Entries tagged with conferences

March 13, 2022

Event 92: I Met/I Heard (Louisville)

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The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture since 1900
24–26 February 2017
University of Louisville

Joseph Donahue
Adeena Karasick
Mark Scroggins
Alan Golding
Matthew Biberman
Lauri Scheyer
Judith Roof
Lynn Keller
Aldon Nielsen
Joseph Shafer
Joe Safdie
Jeff Davis
Lisa Shapiro
Norman Finkelstein
Alice Finkelstein
Joshua Corey
Robert Archambeau
Sally Connolly
David Kellogg
Tyrone Williams
Laura Vrana
Johnny Payne
V. Joshua Adams
Charles Altieri
Robert von Hallberg
Oren Izenberg
Rosanna Warren
Richard Strier
John Beer
Brenda Hillman
Kristi Maxwell
Brendan Johnston
W. Scott Howard
Addie Hopes
Peter O’Leary
Stephen Williams
Shannon Tharp
Alicia Wright
Justin Wymer
Leah Nieboer
Benjamin Lee
Karen Hadley
Ali Altaf Mian
Suzette Henke
Ann Hall

 

Notes and links

Photos: Matthew Biberman

[t/k]

October 2, 2021

Document 94: Diasporic Avant-Gardes

CALL FOR PAPERS

Diasporic Avant-Gardes:
East Asian Transitions in Form and Genre

American Comparative Literature Association
National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei
15–18 June 2022

Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry
Research Center, Hunan Normal University 

This seminar continues the work of Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (ed. Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland; Palgrave, 2009)—a collection of essays addressing the intersection of diasporic literatures and the European avant-garde, with examples from African, Maghrebi, Jewish, and Hispanic diasporas. A decade later, much new work has appeared on innovative forms and genres of poetry, prose, visual art, and media reflecting the diasporic experience of East Asians over two centuries of global migration. On the one hand, the emergence of self-described avant-garde movements that engage and depart from the Euro-American model, particularly in Japan and China but at differing moments in the 50s/60s and 80s/present, has been recognized in major exhibitions. Global figures such as Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Ai Wei-wei, Cai Guo-qiang, and Huang Yongping critically address issues of material form, cultural translation, commodification, economic dispossession, and global migration. The work of experimental East Asian poets such as Kim Hyesoon, Ito Hiromi, and Hsia Yu opens the way toward a developing canon of women authors in translation and has led to critical reflection on translation itself. Asian American poets with differing histories of emigration have developed a range of innovative forms, from authors such as John Yau, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Pamela Lu, and Tan Lin to Don Mee Choi, Sawako Nakayusa, Mary-Kim Arnold, and Ocean Vuong. New prose genres have appeared after the examples of Maxine Hong Kingston and Yoko Tawada in innovative fictions by Tao Lin, Eugene Lim, and Karen An-hwei Lee. The reception of Asian American visual artists from Nam June Paik, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Tehching Hsieh to the current exhibition of Hung Liu points toward the global transition of strictly Eurocentric theories of the avant-garde. This seminar seeks papers that explore individual artists and movements; reflects on their innovations of form and genre; and theorizes experiences of cultural distinctiveness in terms of migration, displacement, cultural heritage, appropriation, linguistic and stylistic hybridity, radical iconoclasm, and syncretic identity—seen in a productive dialogue with or a decisive reconceptualization of Euro-American avant-garde movements.

Submit proposals to ACLA by Sunday, October 31 here
For PDF flyer, click here; for online seminar page, here
Contact barrett.watten@gmail.com for more information

N.B. “In view of the ongoing pandemic, the 2022 conference may need to be moved online again. The board has developed a contingency plan and will make a final decision in January 2022″—ACLA.

Notes

Ai Wei-wei, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, 1995

February 23, 2021

Document 90: Poetics & the University in Crisis

Poetics & the University in Crisis
Friday, March 5–Sunday, March 7 / 3:00–7:00 P.M.
featuring 22 poets, critics, teachers, artists
free registration required; click here

A virtual colloquy on the role of poetics in the American university in crisis, for a nation also in crisis. The humanities and arts continue to be major targets of increasingly austere budgets—and so, too, has critical thinking. How can poetics—as inventive, intellectually engaged creative series of practices and modalities of thought—offer an intervention into this moment? How can the university re-embrace the necessity of art based in critical thinking and open inquiry that includes the aesthetic and the political? The three days of this colloquy will aim to unite creative poetic practices with analytical critique and pedagogy from a wide range of voices, methods, points of view.

