HERE IS A LIST PANEL AND ROUNDTABLE PROPOSALS THAT HAVE BEEN ANNOUNCED ON THE MSA LISTSERV (last updated: 26 April 2006):

CALL FOR PAPERS
Modernist Studies Association 8 (2006)
October 19-22, 2006, Tulsa, OK

"The Avant-Garde Body"

Avant-garde art, performance, and theory of the early twentieth century portrayed the body as an entity to be molded, manipulated, and even transcended.  Fused with machines, fashioned à la mode, or compressed into geometric shapes, avant-garde bodies functioned in the promotion of new social orders and visual forms.  Yet many avant-gardists also regarded the body suspiciously, as a vestige of the natural world that remained resistant to aesthetic and political transformation.  Such negotiations between the ideal and the reality of the body are the focal point of this panel. By
redefining the body¹s role within avant-garde production and rhetoric, this panel will open up new ways of theorizing the social discourse of the body; explore the historical deprivileging of groups commonly associated with the body; and examine the body¹s function as an interdisciplinary site upon which visual, physical, and political culture converged during this period. We invite papers on avant-garde art, theater, literature, photography and film that consider some of the following questions: How has the dynamism of the live body worked with and against static or non-visual art forms?  What role does the body play in styles that would seem to obfuscate or obliterate its presence (such as abstraction)?  How did avant-garde figures construe the relation between the individual body and the body politic? How has the body served as a tool of (or a hindrance to) political and social cultural
change?  How has it been utilized to express attitudes towards gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality and class?

Please send questions and one-page abstracts by April 15 to Susan Funkenstein (funkenst uwp.edu) and Juliet Bellow (bellow sas.upenn.edu).

"The Theater of Harlem"

The topic of this panel is the theater of Harlem, broadly conceived from literary, social, and historical perspectives. The panel will explore how Harlem served in the 1920s and 30s as a theater for exploring the volatile drama of race in America. Papers might address the following topics or propose others:
- cabarets, musicals, or plays in or about Harlem
- the use of theatrical motifs and conventions in fiction or poetry of the
Harlem Renaissance
- representations of Harlem as a spectacle in mass media publications or popular cultural venues.

Please send inquiries or abstracts by April 10 to suchurchill@davidson.edu.

Suzanne W. Churchill
Associate Professor of English
Davidson College
PO Box 6927
Davidson, NC 28035-6927
phone: (704) 894-2695
fax: (704) 894-2720

"Modernist Irony"

The topic of this panel is modernist irony. Papers might address the
following questions or others:

Is there such a thing as modernist irony? If so, what are its characteristics? What is its relationship to Romantic Irony? How do we detect irony? How can we decide where irony begins and ends? Is it useful to distinguish types of irony (dramatic, verbal, narrative)? How is irony related to indeterminacy? How does irony affect meaning?

Please send inquiries or brief proposals by April 10 to jwexler@luc.edu
 
Joyce Wexler
Professor of English
Loyola University Chicago
6525 N. Sheridan
Chicago, IL 60626
773-508-2782

Everyday Empires: State, Security, Form.  (4/15/06; MSA 10/19/06 – 10/22/06)

This panel examines the points in "modernist" aesthetic production where state power, imperial practice, and domestic life coincide.  In keeping with the emphasis of this year's conference on the archive, we are especially interested in projects that draw upon archival work or, alternatively, understand aesthetic form itself as a kind of archive -- one that, in a Benjaminian way, might register both political power and its utopian alternatives.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

-Formal articulations of power (Political and narrative sovereignty);
-Everyday life during the "event" of total war (Emergency powers, narratives from the Western Front, the "Phoney War", the Blitz)
-Aesthetic innovation and everyday life in the "colonial metropolis" (Dublin, Cairo, Algiers, etc.)
-Literary treatments of imperial liberalism (Developmental narratives, missionary tales at home and abroad)
-The imperial "outside" vs. the "inside" of state (International law, "empty space," biopolitical empire)
-Gender and the state (Population management, reproductive legislation)
-Interwar travel narratives and autoethnographies (Orwell, Auden, West)
-British Documentary and the Politics of Everyday Life (Mass-Observation, GPO Film Unit, etc.)
-Aesthetics, liberalism, and public space (Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, etc.)
-Poetics of Imperial Decline (Larkin, Heaney, Hill)

Interdisciplinary approaches are encouraged, nontraditional and/or noncanonical texts equally so.  This panel is proposed for the 2006 Modernist Studies Association conference, Oct 19-22, Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Send 1-page abstract and a brief vita to Nathan K. Hensley (nathan.hensley@duke.edu) or Tommy Davis (tdavis@nd.edu), by April 15th.

