Entries tagged with modernism
March 3, 2024
“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET
“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here … More
July 7, 2022
“Modernist Poetics: New Genealogies
of ‘Making the Work’ in Modernity”
Seminar for “Making Modernism”
Modernist Studies Association
Portland, Ore., 27–30 October 2022
NOTE EXTENDED DATE FOR SEMINAR REGISTRATION
AUGUST 31: REGISTRATION HERE
Seminar led by Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
and Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University
with invited guest Lyn Hejinian, UC Berkeley
This seminar takes up the conference rubric, Making Modernism, as a question of “poetics”—a discourse of “making the work.” Poetics may either immanent to a modernist work of art or a supplement to it; it is an aesthetic or theoretical reflection that offers a blueprint for how the “work” is made and how to read it. Poetics may take the form of a separate instance of writing, a preface or explanatory essay external to the work of art, or it may be described or enacted in the work itself, as a set of instructions to the reader on how work may be read. In this seminar, we will seek new ways of understanding modernist poetics, at or beyond the epochal date of 1922, as a response to the crisis of modernity. Modernist poetics is often characterized as “formalist,” after avant-garde manifestos, the New Critics, or the Russian Formalists. For this inquiry, Eliot’s “Notes” to The Waste Land and his editorship of The Criterion would be as important for modernist poetics as the poem itself. Extending this principle, Joyce’s turn to writing “Work in Progress” and its serial publication in transition from 1927 on would depart from the modernist masterpiece into another kind of writing; Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” (1926) would supplement the publication of Geography and Plays (1922); and McKay’s development of vernacular prose romances from Home to Harlem (1928) to Banana Bottom (1933) would augment the formal poetics of Harlem Shadows. After 1922, a reflection on the “making of the work” emerges in numerous works of poetics that address the modern present and its “condition of possibility.” Such a deliberate inquiry into the making of the modernist work motivates the prose/poetry dialectic of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923); it is found in the self-reflexive explorations of women authors such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, and Djuna Barnes; it extends to the social discourses on poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular Front; it is everywhere in the manifestos of the avant-garde, especially surrealism; it appears in the turn to fascism in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis; it is central to key works of Critical Theory such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” and Theodor Adorno’s many writings on modernism. This seminar invites literary, historical, cultural, and theoretical inquiry into works broadly seen as “poetics” in modernism. What will count as a key work in modernist/modern poetics is the task of participants to determine; our aim is to establish a broad and productive series of works that represent the aesthetic, cultural, political, and critical “making of the work” under conditions of modernity. In so doing, it seeks a broad discussion on modernist poetics in line with our earlier work on contemporary examples in A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan UP).
July 9, 2020
Announcing publication of
Modernity @ Zero Hour:
The Question of the Universal
and the Origins of the Global Order
Barrett Watten (Guest editor)
Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures
Hunan Normal University, Changsha, China
vol. 4, no. 1 (June 2020)
Table of contents [here]
Barrett Watten, introduction [here]
“Modernity @ Zero Hour: Three Women
(Lee Miller, Hannah Höch, Anonyma)” [here]
Maggie Rosenau
“Universality and the Zero Hour:
Interrelationship Between the Avant-Garde, Denazification,
and German-Language Literatures” [here]
Herman Rapaport
“The Ethical Break: Marguerite Duras, Jorie Graham,
and M. NourbeSe Philip” [here]
Lauri Scheyer
“Zero Hour and the Changing Same: Aesthetic Modernism
and Black Nationalist Identity” [here]
David Kellogg
“Modernist Non-Events: Disappearing Modernisms
in New York and Singapore” [here]
Parvinder Mehta
“Fractured Feminine Selves, Autospecular Affect, and Global Modernity:
Meena Alexander and the Postcolonial Artist as a Woman” [here]
Gary Huafan He
“Entropy and Utopia @ Zero Hour:
Modernity and the Manhattan Project” [here] … More
March 14, 2020
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.
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”
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
September 2, 2019
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
August 19, 2017
Modernist Studies Association
Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam
10–13 August 2017
Questions of the Present
in Contemporary Poetics
1.20 Veilingzaal, 13 August 2017
Stephanie Anderson
Louis Bury
Tomasz Cieslak-Sokolowski
George Fragopoulos
Alan Golding
Kristin Grogan
Franziska Ruprecht
Joshua Schuster
Wendy Truran
Samuel Vriezen
Tyrone Williams
Mia You
… More
May 18, 2017
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
December 28, 2015
Modernist Studies Association
Boston, Massachusetts
19–22 November 2015
(after On Kawara)
Herman Rapaport
Tyrone Williams
Carla Billiterri
Ben Friedlander
Alisa Allkins
Alan Golding
Aaron Nyerges
Sarah Posman
Dorothy Wang
Rachel Galvin
Kaplan Harris
… More
March 2, 2013
Michael Schmidt’s dissertation, “The Materialism of the Encounter: Queer Sociality and Capital in Modern Literature,” is scheduled for its defense in the Wayne State Department of English at 11 AM, Tuesday, March 19, 10302 5057 Woodward Avenue, Detroit. This a public defense. After its conclusion, I will post the abstract here.
January 20, 2013
Modernism and the Abstraction of Value:
Poetry and Political Economy in transition (1927-38)
During this recent era, linguistic understandings of political economy found purchase for a wealth of reasons, many of which have a grounding in actual conditions. Nonetheless [. . .] the literarity of such conceptions ended up participating in, and sometimes generating, serious analytic errors . . . . The misrecognitions of value engendered by modes of literarity thus pose a radical limit to the history of the present. —Joshua Clover, “Value/Theory/Crisis” (107, 109)
[Introduction]
In my lecture at the Poetry of the 70s conference at University of Maine (under the rubric “Late Capitalism and Language Writing”; 2008), I made a strong claim that the “turn to language” in poetry must be seen as simultaneously a response to the emergent horizon of neoliberalism after 1973 along with an anticipatory illumination, undertaken at the level of form, of what the new order of intensified commodification and mobility of capital would look like—and how it might be comprehended and opposed. … More
