MODERNIST STUDIES ASSOCIATION

SEMINAR DESCRIPTIONS

Modernism and Marxism C. Dan Blanton
From the theoretical revisions of Western Marxism to the practical problems of "actually existing socialism," the history of Marxist thought seems to include its own series of modernist moments, forms, and failures. More recently, materialist accounts of aesthetics and culture, globalization and late capitalism, have returned to the now historical questions of modernism: its concept or lack thereof, its death or persistence, its resolutions and irresolutions. This seminar invites reconsiderations (based in any discipline) of any aspect of the relation between modernism and dialectical thought: of modernist Marxisms or Marxist modernisms.

Modernist Politics and Aesthetics Tony Brinkley, Christopher Bush and Laura Cowan
How did modernist art, literature, and aesthetics engage the many political systems of modernity? We are particularly interested in modernism's reaction to or participation in totalitarian or extreme political systems. Papers involving diverse genres, media, national traditions, and theoretical frameworks are encouraged. The seminar will explore a range of responses to the politics of the time and ask questions such as the following: Can aesthetics help clarify the relationship between the revolutionary and reactionary strains of the modernist right? What relevance do historians' comparative studies of fascism have to our understanding of literary programs and aesthetics? How do contemporary developments in technology and in science studies change the way we look back on modernist machine aesthetics and their relationship to politics? Is it useful to regard fascism as a phenomenon of the political left (Stalinism) as well as of the right (Italian fascism, National Socialism)?

Queer and Sapphic Modernisms in 2003 Anne Charles
This seminar will discuss the notions of Queer and Sapphic modernisms as they have come to be understood in the last two decades. What, if any, are their identifying features? Are they separate constructs, and, if so, at what points do they converge, coalesce, overlap? We will also consider the critical relevance of these lines of inquiry in 2003. Where do Sapphic and Queer modernisms fit in the larger field of Modernist Studies? Essays must devote some attention to specific works of modernist cultural production (novels, paintings, journals).

A Few Don'ts About Modernist Studies Sean Latham
There has been so much scribbling about a new fashion in modernist scholarship, that we may perhaps be pardoned a brief recapitulation and retrospect. This seminar will serve to define and debate current directions in modernist scholarship, focusing specifically on (1) recent attempts to extricate this scholarship from the persistent logic and forceful attitudes of its subject; (2) new and alternative models of canon formation and scholarly value; (3) field-based consolidations of scholarly production through technologies such as conferences, book publishing, journals, and the internet. Most importantly, we plan to draft a manifesto on the future of modernist scholarship which all members of the seminar would sign and then submit (and most likely resubmit!) for publication in a major scholarly journal.

Broadcasting Modernism Michael Coyle and Jane Alison Lewty
Short papers are invited for a discussion on the relations between Modernist literature and aspects of radio. Discussion will emphasize the different ways in which writers treated radio not only as a method by which to extrapolate existing theories, but also as a structural device or formative influence. As an alternative outlet for creative expression, radio employed many writers and poets in the dissemination of culture via the public/national radio services of the B.B.C. or the C.B.C, or via U.S. commercial stations. Papers treating this topic in other languages are also welcome, as is commentary on the differing practices and impact of commercial vs. nation broadcasting systems. Other topics for debate include censorship, propaganda, mass reception of broadcast literature, writers who spoke on air, original radio plays and acoustic adaptations of existing work. Above all, the seminar hopes to posit radio as both a conceptual and actual influence on literature, which allows for a wide range of case studies. Some examples are Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, H.D., Cecil Day-Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell, Ezra Pound, Stephen Spender, William Carlos Williams, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.

Art as a Language of Social Discourse Jonathan Fineberg
The unnameable is at the heart of the visual arts. Most of us recognize from personal experience that a variety of unverbalizable, visceral sensations are evoked by a deep encounter with a work of art and that these sensations may powerfully affect the viewer's state of mind. This seminar will discuss a range of methodologies - from Foucault's institutional analysis to Erik Erikson's psychoanalytic sociology - for understanding the ways in which works of art articulate the reality of an artist's experience and affect the viewer's apprehension of events, giving form to an aspect of social discourse.

Human Rights Modernism Lisa Fluet
Keeping in mind what Michael Ignatieff terms "the juridical revolution" in human rights legislation and awareness since 1945, this seminar seeks papers that consider literary modernism's varied formal, intellectual, emotional, and utopian anticipations of post-war human rights discourse. Papers might consider questions like: how are abuses of human rights imagined and represented in the modern novel, or in journalism? How do the "stateless" border-crossings of cosmopolitan moderns relate to the concept of safe asylum? What role did the social progressivism of Edwardian moderns, or the intellectual sympathies of Bloomsbury, play in the formation of global awareness?

