boston U.)

This seminar will revolve around theoretically informed readings of literature of the long twentieth century (Wilde forward) that bring together, under the conceptual umbrella of postcoloniality, modernist and postmodernist writers from various locales and ethnic groups whose texts reflect the dislocations of modernity, including Irish, American Southern, post-war African-American, and Caribbean writers among others.

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MODERNISM, LESBIAN DISCOURSE, AND THE PROBLEMS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY
Patricia Juliana Smith (Hofstra)

The Modernist period saw a specifically lesbian or "Sapphist" sensibility manifested in literature and related arts. This phenomenon occurs almost simultaneously with the advent of a particularly virulent form of nationalism and racism in the Western world. This seminar will examine the various ways in which lesbian literature, art, and culture were affected, even shaped, by the politics of national and/or racial identity during this period.

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MODERNISM AND TECHNOLOGY
Luca Somigli (U. of Toronto)

The relationship between technology and cultural production in modernism: the role of technology in transforming the process of cultural production; new forms of aesthetics fostered by or theorized in relation to technological innovations; the representation of technology in modernist literature.

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AVANT-GARDES AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY
Barrett Watten (Wayne State U.)

This seminar will seek to obtain an overview of the ways avant-gardes in literature and art have been accounted for historically, how they have incorporated historical materials and motivations, and the relation between these two forms of historicity.

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CLOSED BENJAMIN: MEMORY,EXPERIENCE, AND THE DESIGNS OF MODERNISM
Philip Weinstein (Swarthmore) and Ian Baucom (Duke)

This seminar will explore Benjamin's reframings or recastings of "modernism," as well as investigate the inter-articulation of certain key figures of his thought with some of the central concerns of modernist aesthetics and practice. Open to specialists and non-specialists.

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OTHER MODE-RNISMS
Steven Yao (Ohio State U.)

Alternative modes of modernist cultural production e.g., manifesto, educational handbook).The significance of alternative avenues of cultural production and the impact their technological or practical dimensions might have for the consistencies and fractures of Modernism as a critical and historical category.

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BODIES: PREMODERN, MODERN, POSTMODERN
Erin G. Carlston (UNC-Chapel Hill)

This seminar will focus specifically on the idea of gendered/classed/raced/disabled bodies in texts. We will look at the way discourses about bodies 1) influenced developments in literary/cultural modernism in the 19th and early 20th centuries and 2) have been influenced by literary/cultural modernism throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. As a result, papers *must* treat at least one work that distinctly pre- or post-dates Modernism.

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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. WE WILL BEGIN NOTIFYING SEMINAR REGISTRANTS OF THEIR ASSIGNMENTS AS OF MAY 1ST. SUBSEQUENT SEMINAR REGISTRATIONS WILL BE ON AN AVAILABILITY ONLY BASIS.

Send seminar selections to: (please include a SUMMER ADDRESS)

C/O Jacob Speaks
MSA Department of English
Rice University
6100 Main Street, MS 30
Houston, TX 77251

For FEDEX or UPS shipments:

Jacob Speaks
Rice University
Dept of English-MS 30
6100 Main St.
Houston, TX 77005

E-mail jas@rice.edu (please paste into e-mail; no attachments)

Fax: 713-348-5991

For information on panels contact:

• Michael Coyle, President, MSA;
• Cassandra Laity, Co-Editor, Modernism/Modernity