Counter Constructs: Reading the Archive, Re-reading Modernism

I am seeking papers for a panel on counter-histories that disrupt the aesthetic, generic and disciplinary boundaries of modernism. This panel considers what the archive can reveal about the construction of modernist canons, and how as critics might we undo/redo such canonical boundaries in light of this. What implications might such processes have for the institutional study of modernism, and how can they in turn shed light on conceptualizations of modernism that have been particularly prominent in critical understandings of the movement? Papers on texts and authors situated outside geographical centers of modernist activity in England, Europe and America will be especially welcomed.

How might we theorise the gap between the text, the author, the archive, and those whose names do not appear on the covers of books or in the pages of journals but whose contribution to modernism the archive makes clear? How does the archive make visible the gendering of modernist canons? How might archival work help non-Anglo-American modernist writing and scholarship to intervene into dominant conceptualisations of modernism? How does the archive destabilize modernist histories and narratives? Can postcolonial theoretical frameworks be fruitfully brought to bear on the deconstruction of modernist canons and concepts?

Please send abstracts (200w) by 18 April to Anouk Lang at a.e.lang@bham.ac.uk.

"Error in the Archive: Misprints, Misrecognitions, and other Mistakes"

Recent textual scholarship--such as Susan Howe's in _The Birthmark_ and _Peirce Arrow_--advocates the consideration of writing as a physical act, in which the print on the page, the shape of words in a manuscript, and the space of the paper itself are important facets of experience when we read books. The amplification of texts to include aspects typically considered the product of chance--a notebook opened at random, an accidental inkblot--results in the kind of disregard for authorial intention for which poststructuralism has long paved the way. Stanley Corngold has argued in "Error in Paul de Man," for instance, that the concept of error refers to the essential ambiguity of literary language. If art is error, then one can make no mistakes about it.

On the other hand, some scholars have begun to wonder whether it isn't a mistake not to draw a sharp line between a text and a book, in order to fend off the minefield of error awaiting anyone who tries to figure out what a nonsensical mark or space on a page might mean. Walter Benn Michaels' _Shape of the Signifier_, for example, asks whether we can distinguish between what an author means and paginal accidents, and he determines that we can and must. In Michaels’ view, the debate over whether it is possible to make an interpretive error is tantamount to a debate between structuralism and post-structuralism, a clash that he argues is, at least in part, fought out over editorial decisions about what elements of an archive can be considered “text.” The question Michaels demands one ask is one that has gone out of critical fashion in recent decades--except, of course, for in his own work--because in order to believe in mistakes one has to believe in intentions. However, his is a question that derives new force from the growing climate of interest in archival research. What, we might then ask, counts in an archive as having been meant? Words crossed out? Words substituted for them? Dashes? 83 blank pages—as in one of Howe’s examples—between two beginnings, one upside down, in the manuscript of the Puritan minister Thomas Shepard’s _Autobiography_?Understanding the function and limits of intention in the archive might reinvigorate critics’ broader interest in a question long considered answered and disposed of, with repercussions for inquiries into the difference between the nature of aesthetic objects and experience. Thus the purpose of this panel is to examine error in the archive: to wonder whether it exists in order to wonder what elements of the archive are meaningful in the absence of institutional (authorial, editorial) confirmations of legitimacy. Proposals may include, but aren’t limited to:

•    The Lost vs. Last Lunar Baedeker—editing errors in Mina Loy, Roger Conover’s corrections.
•    Misreadings, misprintings: the archive reveals the truth
•    Accidents adopted as part of the work of art—dada, surrealism, and other avant-garde adaptations; modernism and chance
•    Automatic writing
•    Freudian slips
•    Film and theater: directors’ and actors’ improvisations
•    Textual materialism—meaning beyond the word; the history of and modernist innovations in book culture
•    Little Magazines and other alternative presses; H.D.’s little books
•    “The Waste Land”—Eliot vs. Pound
•    Futurist declamations vs. futurist texts

Please send a brief abstract to creid@ycp.edu by April 30.