… More

October 1, 2020

Document 89: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour

CALL FOR PAPERS

Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
European, American, Transnational

American Comparative Literature Association
Virtual conference, 8–11 April 2021

This seminar continues the work of “Modernism @ Zero Hour,” focusing on European, American, and transnational avant-gardes after the epochal moment of “Zero Hour,” 1945. At a moment of crisis and renewal, modernity is disclosed in a process of “systemic detotalization” that new avant-garde tendencies interrogated in forms of mimetic activity, at once preservative and self-undoing. The destruction of European cities, the displacement of peoples, the end of colonial empires, political and economic antagonisms, the specter of mass extermination, but also new cultural freedoms are enacted in a broad range of aesthetic, philosophical, and political forms, differing substantially from the historical avant-garde. What was “new” in 1945 was to see the world as it had never been, as a locus of destruction and creation on a global scale. Seminar topics could include transnational routes for the avant-garde: the global influences of surrealism and existentialism; the ethical imperatives of “bare life” and abstraction; the eruption of absurdism; cross-racial aesthetic motives and possibilities; the circulation of new cultural forms such as American jazz in Europe or New Wave film in the U.S.; the tension between avant-gardes, state formations, and ex/repatriation; and aesthetic movements of the global South that oppose the spatial hierarchy of prior avant-gardes. In each instance, radical form addresses modernity in crisis and the inauguration of a new global order in unique ways.

Submit proposals to ACLA by Saturday, October 31
For ACLA portal, click here; for seminars, click here
Contact barrett.watten@gmail.com for more information

Image: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, No. 583, 30 April 1957

March 14, 2020

Document 84: Modernity @ Zero Hour

Modernity @ Zero Hour: 
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order

ACLA Nonsite Seminar
March 20 and 21, 2020

With the cancelation of ACLA 2020, seminar members have agreed to hold a virtual seminar using conferencing software, across two continents and four time zones, consolidated into two sessions. A small number of invitations for non-presenting participants is available; contact organizer at address below.

Modernity @ Zero Hour I
Friday, March 20, 10:30 AM –1:00 PM

Barrett Watten, Wayne State University: “Modernism @ Zero Hour: Anticipatory, Punctual, and Retrospective Universals”

Maggie Rosenau, University of Colorado, Denver: “Objectivity: A Moment of Intersection Between the Avant-Garde, Denazification of the German Language, and Literary Goals after the Zero Hour”

David Kellogg, Coastal Carolina University: “Modernist Non-Events: Trials of Modernism in Malaya and New York”

Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University: “Dismantling Modernity”

Modernity @ Zero Hour II
Saturday, March 21, 10:30 AM –1:00 PM

Lauri Scheyer, Hunan Normal University (China), “Modernism and Black Nationalist Identity: The Diaspora Before and Since the Zero Hour”

Parvinder Mehta, Wayne State University, “Fractured Feminine Selves and Autospecular Affect: Global Modernism and the Postcolonial Artist as a Woman in Meena Alexander’s Writings”

Zhai Yitian, SUNY Buffalo: “Sexual Difference, YinYang, and the Critique of Universals in Simone de Beauvoir and Luce Irigaray”

Gary Huafan He, Yale University, “Entropy and Utopia @ Zero Hour: Modernity and the Manhattan Project” … More

February 18, 2020

Document 83: @ Louisville


Ahead of our “nonsite” event in Louisville Friday, I wanted to put the record of my contributions to the Louisville Conference up, to point to the critical and poetic work that has scarcely been considered in this instance. Content—not just projection—matters. I have added a sentence or two to each title, along with publication history, to give a sense of what my path through Louisville has been. The Louisville Conference has indeed been important for me, and I am deeply grateful for and committed to it. But I never shouted anyone down at this conference, though I did go on too long a couple of times early on.

Nonsite event

“Cancel Culture as Unfree Speech: Parrhesia @ The Louisville Conference,” independently organized, The Brown Hotel, Louisville, February 2020.

A brutal rationalization takes place in the neoliberal university beyond the wildest dreams of Mario Savio; the degradation of speech we have suffered is its symptomatic manifestation. The university has achieved a condition of unfree speech that has spread, in viral fashion, from the central core of the administration to the department and classroom, each internalizing and performing its version of the paranoia and defensiveness of the larger polity, where it reigns unchecked.

Lectures and panel presentations

“Refunctioning Surrealism: Eugene Lim’s Dear Cyborgs and Karen An-hwei Lee’s Maze of Transparencies,” The Louisville Conference on Literature After 1900, canceled February 2020. … More

January 20, 2020

Document 82: Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour

CALL FOR PAPERS

Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour:
Destruction and New Meaning

“Crisis”: 7th Biennial Conference of the European
Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies
University of Leuven, Belgium
17–19 September 2020