Musical Intersections Bill Friend
This seminar seeks to examine some of the ways in which music intersected with other arts during the first half of the twentieth century. "Music" should be understood in the largest possible sense, from jazz, folk and indigenous musics, free tonality, opera, sound poems, and the Art of Noise. Other possibilities include the influence of modernist texts on "postmodern" music, such as Morton Feldman's uses of Céline and e.e. cummings, or John Cage's reworking of Finnegans Wake.

Modernism, Theater, Mass Culture, 1860-1940 Martin Harries
Or, the Work of Drama in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. How does theater respond to the growing hegemony of mass cultural forms, especially film and radio? How might we read formal changes -- or aspirations -- in theater in the light of mass cultural formations of audience? Papers on the intersections of theater, mass culture, and technology. Total works of art. Mass spectacles. Theater audiences, film audiences, radio audiences. Theories and praxis. Failures of practice. Technology on stage. Advertising and theater. Technology against theatre. Theatre against technology.

Architecture and Utopia Hilda Heynen
Referring to Tafuri's diagnosis that modern architecture's utopian ideals were inevitably bound up with the underlying requirements of capitalist development, this peer seminar wants to reopen the discussion on the assessment of the utopian impulses behind modern architecture. Are these impulses to be seen as mere symptoms of a paternalistic and totalitarian way of thinking, or should we rather appreciate them for their capacity to criticize the status quo? If spatial utopias, when materialized, are often bound to end up in failure, does this mean that utopian thinking as such should be blamed?

Vision and Gender Catherine Hobbs
This seminar, sparked by a plenary talk by W.J.T. Mitchell at MSA 4 , will take up
issues of vision and visual theory with an emphasis on gender. Undertaking a visual "thick description of the present," Mitchell argued that postmodern
"biocybernetics" rewrites founding binaries such as nature/culture, image/word,
human/machine, mechanical/biocybernetic reproduction. Although he discussed
reproductive technologies at length and presented the audience with several slides
of particular interest to women, Mitchell did not use gender as a category to
analyze the images he showed. This seminar aspires to fill in that lacuna.
Participants need not respond to the talk specifically; the foregoing points are
meant only to help generate ideas. Work on any intersections among gender, the
cultures of modernity/postmodernity, and vision will be welcome. (Those interested
in Mitchell's work in this area, however, may want to consult his Summer 1997
article in October, "What do pictures want?").

Modernism and the Ghosts of Symbolism Raphael Ingelbien
Even before 'modernism' appeared as a category in English literary criticism, many of the major Anglo-Saxon modernists were regarded as the heirs of French symbolism (cf. Wilson's Axël's Castle). Since then, our understanding of modernism has been profoundly altered by various theoretical revolutions, recontextualizations, denunciations and alternative canons. How much critical relevance does the symbolist influence retain in the study of modernism? (How) do we distinguish between symbolist and modernist poetics in current critical practice? How has our view of the relationships between modernism and symbolism developed? What does a focus on French/European symbolist influences contribute to our understanding of modernist ideologies?

Modernism's Other Geographies Catherine Jurca
Most accounts of modernism (& modernity) describe it as an urban phenomenon, focusing on avant-gardes, advertising agencies, cafes, and red-light districts, in such places as Bloomsbury, Paris, and Harlem. This seminar explores alternative sites of modernist inquiry, production, and reception. Rural American musical forms addressed the cocaine, commerce, and racial mixing typically associated with the metropolitan Jazz Age; George Ohr's pottery was less "ahead of its time" than out of its place in Mississippi; country houses rivaled Bloomsbury as modernist literary sites; hard-boiled fiction located corruption at the city's fringes. Papers invited that broaden our understanding of modernism's many places.

Family Systems Therapy and Modernist Psychological Literary Criticism John V. Knapp
The development in recent years of the intersections between the family and
modernist literary study continues to emerge as one of the most productive and
illuminating arenas of contemporary critique. As an interpretative mechanism, family
systems therapy (fst) provides scholars and readers alike with a revelatory social
psychology for evaluating the nature of the familial structures that often mark our
textual experiences. In addition to addressing the family dynamic through which a
given literary character develops a fully realized sense of self, family systems
therapy allows readers to examine the patterns by which characters function in their
larger intimate systems, whether those systems be social, institutional, or even
global. This seminar is open to any members of the MSA who are interested in
psychological literary criticism, and who wish to consider the fst model as an
alternative to Neo-Freudian and Lacanian critical theories.