Call for Papers: Clipping Services

I am looking for proposed papers for a session on the surprisingly energetic involvement with clipping services by modernist writers. What can clipping services tell us about modernism and individual modernist writers? How did writers use clipping services?  What does the use of clipping services reveal about modernist relations to mass culture? What kinds of knowledge do these archives reveal? What potential for research is there?

Please send a maximum 500-word abstract by April 21 to Len Diepeveen (Leonard.Diepeveen@Dal.Ca)

Impersonal Passions

This panel brings together two contested territories of contemporary
scholarship on aesthetic modernism: the reconsideration of impersonality and
the attempt to rethink emotional experience and its role in creativity and
aesthetics.

Our panel seeks to gauge the pressure that new readings of impersonality exert
on modern theories of emotion or vice versa. Do modernist considerations of
emotion revise or reify conventional expressivist theories of art and personality? How do modernist strategies of myth-making, detachment, and indifference negotiate the urgent, particular emotions associated with personal, historical, and political experience? We welcome essays that explore how modernism engages with emotional experience in many varieties, including its role in artistic creation and reception; its configurations in the discourses of philosophy, emergent psychologies, or popular culture; and its implications in terms of politics, ideology, and aesthetics.

In light of the conference's title, "Out of the Archives," we also welcome essays that address the tension between archival research--which often promises to shed light the intentions of an authorial self--and the theoretical implications of such research, which (especially in terms of impersonality) frequently challenge or resist both intentionality and authority. Please send brief (150 words) abstracts as soon as possible to Anthony Cuda at acuda@emory.edu. Deadline is April 1, but review of proposals begins immediately.

Paper proposals are invited for a proposed panel: Beyond the Freud Principle: British Modernists' Engagement with Depth Psychology, at the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Conference in Tulsa, OK from October 19-22.

Virginia Woolf reserved for the moderns an appreciation of "the dark places of psychology." All too frequently literary historians, critics and biographers have suffered from the compulsion to repeat the orthodox view associating those dark places with Freudian psychoanalysis. This panel seeks to interrogate British modernists' engagement with eclectic depth psychologies, or as I have termed them, dynamic psychologies, including, but not limited to those propounded by William
Brown, David Eder, Bernard Hart, Pierre Janet, William McDougall, Frederic Myers, and James Sully.

Please send a 300 word abstract together with a brief CV to George Johnson gjohnson@tru.ca by April 15th, 2006.

The Sounds of Modern Poetry

What did poetic modernism sound like?  By what means-print, manuscript, aural recordings, performance traditions-have the sounds of early twentieth-century poetry persisted? Please send brief statements describing your work on this topic to Lesley Wheeler at the address below by April 1st (e-mail or regular mail; attachments are fine).  I will choose several participants and, based on the intersections among their projects, submit a completed proposal for a Roundtable Discussion to the Modernist Studies Association by early May.  The conference theme addresses how archival work might reshape our sense of modernism's borders and concerns, so if possible, please address how your own research draws from archival resources.  Also include a one-page c.v. or a scholarly/artistic biography (including rank, institutional affiliation, degrees, and major publications, if any, and complete contact information).  At the end of this message I include roundtable guidelines issued by the MSA; please note that the format invites dialogue in part by limiting the length of the panelists' presentations.

Lesley Wheeler, Associate Professor of English
Washington and Lee University
Lexington, VA 24450, USA
(540) 458 8758
FAX: (540) 458 8708
wheelerlm@wlu.edu

Paper proposals are invited for a proposed panel on Modernist Revision at the 2006 Modernist Studies Association Conference in  Tulsa, OK from October 19-22.

