Simultaneity: Before/Then/Now
Edward Aiken, Syracuse University

The concept of Simultaneity and its relation to Modernism has been primarily associated with Henri Bergson's writings; the rise of Cubism and Futurism; and the impact of such technologies as the cinema on Western European cultures, especially in the years between 1909 and 1914. It would be of considerable interest not only to re-examine traditional scholarship on this subject, but to gain a greater understanding of the origins of the concept of Simultaneity in the 19th Century and the continuing relevance of Simultaneity to world culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

English/Not English/Not English Only
Meryl Altman, DePauw University

As Walter Benjamin famously said, "all translation is only a somewhat provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages." But "straight" translation is only the starkest example of how writing can do, undo, redo borders: other ways of coming to terms with foreignness (of language and of culture) include interpretation, "versions of," partial translation, even the refusal of translation. Papers might address topics such as macaronic and multiglossic texts within high modernism and/or "other" modernisms; migrant resistances to English; language memoirs; "imported" critical theory; translation problems, challenges, practices, as these relate to canonicity, preservation of inherited traditions, and so on.

Modernisms in/and the Sciences
Suzanne Black, Purdue University

This year, the centennial of Einstein's papers on relativity and the photoelectric effect, seems an apt occasion for MSA to rethink connections between modernism(s) and the natural sciences. Scholars have long examined depictions of scientists like Einstein by modernist writers and artists. Although papers in this vein are welcome, I propose we also reverse the pattern, asking how characteristics of modernist culture might influence science. For example, does modern art affect the construction of scientific images? Does modernist non-fiction change the writing of popular science or scientific papers? How can we best understand resemblances between modernist themes like fragmentation, experimentation, and noise and their scientific counterparts?

The Author Business
Alison Booth, University of Virginia

What did the early twentieth-century add to the model of authorship that flourished in the later nineteenth-century? Arguably, modernism added new modes of authentication, commodification, and approximation (or reducing authorial distance). Authors had increasingly been purveyed in biographies, portraits, signatures, and manuscripts, in the publishing industry and copyright laws, and in pilgrimages to literary sites or in authors' public appearances. Papers are welcomed concerning literary business and the representation of authors of all sorts and contexts, addressing either longstanding practices or those that became profitable in the twentieth century: literary tours and walks; "homes and haunts" books; author museums; or our current management of authors circa 1880-1940.

Carrie's Sisters: Sex and the Single Girl in the Modern City
Genevieve Brassard, University of Connecticut/University of Portland

Chicago, New York, London, and Paris have been the setting for narratives that foreground female sexual development in the modern period. What happens to protagonists who are neither wives nor whores? What role do urban features such as public spaces and emerging media/technologies play in sexual identity, desire, and performance? How do traditional roles and expectations clash with female independence and the pursuit of sexual fulfillment? Seminar participants will explore the ways female sexuality intersects with the city as site of conflict and gendered space.

Collaborations and Collisions: Modernism and the Intersections of Genre
Brian Bremen, University of Texas at Austin
John Whittier-Ferguson, University of Michigan

Ezra Pound thought that "Poetry must be as well written as prose," and the modern long poem and experimental novel have dominated our ideas of Modernist writing. But how do other genres and media produced during the Modern era affect how we conceive of Modernism? Do popular genres such as the classic and hard-boiled detective story, film noir, science fiction, screwball comedies, music hall productions, burlesque, and other popular forms bear a particularly constitutive relationship to Modernism? This seminar aims to explore the relationship between Modernism and genre.

Tropes of Embodiment in Modernist Cultural Production
Nancy Buchwald, Independent Scholar

This seminar will investigate race, ethnicity, gender, and class in modernist cultural productions whose claims for universality often mask a valorization of white Anglo-Saxon masculinity. Scholars such as T. J. Clark, Michael Leja, Griselda Pollock, and Ann Gibson, among others, argue that the signifying systems of American visual modernism mask "difference" (such as painted marks associated with "feminine" qualities of looseness, randomness, and gesture) in order to secure modernist criticism's rhetoric of purity and transcendence from the taint of embodiment. By appropriating and domesticating visual signs for disorder, the accidental, and turbulence, for example, as mere stylistic gestures within the bounded, ordered surface of the modernist canvas, attributes of the "other" are re-presented as gestures gendered as male.