Modern Poetry and Visual Cultures Elizabeth Loizeaux
Taking the vitalizing interactions between literature and visual cultures as one of the distinguishing features of "new modernisms," this seminar will explore in particular the ways poetry engaged what W.J.T. Mitchell has called the "pictorial turn" of the twentieth century. We will think about specific poetic interactions with old media (painting, sculpture, architecture) and then-new media (film, photography), through variety of means which might include ekphrasis, illustration, performance, collaborations between poets and artists. We will also consider what it might mean for poetry and poets to live in a culture in which they may themselves be visual texts in filmed readings and interviews, on magazine covers and posters, and in galleries and museums. Although the seminar will focus on the early twentieth century, papers might also look forward to video or digital imaging that builds on modernist practices. The aim is to explore the ways poetry has engaged a variety of visual cultures, in a variety of ways, and been challenged, enlivened, and transformed.

Modernism and the Culture Concept Marc Manganaro
This seminar invites papers that explore the relations between modernism and the development of culture as model, concept, or term. This is an especially appropriate topic given the subject of this year's conference, "the cultures of modernism." This seminar will focus on the modes by which culture in the modernist era was anything but a conceptual given but, rather, was a highly variable, contestable, and hence powerful concept that perhaps finds its richest articulation in the crossing of disciplinary boundaries--especially, though not exclusively, those between anthropology, folklore, myth, and modernist literature and criticism.

Modernism/Modernity and the Everyday Scott McCracken
The everyday was always central to modernist concerns. Modernist fiction, poetry and art focused on discarded or found objects, while Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project constructed a whole theory of modernity on what it leaves behind: its detritus, lost, forgotten and redundant artifacts. Yet there has always been a contradiction between high modernism's interest in the everyday and its self-conscious difficulty. This seminar seeks to address the contradictory relationshiop between modernism/modernity and the everyday. Papers might consider the following: the relevance of theories of the everyday (Lefebvre, de Certeau, Benjamin) to modernist studies; how a focus on high modernism's concern with the everyday might alter critical discussion of the high/low culture debate. But the seminar invites a range of approaches to what will surely be an important area of debate in the future.

Modernist Montage Jordana Mendelson
As an aesthetic strategy used by the avant-garde, state agencies, and commercial producers of mass media (film, photography, print culture), montage in the early 20th century signaled the expansion of the work of artists and writers beyond singular frameworks of national and/or cultural contexts. For those artists and writers who turned to montage, what did an adoption of this technique signify? Where and how is montage located within larger cultural politics, both national and international? This seminar invites papers on modernist montage, especially as it was practiced and theorized in Asia, America, and Europe.

Vorticism: The First English Avant-garde Alan Munton
Vorticism was the first and perhaps only significant British avant-garde movement of the twentieth century. The Vorticist group, notable in that it had both men and women members, was active in art, sculpture, art theory and literature between 1913 and 1915. The group took and transformed recent developments in European practice and theory, building from expressionism, Cubism and Futurism a confident and vigorous movement which should have altered British art permanently, but -in a drastic impingement of modernity - was closed down by the First World War.
Papers are particularly invited on Vorticism in relation to modernity, to European art and theory, and to literature. This broad requirement may devolve into discussions of group ethos, writers and artists understood individually or in relation to others, and differences in production arising from gender. 'Literature' refers to Vorticist prose and poetry by Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Jessica Dismorr and Helen Saunders. The significance of the movement's journal Blast, the public response, the relationship to war, and the movement's subsequent reputation, are equally welcome topics.

Modernism and the Authentic Jesse Matz and Elizabeth Outka
This seminar will examine various definitions of modernist authenticity. We'll start with two: the authentic as referencing an originary and unified past before mechanical reproduction and fragmentation, and the authentic as original, new, not derived from tradition or previous models. The conflict and overlap between these two definitions should help us explore recent reassessments of modernism's engagement with both nostalgia and invention. Other critical issues we might discuss include the commodification of authenticity, notions of the primitive, and the tensions between modernist and postmodernist concepts of the authentic. Papers from a range of disciplines, including literary theory and criticism, architecture, visual arts, and cultural studies are welcome.

Modernism and Nationalism Catherine Paul
Nation-building and national identity were central to the project of modernity, but how did modernist art and culture deal with them? How does modernism build on established expectations of nations? How do differing senses of nation contribute to variations in world modernisms? To what extent can modernism be understood as a denial of nation? How does an insistence on or rejection of nationalism affect modernism's projects? How does modernism's engagement with popular culture, propaganda arts, the writing of history, and avant-garde art and literature charge its relationship to nationalism? This seminar will benefit from participation of scholars ranging world modernisms.