Revision is a basic aspect of writing, but it assumed a special prominence during the modernist period.  T. S. Eliot dedicated The Waste Land to his co-reviser, Ezra Pound.  Henry James revised his entire ouvre at the end of his life.  When Virginia Woolf revised the  proofs of her novels, she revised one for the British edition and one for the American edition.

This panel invites papers on the theory and/or practice of modernist  revision.  In line with the MSA’s theme—“Out of the archive”—I am particularly interested in papers that speak to issues of bibliography and textual criticism.

Please send a one-page abstract and brief bio to James Murphy at Jasmurph@Berkeley.edu by April 14, 2006.

Proposed panel:  The 'New Woman' and the Literature of the 1920s
deadline for proposals: April 15th, 2006

One significant cultural transformation rapidly solidified in  the aftermath of the Great War was the emergence of the New Woman. Smoking, drinking, enjoying sex in an uncomfortably masculine way, these women embraced the social relaxation that followed the crippling of class mores. Writers in the 1890s had sought to outline the inherent evils for women of attempting to work, reject maternal or domicile identities, or otherwise take on the freedoms previously restricted to the male sphere (one need only think of Stoker's Lucy Westenra and the consequences of her sexuality); nevertheless, many women, in these new social conditions, turned to writing and the arts.

We invite proposals that address the types of responses  to the altered social
landscape these women crafted:  their newfound freedoms, their sexual experimentation and experiences, and, in particular, their reactions to and
dialogue with those works now considered defining of modernism that emerged after the Great War. How did women writers of the 20s and 30s earn and use their newfound literary independence?

Please send 300 word abstract together with a brief CV to Heather.Lusty@unlv.edu   The deadline for submissions in April 15th, 2006.

"Little Magazines and the Visual Arts"

The arrival of modernism in the visual arts, for British and American audiences alike, is often equated simply with urban spectacles that drew critical viewers en masse - in Britain, the 1910 exhibition of "Monet and the Post-Impressionists," and in America, the 1913 New York Armory Show.  This panel seeks to complicate these assumptions by considering the role that visual reproductions and verbal descriptions of art have played in shaping the conception of what we have come to know as modernism.
In particular, we are interested in papers that examine how little magazines - such as The Dial, Camera Work, Rhythm, BLAST, or Roger Fry's Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs - have disseminated the "new painting" to culturally and geographically dispersed viewing publics by reproducing artworks as well as reviewing exhibits.  How, in other words, did magazines serve as (virtual) exhibition spaces for modern art?  How did they function to mediate between "original" modern artworks and their audiences?

We are especially interested in papers relevant to an exhibit of art taken from the pages of The New Age magazine that will occur concurrently with the conference.

Please send abstracts of 300 words, along with a brief vita, to Dawn_Blizard@brown.edu by April 20.

“Modernist Taste”

Modernist taste might at first glance seem an easy target for the kind of “Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste” offered by Bourdieu in Distinction.  What could better exemplify the “denial of the social,” the self-distinguishing “refusal of the facile,” or the “demand for the distance that allows it to keep its distance” of Bourdieu’s “pure taste” than the elitist, putatively “impersonal,” self-consciously difficult modernist work of art?  But recent re-mappings of modernism and of aesthetic discourse suggest the need for a reconsideration of the nature, function(s), and implications of the concept of taste in modernist art and modern society.

For this interdisciplinary panel I am seeking papers that would reconsider taste as a key modality for understanding, negotiating, and/or critiquing modernity:  its flows and forms of power, production, and consumption; its shifting categories and constructions of class, gender, and sexual identity; the taste-shaping force of its residual and emerging media, from Art to advertising; its technologies of communication and cultural institutions; its rapidly changing situation of the artist and the work of art.  Papers from all relevant disciplines are welcome, as are papers focused on works from any artistic medium, and from all cultural strata (i.e. high, low or middlebrow taste).  How are questions and conflicts of taste theorized, embodied, and/or represented in the modernist period?  In light of the conference theme, how does taste work to create, delimit, and/or change the “archive” that may be said to constitute culture?