I wish to solicit papers which explore representations of embodiments inscribed by gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, age, etc. within works of art, films, novels, poems, or music in the period between 1913 and 1960. I especially invite papers which question the way in which depictions of particular corporealities, however coded, contest the invisibility of a predominantly white masculine cultural producer within American modernism, and in this way, challenge us to reshape the modernist visual and literary canon.

30 years of Minor Literature
Christopher Bush, Princeton University
Eric Hayot, University of Arizona

2005 marks the thirty-year anniversary of Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. While an influential contribution to Kafka scholarship, the book also raises issues that have become central to modernist scholarship, especially the issue of a "minor literature." Using an orientation toward Deleuze and Guatarri's text as a productive constraint, this seminar asks participants to contribute readings of Kafka, the text, or a more general engagements with the theoretical stakes and historical legacies of "minor literature," a category that might include various kinds of minor-ity literature, translation, and the peculiar status of modernist aesthetics in popular culture.

Disciplining Modernism
Pamela Caughie, Loyola University

I am proposing a collection of essays entitled Disciplining Modernism that will articulate the various meanings of modernity, modernism, and the modern in a wide range of disciplines and will consider how these terms have been conceptualized and studied in different social science and humanities disciplines as well as in various interdisciplinary fields. The goal of the collection and this seminar is to advance interdisciplinary work in the field of modernist studies by clarifying some terminological confusion and by illustrating the different approaches to the study of modernism and modernity that characterize different fields. I invite scholars from various humanities and social science disciplines to present papers (8-10 pages) that focus on how the writer's discipline conceives and defines modern, modernity and/or modernism and on how approaches to modernist studies have changed within that discipline over the past three decades with the emergence of new theories and new interdisciplinary fields, such as women's studies and cultural studies. Ideally, papers will also provide an extended example of how a scholar in that discipline might write about a particular modern text, artifact, or phenomenon (e.g., a film, a building, a painting, a novel, an intellectual or social movement, an historical document). Papers may also want to address the question, What changes in disciplinary definitions of modernity and modernism might be necessary to establish models for comparative studies? Participants in this panel may well want to read Susan Stanford Friedman's essay, "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism" (Modernism/Modernity, 2001), which will be reprinted as the lead essay in the collection.

Illness in Modernist Writing
Hilary Clark, University of Saskatchewan

This seminar will explore constructions of physical and mental illness in modernist writing (~1910-1939), including fiction, poetry, essays, manifestos, letters, etc. The seminar's particular focus will be the shaping of illness, understood as both construction and experience, in the encounter with medical/psychiatric ideas and discourse of this period. Possible topics include tuberculosis, hysteria, and melancholia.

Poetics of the Fragment, Politics of the Totality
Joshua Clover, University of California at Davis
Christopher Nealon, University of California at Berkeley

It is impossible to understand contemporary poetry and poetics without reference to Modernism's poetics of the fragment. This seminar will inquire after the relations between that fragmentary poetic (and related Modernist tropes, e.g. impersonality, citation, indirection) and recent emergent poetics engaging with issues of totality, whether desired, lost, or imagined. To what extent are these histories continuous, and to what extent does recent poetry constitute a refusal or revision? Is the relation satisfied by temporal ideas of belatedness or historical inevitability? Can emergent poetics be most usefully described in relation to Modernist traditions or to changing conditions outside aesthetic tradition? Possible considerations include the poetics of "bare life," Empire and the Multitude, Superinformation, and Google News.

Adorno, Benjamin, and the Concept of the New
Edward Cutler, Brigham Young University

One of the most integral, if perplexing, concepts in modernist studies is the concept of "the new" itself. Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, in particular, address the complex interplay of high-capitalist abstraction, commodification, fashion, ephemerality, and the emergence of the new as an aesthetic and social value. For Benjamin and Adorno, the new is conceived less as a "mode" or "style" and more as an historical-cultural inevitability; the "murderous historical force of the modern," as Adorno describes it in Aesthetic Theory, compels art not simply to adapt, but capitulate: "Only those works that expose themselves to every risk have the chance of living on, not those that out of fear of the ephemeral cast their lot with the past" (34). How do such declarations square with our current views of the motive-forces behind modernist art? Do Benjamin and Adorno get the story right? I invite papers that critically examine the concept of aesthetic newness in its varied iterations, from the Baudelairean nouveau to the avant garde, paying special attention to the contributions and potential limitations of the influential Frankfurt School critique.

