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

Seminar: Questions of the Present
in Contemporary Poetics

@ MSA 19 Amsterdam
10–13 August 2017
to register click here

Since 2011, there has been an explosion of new writing in poetics as an academic discourse and a proliferation of new approaches to poetry that unite formal concerns (after Language writing, conceptualism, Flarf, and other avant-gardes) with radical accounts of the millennial present—in a manner reflecting on, but departing from, modernism. This seminar will perform several tasks: first, to survey recent writing in poetics that “question the present,” involving concerns of political economy, ideology and public discourse, documentary and digital sources, gender and sexuality, race and poets of color, hybrid forms, and multi-languaged writing/translation. Then, it will undertake an overview of new forms of writing that engage these questions of the present. Finally, it will ask how poetry and poetics can create new critical and creative, activist and interventionist, initiatives, to counter deformed public discourse(s) of our presentist epoch. What does it mean to question poetics and poetry as a historicism of the present?

Seminar organizer: Barrett Watten
Professor, English, Wayne State University
Contact: barrett.watten@gmail.com
Registration: MSA 19 website here