Please send a maximum 500-word abstract to by April 21 to David McWhirter: d-mcwhirter@tamu.edu

Paper proposals are invited for a proposed panel:
"Archiving Violence": History, Modernism, and War

By "archiving violence" via artistic representation, modernist war artists were engaged in the negotiation of a way to remember and represent war as a specific historical event. In doing so, they sought ways to locate particular wars among other wars, or as a singular "disaster" that must be considered in relationship to other "disasters."
Yet, for these artists, the very ability to represent war is called into question by its violence. As a result, the problem that these artists highlight is one of representing unrepresentable violence or events.

This panel will consider how modernist artists attempted to define and understand the violence of war by complicating notions of who commits violence, who suffers as a result of violence, and where violence takes place. Of particular interest are modernist works that represent and thus, in a sense, "archive" war by radically revising the individuals, events, and ideas that are important to an understanding of the war. These works make explicit the tensions between attention and distraction
that are central to determining which experiences are marginalized, who is an "actor" in history, and who has the authority to record history. As such, modernist depictions of violence contribute to the destabilization of fixed identity categories, emerging out of challenges to myths such as "The Good War," the identifiable enemy, and even the
category of "the witness," as well as exposing the shifting and porous boundaries between home and the battlefield, the domestic and foreign.

By considering the production of war art as an engagement with history-making, the panel seeks to discuss the ways in which modernist artists redefine, re-present, and record notions of history, nation, self, and other through the artistic imagining of war and its violence.

Please send a maximum 250-word abstract by April 30 to Taryn L. Okuma
(tlokuma@wisc.edu)

“These fragments I have shorn”: Archive as the Literary Form of Modernism

“Quotation,” writes Lawrence Rainey, “is a salient feature of major modernist texts, whether The Cantos or The Waste Land, Ulysses or To the Lighthouse.” Indeed, given the absolute centrality of quotation and allusion in many of these texts, as well as in texts by the modernists’ inheritors among the Objectivists, the Language school and others, it might be possible to say that quotation is the salient feature of major modernist texts.  Many of these texts are so permeated by citation that they become virtual archives themselves---of the literary canon, of history, of contemporary culture. In the process, they often pursue the same goals as the archive as well: archeological research into more or less acknowledged histories; preservation of cultural monuments perceived as under threat (Eliot); exhibition of artifacts in interpretative arrangements. Often, they undertake a pursuit of origins through the networks of documents and texts they establish, tracing, as Fenollosa said the poet must, "back along the ancient lines of advance" towards an Adamic language, a lost cultural wholeness or a primordial moment of trauma.

What can these figurative archives teach us about the structure of the archive in general, about the act of creating an archive and about its relationship to human tradition and memory? How does the archive function, through these texts, as a metaphor itself of the production of the canon, of history, identity or the self? Is this archival form unique to the modernist and their heirs, or is it innate to the process of writing within culture? And why is it only at the moment of modernism that this archival form becomes apparent, or comes into being?

This is a proposed panel for the MSA conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma on 19-22
October 2006. Please Send 200 word maximum abstracts to jm3yg@virgina.edu
and mekonkol@buffalo.edu by April 30. Please include a brief bio or CV as well.

Call for Papers:
The Archive, the Book, and the Library
Proposed Panel for Modernist Studies Association 8 (2006)
October 19-22, 2006, Tulsa, OK

This panel seeks proposals on modernist critiques of (and experimentation with) the technology and institutions of the book. In what ways did modernist authors and movements address the material manifestations of literature, both old and emerging, in an effort to "make it new"?

Papers might address the relationship between print and manuscript, the role of the printing press, the relationship between modernist authors and publishers, booksellers, libraries, and universities, the use of the typewriter, methods of reading, and experimental or utopian bookmaking. Some examples might include: Pound's advocation of a "loose-leaf" system instead of bound anthologies, to keep the best material in front; the influence of late 19th-century sentence diagrams on modernist poetry (e.g., Stein, Williams); the burning of the library in Williams's Paterson; avant-garde (especially Futurist and Constructivist) experimentation with printing and typesets; Olson's use of the typewriter (or O'Hara's use of the telephone) and other new technologies; and other related topics.

