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?
Invited Participant: Michael Levenson
back to seminar
list
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.
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
David Chinitz
(English, Loyola University of 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?
back to seminar
list
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?
back to seminar
list
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?
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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?
back to seminar
list
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"?
back to seminar
list
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.
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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?
back to seminar
list
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: Helen
Sword (Indiana University, Bloomington) and Joan DeJean (University of Pennsylvania).
back to seminar
list
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?
Invited participant: Susan Squier
back to seminar
list
Kerry Johnson
(English, Merrimack)
Modernism and Caribbean Literatures
Caribbean writers often utilize fragmentation and dreamwork to explore
alienation and crisis of consciousness. Some contributed to the Harlem Renaissance.
What are the intersections of Caribbean and modernist literatures? How and why
do Caribbean writers revise and respond to modernism?
back to seminar
list
Gail McDonald
(English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro)
Feeding Modernism
Food (and drink) in modernism. Possibilities: cookbooks as manifestos,
the role of cafés, 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.
back to seminar
list
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.
Invited participants: Anke Finger and Robert Kaufman
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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.
back to seminar
list
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.
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
John Paul Riquelme
(English, Boston University)
Modernist Orientalisms: 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.
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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: Jack Amariglio, Hildegard Hoeller, Alec Marsh and David Ruccio
back to seminar list
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.
back to seminar
list
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
back to seminar
list
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?
back to seminar
list