Entries tagged with Zero Hour
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
December 30, 2022
“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)
To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.
The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below). … More
March 19, 2021
Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour: European, American, Transnational
Monday, April 5–Wednesday, April 7
A virtual colloquy featuring 16 scholars, writers, artists
& the global premiere of Carla Harryman’s “Occupying
Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music: A Re-Performance”
attendees welcome; registration required; click here
Originally organized for the 2020 conference of the European Network of Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM) conference in Ghent, Belgium, canceled due to COVID-19 (here), and following last year’s virtual colloquy on “Modernism @ Zero Hour” (here). The seminars have been reorganized and expanded, with participating scholars and artists from seven nationalities and time zones, and with the addition of the streaming of Carla Harryman’s revised production of “Occupying Theodor W. Adorno’s Music and New Music,” originally staged at dOCUMENTA 13 (2012). The colloquy takes up transnational approaches to the emergence of avant-garde art and practices after the metahistorical date of “Zero Hour,” 1945—the end of the war which is not one—to comprehend the profound reflection on destruction, displacement, and a new global order in post–1945 movements and works.
Organized by Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
and Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Sponsored by Projects in Poetics and Statement Magazine,
California State University, Los Angeles
… More
September 16, 2020
The weekend of 17–20 September was to have been seventh in a series of biennial conferences of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies (EAM). I have been presenting at EAM since their first meeting in Ghent, Belgium, in 2008. Each of the meetings that followed was remarkable, and opened a window onto new vistas on the aesthetics and politics, in fact the historical importance, of avant-garde and modernist studies—an expanding field that departs significantly from its Eurocentric origins and turns toward postcolonial and post-socialist contexts. The latter was encouraged by meetings in Poznan, Poland, and Helsinki, Finland, where I met a number of Eastern European scholars, and that connection is an important aspect of my organization of a seminar on “Avant-Garde @ Zero Hour.” The seminar was to focus on radical formal innovation in the crisis of the immediate postwar period, seeking different frameworks for the avant-garde than those that define the “historical avant-garde”—seeking a different register of the historical, in fact, one that eschews any form of progressive historicism for the crisis, destruction, discontinuity, and universality that attends the Zero Hour.
As it happened, the conference was canceled due to the current crisis. Much reflection may follow on the nature, and specificity, of “crisis” in its many instances. My proposal for the seminar may be found here; the conference CFP is linked here and above; and below is the line-up for our seminar. I will update this page with a link to full conference program soon; while the organizers have proposed a conference volume on our evolving understanding of crisis, with the avant-garde as both instance and guide.