Please send a maximum 500-word abstract along with a brief bio/CV to Timothy Carmody at carmody@sas.upenn.edu by April 20. Inquiries welcome.

Call for Papers: NON-ARCHIVED: BALKAN MODERNISMS

We are soliciting the papers for the panel on Balkan modernisms at the upcoming convention of the Modernist Studies Association, held in Tulsa, Oklahoma, October 19-22, 2006. It is indeed with scant archival or documentation support that researchers in Balkan modernisms approach their topic. The area has reclaimed its modernist heritage only recently and the long neglect has taken its toll. Already hampered by the linguistic, cultural, and political division of this vibrant geo-cultural
space, the scholarly work on Balkan modernisms has been additionally hindered by the disappearance of literary magazines, leaflets, books, collages, programs, and other documents that may testify to the modernist activities in the Balkans. Conditioned by foreign and domestic cultural politics, the vanishing of the traces of Balkan modernisms often went hand in hand with the disappearance and change of political systems, which we would like to explore. We are inviting the proposals for the papers that examine the silenced modernist spaces of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Turkey, and the former Yugoslavia in comparative perspective. We are interested in documented and undocumented traces of Balkan modernisms—personal archives, legacies, journals, bans and declarations, as well as alternative artistic activities (café-culture, performances, and so forth), and their connections to the European, American, and global modernist movements It is our aim to reflect on the history of cultural omissions as we bring to light the modernist space of the Balkans.

Please send one page abstracts and brief vitas to Sanja Bahun-Radunovic
(bahunic@rci.rutgers.edu) by April 25, 2006.

India, Modernism, and the Classroom

Proposed Panel for Modernist Studies Association 8 (2006)
October 19-22, 2006, Tulsa, OK

This potential panel seeks proposals on how we bring Indian texts—poetry, novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, film—out of the archive and into the classroom in order to build our students’ understanding of global modernism. How do we teach these texts to our students?  Are there differences in our pedagogical approaches to these texts in survey courses versus special topics courses?  What are effective teaching strategies for introducing students to the archive of Indian modernist texts?

Papers might address the relationship between English, Irish, and American writers and their Indian counterparts, Bollywood, the use of the English language as an art form, the placement of Indian writers in the syllabus, issues of imperialism and independence, whether or not Indian modernism is different than our traditionally accepted notions of the modernist project, and/or anthologized Indian writers vs. non-anthologized Indian writers.

Please send a maximum 500-word abstract along with a brief bio/CV to Marcia Farrell at marcia-farrell@utulsa.edu by April 20.

Precision and Soul in Modernism
 
In 1922, Robert Musil wrote of a "miscommunication between the intellect and
the soul. We do not have too much intellect and too little soul", he
continued, "but too little intellect in matters of the soul". This panel
focuses on the ways in which the intellect and the soul are made actively to
communicate in modernist texts in which the impersonal, the abstract, the
logical and the technological provide a means of accessing the poetic,
mystical, epiphanic and extraordinary aspects of the everyday real.

Please send 250-500 word proposals and a brief CV to Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé,
zoom@berkeley.edu by 21 April

Rereading the New Criticism

Commentators such as Gerald Graff and Mark Jancovich have noted that, since the demise in the 1960s of the New Critical hegemony, contemporary critical discourse has often promoted misunderstandings of New Critical projects. The image of the New Criticism as ahistorical formalism, they suggest, misrepresents the New Critics' commitment to practices and epistemologies distinctive to literature; their engagement with social and historical issues; and their cultural politics.  These recent critiques encourage rereading the work of the New Critics from a new perspective-one that maintains critical distance on received ideas about their methods. Any such rereading of the New Criticism has significant implications for modernist studies, given how much contemporary understandings of modernism owe to the work of the New Critics: as they established themselves in American universities at mid-century, the New Critics played a vital role in bringing what we now regard as modernist literature to prominence, legitimizing it as an area for scholarly study and shaping its reception. The histories of the New Criticism and modernism are so intertwined that we risk confusing the cultural stances of the moderns themselves with those of the critics who featured them.  This panel's premise is that the New Criticism forms a crucial part of the "archives" of our profession, as well as those of modernism; and that renewed contact with the work of the New Critics can yield valuable insights into both the profession and modernist studies.