My proposed session(s) stem from on-going work on literary and visual modernism at the “moment” of destruction in 1945: Stunde Null or Zero Hour. I focus on the epochal date of 1945 (Stunde Null or Zero Hour, in its divergent forms across the global territories) as both the end of World War II and an inaugural moment of transition to the global order we now live. For one or more sessions at EAM, I propose to recover and theorize the avant-garde to interpret the “zero hour” of 1945 and explore the historical moment of crisis of 1945—of European destruction, the end of colonial empires, the origins of our global order—as progenitor of new forms of avant-garde writing, visual art, and thinking. I want to access key examples, or a larger overview, of how avant-gardes in Europe, the Americas, and globally gained new impetus from several related projects: overturning the cultural violence of fascism; finding an ethical imperative in “bare life” in the forms of destruction; and resisting recuperation into already existing historical and artistic narratives. What was “new” in 1945 was not “new” in the sense of modernist innovation; rather, it was to see the world as it had never been, as a locus of destruction and creation with historical possibility but also with the undoing of progressive narratives. In this sense 1945 is no longer only an epochal date for the avant-garde per se but a defining moment of modernity, at which its aesthetic, ethical, and historical horizons coincide uniquely. Creation and destruction in modernity at 1945 can be comprehended through the work of a number of avant-garde writers and artists, particularly in their dialectic between “particulars,” unique and intractable values and forms, and “universals,” values and forms as applicable universally, across languages and cultures. Send proposals for interrogating the work of post-1945 avant-gardes, seen in relation to the form of historical crisis of 1945 and its challenge to progressive historicism, by Thursday, January 30, for submission by Saturday, February 1, to:

Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
b.watten@wayne.edu or barrett.watten@gmail.com

Image: Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, No. 877, May 30, 1960.

September 8, 2019

Document 80: Refunctioning Poetics

CALL FOR PAPERS

Refunctioning Poetics

The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture After 1900
University of Louisville, February 20–22, 2020
Organizer: Barrett Watten / contact by September 16

This is a call for one or two participants for a session on the “refunctioning” of literature (focusing on poetry and poetics in terms of “the making of the work” but including other genre possibilities). Recent texts suggesting such a “refunctioned” poetics include Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun; Kevin Killian’s amazon.com writings; Eugene Lim’s cyber-novels; and others proposed by panel participants. The concept of “Refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) comes from Walter Benjamin, via Bertolt Brecht, in his keystone essay “The Author as Producer” (1934). How can new forms and genres of poetics be seen as “refunctioning” the aesthetic as political, given that Benjamin’s world has been “refunctioned” in the “new presentism” we live and suffer? Returning to Benjamin’s 1934 essay, in the context of the struggles against fascism but also in contestation with socialist realism, the panel asks, what does “refunctioning” authorship, and the literary and cultural work, mean in the present? Participants may approach this question by rethinking the status of the author; theorizing poetic making from a gendered perspective; seeing material production and digital reproduction as central for rethinking poetics as “the making of the work”; and reading new genres of experimental writing, after the Millennium, that incorporate its precarious presentism.

… More

September 2, 2019

Document 79: Modernity @ Zero Hour

CALL FOR PAPERS

Modernity @ Zero Hour: 
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order

American Comparative Literature Association
Chicago, March 19–22, 2020

This seminar will address the relationship between literary modernism (traditionally seen as having its end date at 1945, but expanded to include work in genres not usually associated with high modernism) with the Zero Hour of the end of World War II (seen as a crisis of modernity that decisively set in place processes of globalization). Seminar participants will read works of modernism, from American, European, and non-Eurocentric sources, that imagine and constitute while they challenge and critique “the universal” as an entailment of modernist forms (which are often seen as characterized by forms of parataxis and the foregrounding of particularity that suspend any notion of the universal). In the process of critiquing modernist particularity, we will also interrogate the vertical, idealist, and even authoritarian aspects of mid-century modernism and their entailments for the post-1945 order. High modernist authors could include Eliot, Woolf, Williams, Pound, Breton, Stein, Beckett, and so on in the Eurocentric tradition, but these figures may be placed next to lesser-known and nonliterary figures, movements, genres, and works. We would then try to connect the aesthetic “universalist” aspect of these authors and works with political claims for universal ethical and aesthetic values, in historical frameworks that range from the Nuremberg Trials, on the one hand, to the rise of abstraction as a universalist aesthetic, on the other. Finally, we will move from the Eurocentric constructions of universals to query their possibility in “alternative modernities,” represented at 1945 by Russia, China, and India as non-Western states and cultures, along with the decolonizing world, as anticipating non-Eurocentric frameworks for the emergent global order that must be taken into account in any notion of the “universal.” The seminar will expand the implications of modernism for global and transnational pedagogy; should interest students of modernist, transnational, and postcolonial literature; and will engage theoretical concerns of Critical Theory and the gendering of modernity whenever possible.

Submit proposals to ACLA by Monday, September 23
For the ACLA portal: click here
Contact b.watten@wayne.edu or barrett.watten@gmail.com

March 16, 2018

Document 68: Third Factory

“Third Factory: Avant-Garde,
Social Construction, and Ideology in the Soviet 20s”

European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM)
Universität Münster, 5–7 September 2018

For this year’s EAM, centered the theme of “Realisms of the Avant-Garde and Modernism,” I propose to organize a panel or multi-session series of panels that would revisit the relation of the avant-garde to social construction. Such a project would necessarily be revisionist, in deepening but questioning the role of the avant-garde in the project of social construction, particularly after new archival materials and critical perspectives have become available. But it would also try to refocus interest on the Soviet 20s as scene of a coordinated Gesamtkunstwerk beyond individual artists, works, groupings, or genres that has continued relevance for a global, mediated, ideologically distorted world. … More

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