Visual Poetry and Graphic Design Jed Rasula
This panel invites examinations of the printed page as a corollary of performance (enthusiasm for cabaret and circus inflected the interest in visual poetry); collaborative interactions between poets, artists, and graphic designers; the role played by graphic design in avant-garde periodicals; and the work of poets who made a significant commitment to typographic innovation in their work. Despite the canonical familiarity of Apollinaire's calligrams and Marinetti's "parole in libertà," and increasing awareness of the look of Russian Futurist books (MOMA 2002) and the Eastern European avant-garde (LACMA 2002), a need remains to address the full scope of European vanguard visual poetry and graphic design in the early twentieth century.

Translating and Editing Modernist Texts (With Particular Reference to
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End) Max Saunders
Unlike The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford's other major masterpiece, Parade's End, is still in need of scholarly editing, annotation, and translating into European languages. It is increasingly being recognised as a major Modernist text, as well as one of the best works about the First World War. It is also a significant European
work, treating Britain, Germany, France and Belgium--one which brings home the international aspect of Modernism. A project of translating Ford's Parade's End was established in 1999 and has now become a large European and American grouping of translators and scholars working in nine languages. Very productive workshops at meetings of the European Society for the Study of English (2000 and 2002) advanced two related goals of the project. First, a properly edited and annotated text of all four novels, as both an electronic hypertext and book version. Second, simultaneous translations of the novels into as many European languages as possible. Teams working within individual languages vary in size between one and four people.
The combination of these projects is an innovation, and the two strands are mutually enriching. This seminar takes the Parade's End project as its point of departure, but welcomes discussion from scholars working on any aspect of the translation, editing, or electronic-format production of modernist literary texts. It is hoped that this seminar will encourage other Modernists to make contact with and contribute to the project, and will also enable our European participants to become involved in Anglophone Modernist Studies.

The Legacy of Surrealism Raymond Spiteri
Although the Second World War is often taken to signal the decline of surrealism as an avant-garde movement, surrealism continued to exist after the war not only as an organized movement but also as an historically decisive experience. It has continued to influence a broad range of endeavors from critical theory and psychoanalysis to contemporary art and gender studies. This seminar interrogates the contemporaneity of surrealism and invites contributions focused on legacy of surrealism as an aspect of our modernity. Topics can range from surrealism's influence on theory, surrealism as an interlocutor in cultural dialogue, surrealism and the question of gender, to the re-reading of surrealism after modernism.

Modernist Poetry and Prosody: The Ezra Pound - William Carlos Williams Tradition Ellen Stauder and Demetres Tryphonopoulos
This seminar invites papers that consider the genesis and development of "free" (as opposed to "metrical") prosody in Anglo-American modernist poetry. Prosody is defined here as the formal description of the sound structures in poetry or, in Pound's words, the "articulation of the total sound of a poem." Our emphasis will be on tracing, identifying, and proposing ways of discussing the prosodic innovations and the open or vers libre prosodies advanced in the work of poets in the PoundWilliams tradition, including Pound and Williams as well as (but not limited to) H.D., Olson, Duncan, Levertov, Oppen, Zukovsky, Niedecker, Ginsberg, and Creeley.

Space and Place in Modernism Andrew Thacker
Cities, streets, rooms and nations: where and how do we locate modernism? In what spaces and places? How can we take a more geographically inflected approach to the study of multiple modernisms? This seminar will address these questions and invites participants to think about how the spatial location of modernism affects our understanding of its texts and practices. The seminar takes the contentious distinction within cultural geography between space and place as its theoretical orientation in order to address some of the following themes: the connection between material and metaphorical space; the significance of where modernists lived and worked; the geography of where modernism was published/performed/displayed; the location of the audience; and the nature of how modernists represented specific spaces and places.

Cruel Modernisms Janine Utell
This seminar will examine the presence, representation, and uses of cruelty in modernist literature, art, music, film. A starting point might be the tension, as articulated by Richard Rorty, between texts of self-creation - a significant modernist project - and texts of cruelty, and whether the two strands coexist. Possible topics (others welcome): political cruelty, including but not limited to Fascism; the deployment of cruelty as a creative/destructive force; gender/sexuality/sex and cruelty; cruelty and the world wars. What function can/does cruelty serve? How do we respond to cruelty as critics? What facets, if any, of this topic are uniquely present in modernism? Why?

Comparative Modernist Cultures Laura Chrisman and Steven G. Yao
This seminar invites papers addressing methodological or critical issues of comparison between "modernist" cultures embedded in various traditions, languages and historico-political configurations. Particularly welcome are papers theorizing the relationship between traditional Anglo-Euro-American "Modernism" and other comparable "movements" or cultural formations in other parts of the globe, especially the "third world." Possible topics include, but are not limited to, Japanese modanizumu, Chinese xian dai zhu yi, Latin American modernismo, as well as the meaning of so-called "modernist" cultural strategies in different regions of Africa. Also welcome are papers comparing critical approaches to the study of Modernism in different national environments.