We invite papers that revisit the work of the New Critics from a contemporary angle. Rather than rehabilitate the New Critics, we aim to facilitate new encounters with their claims and methods, as well as with the cultural milieu that conditioned their endeavours.  We also invite new considerations of the relevance that their work might have today to the criticism of literature and of cultural texts more broadly.  How might the work of Ransom, Brooks, Tate, Wellek, and Warren speak to us today in a field whose identity and practices were importantly shaped by their professional projects?  What might they have to say to us as critics of modernism pecifically?  How might we now view the oft-cited link between modernism and New Criticism, in light of recent developments within modernist studies?  Resisting constructions of the New Criticism as homogenous, our panel will instead highlight the divergent perspectives within what was a broadly constituted critical field.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

*New Critical claims about how to address literature as literature
*New Critical assertions about the kinds of knowledge uniquely available through literature
*New Critical pedagogical methods
*the relationship between New Critical practice and the assumptions, methodologies, and analytical methods associated with the domain of science
*the relationship between the New Critics and their cultural environment
*the cultural politics of the New Critics
*the role of the New Critics in the "Rise of English"
*the impact of New Critical methods and readings on understandings of modernism
*the New Criticism's place in the institutional archive
*modernism's response[s] to the New Critics

Please send 500-word abstracts along with a brief cv to Miranda Hickman
(miranda.hickman@mcgill.ca) or John McIntyre (jmcintyre@upei.ca) by April 15, 2006.

I am proposing the following panel for the 8th annual Modernist Studies Conference in Tulsa (October 19-22, 2006).

This panel will look closely at how modernist science is constructed and challenged from various interdisciplinary perspectives.Bruno Latour asked the question of whether we have ever been modern. Does a modern science exist? How have arguments for the social constructedness of scientific fact affected visions of a modernist science? Does the scientific method inherently engender the modern subject as free beings? Papers that deal specifically with the issue of whether modern science has been deconstructed in terms of actual scientific practice are especially welcome.

Please send a 500-word abstract by May 1st to Priya Venkatesan at priyav68@verizon.net

“Modern Confessionals”

This proposed panel will explore modern representations of “the confessional” and its many meanings: as an act of admitting guilt, as an ethical stance, as a narrative genre, or as the space where confessions are made.  It takes as its particular focus the ways in which art  “archives” or chronicles the confessional act, memorializing both the declaration and the wrongdoing.  By considering how confessions and confessional sites function, the panel will engage with tensions between public and private and secular and sacred, and discuss the extent to which such terms come to be revised in the 20th century climate of moral and lexical flexibility.  Papers from across the disciplines are invited, and essays on post-WWII texts are encouraged.

Papers might consider (but are not limited to) the following:
The text (or “the book”) as both the site and performance of confession;
the courtroom drama;
depictions / representations of sacramental confession;
witnessing and testimony;
public knowledge;
forced confession;
the confessional (autobiographical or intimate) narrative;
the reader as confessor.

Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief CV to mmnakaue@wisc.edu by 1 May.

“Modernism and the Comics”

While contemporary graphic narratives in comic strip, book, and “novel” form rapidly gain scholarly attention, the great age of comics, from the birth of the strip genre at the turn of the 20th century to the censorship clampdown of the 1950s, remains all but a dark continent in relation to other popular and avant-garde cultures of modernism. Papers are invited which seek to present illuminating research into relationships between comics and modernist lives and works. Possible topics include the history or poetics of comics of the modern period, the traces of comics in ideas or productions of modernist writers and artists, the continuities and discontinuities between literary and comics genres, and the problems of archival research for early comics.

Please send inquiries or one-page abstracts by April 27 to Glenn Willmott, Professor of English, Queen’s University, Canada; gw12@post.queensu.ca

"The Mimeograph Revolution and the Avant-Garde"
Proposed Panel for Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference, Tulsa, Oklahoma October  19-22, 2006

In recognition of MSA8’s host city, this proposed panel seeks papers  on the work of Joe Brainard, Ted Berrgian, and Ron Padgett. Although  generally associated with the second-generation New York School,  these figures might also be usefully identified with the city in  which their collaboration began: Tulsa, Oklahoma. Indeed, as  significant as is their debt to the first generation New Yorkers, in  many ways this filial relation has obscured the degree to which their  work represents its own important contribution to the history of  avant-gardism. This panel seeks to examine their participation in the  so-called “mimeograph revolution” of the 1960s as an extension of  historical avant-garde movements such as dada and surrealism. Papers  that treat archival materials such as _“C” a Journal of Poetry_ in  relation to the little magazines through which modernism was  propagated are especially welcome. In addition, papers might explore  the techniques of collage, appropriation, and mistranslation with  which Brainard, Berrigan, and Padgett created and transformed their  own archive of source material. Please send a one page abstract and a  brief cv to glavey@virginia.edu by April 25.

Proposed Panel: Listening to Modernism

Is listening indeed relegated to epistemological margins, part of “no acknowledged discipline” as Barthes observed?* Or might Barthes’ phrasing reflect how much more easily literary critical frameworks can be adapted to visual, versus acoustic, objects? In contrast to the great amount of work on visuality in modernism, few have addressed the meaning of hearing and listening in modernist prose. By examining representations of phenomenal sounds, this proposed panel aims to explore, in acoustic terms, alternatives to familiar, visually-anchored, models of modernist experience and perception. Papers that could complement recent work on sound in Ellison, Woolf, Joyce, Proust and Beckett are especially welcome. Please send a 300-500 word abstract and short cv to Katherine Anderson by April 30 at akea@berkeley.edu

* R. Barthes, “Listening.” _The Responsibility of Forms_. Trans. R. Howard. NY: Hill & Wang, 1985. 260.

Pulping the Archive: Uncovering Popular Modernisms

I seek papers that explore the possibilities opened up by extending definitions of the modernist archive to include the pulp magazines that flourished in the period.  Among the questions that might arise from this inquiry I find the following to be especially interesting.  Can scholars simply apply methods developed in studies of the little magazines to the pulps or do the different economic models and audiences of these publications require an altered methodology?  How do the pulps place themselves in literary history and in the sphere of cultural production?  Do specific publications, editors, or authors develop popular models of something like what we have come to recognize as high modernism?  How does the active role of pulp audiences in shaping what they read complicate the commonly accepted depiction of mass culture as a generic product foisted on a faceless mob of consumers?

Papers addressing any aspect of pulp archival work are welcome.  Papers that explore a publication’s cultivation of a “house style”, the career of a pulp editor or author, or the role of fans or fanzines are encouraged. 

Send 250 word abstracts to Leif Sorensen at Sorensen@uga.edu by May 1.

 All presenters must become members of the MSA and register for the conference in order to present. 

Black Poetry Out of the Archive

Because poetry written by blacks in the United States since the turn of the 20th Century has mainly been defined in terms of its oral or experiential power, little attention has been given to the literate aspects of that poetry's development, production, or publication.  Archives, of course, are the record of such literate processes, and many of the archives of some of modernism and postmodernism's most important black writers have yet to be adequately studied for the critical light
they can shed on the poetic work.

This panel for the Eighth Annual Modernist Studies Association conference in Tulsa, OK seeks to address the relationship between the archives and interpretation of poetry written by African American modernists.  Topic may include but are not limited to the following:

* Studies of individual writers and their archives
* Textual criticism of the development of particular works
* New understandings of poetry facilitated by archival discoveries
* Reports on discoveries at archives of black modernist writers
* Use by black poets of archives of other writers/figures/family
* The politics and economics of archiving the papers African American writers
* The public use/neglect/misuse of archives
* Needs in the archiving of African American writers
* Importance of archives to the future of black studies.

Please submit a 250-300 word abstract to Grant Matthew Jenkins by email
grant-jenkins@utulsa.edu by May 5, 2006.