Modernist Authenticities
Kevin Dettmar, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale
Debra Rae Cohen, University of Arkansas

This seminar will take up the question of how concepts of authenticity operate within the discourses of modernism, both contemporary and current. What constitute--then and now--the various, possibly conflicting indices of modernism's authenticity? What standards came into play to confirm the arrival of, in Eliot's words, "the new (the really new)" and how were such standards used to police the borders of an emergent modernism? How might examining notions of authenticity help illuminate such undertheorized concepts as modernist "irony" and "ambiguity," or current evocations of multiple modernisms? All critical models are welcome, including those derived from popular music studies.

Irish Modernism
Gregory Dobbins, University of California, Davis

The inspiration here stems from an experience I had in a seminar at last year's MSA conference. Somewhere between a discussion of British modernism on the one hand and American modernism on the other, some of us concerned with Irish modernism found ourselves in a different category altogether: the Peculiarities of the Irish. But how peculiar is Irish modernism? Certainly since the rise to prominence of post-colonial theory within Irish studies in recent years a sense of the differential nature of Irish modernism has emerged as well. But given the prominence of Irish writers in older, international conceptions of modernism right from the very beginning, just exactly how different is Irish modernism from other modernisms? What are the theoretical grounds for the specificity of Irish modernism, and what does it tell us about other modernisms? This seminar invites brief papers on any subject connected to the possibility or impossibility of a peculiarly Irish modernism.

The Avant-Garde and Its Object
Jonathan P. Eburne, Emory University
Janine Mileaf, Swarthmore College

This seminar invites papers that explore the relationship between the material practices of avant-garde movements and the political, cultural, and aesthetic aims these movements articulated. How can a focus on this relationship challenge the more fixed understanding of avant-gardism outlined in manifestos, or assessed by critics and historians in determining a movement's success or failure? How might our understanding of avant-gardism benefit from discussing such movements in terms of objects and the dynamics of their production, exchange, collection, display, and reception, as opposed to focusing on the exegesis of individual literary or artistic "works"? And how does materiality itself become a motivating factor in determining the avant-garde's objectives?

Word as Image as Cultural Artifact
Craig Eliason, University of St. Thomas (MN)

What is the cultural significance of the shape of words? This seminar invites studies of the visual aspects of letters and words in the modern period. These might appear in visual poetry (e.g., Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Schwitters), on painted canvases (Picasso, Magritte), in modern typography (avant-garde journals, the New Typography), in modern typeface design (Renner, Gill, Koch), in modern calligraphy (British, Islamic, East Asian traditions), or elsewhere. Of particular interest are studies that both pay close attention to the specific visual character of letters and words, and that venture broader conclusions about the producers or consumers of those forms.

Culture on the Move: Importation, Relocation, Translation
Jim English, University of Pennsylvania
Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania

This seminar is concerned with deliberate attempts to shift the geographical location of particular modes, forms, or schools of 20th-century culture, and especially with the institutional aspects of such relocations. What, concretely, is involved in establishing a modernist poetic coterie in Cairo; in instituting Surrealism in New York or Buenos Aires; or, to take a more recent and commercial example, in remaking British game or reality shows for North American television? We are accustomed to thinking of such relocations as effects of exile or of (cultural) imperialism, but perhaps it is time to develop new terms and models of analysis. Are there certain neglected patterns in the way these shifts of location are managed, certain agents (individual or institutional) whose interventions are likely to be decisive? What accounts for success or failure? And has the whole practice of "managing" cultural import/export changed in the era of transnational media conglomerates and globalization?

Wired Reading and Modernist Texts
Margaret Mills Harper, Georgia State University

How does an iPod head hear the music of Ulysses? Do videogamers create new narratives in Proust? What does wi-fi web browsing do to Woolf? When does CNN present Harlem or Paris? I am interested in changes to reading that may be occurring in a post-Haraway environment, and whether cyborgs like myself (and, more dramatically, my students) create new modernist readings and/or texts in specific and theorizable ways. To put it in other, convoluted words, I want to know whether contemporary readers of texts that responded to technological change when they were produced produce technologically changed texts in their turn?

Satire, Sentiment, and Political Modernism
Matthew Hofer, University of New Mexico

This seminar will reassess the political resources of modernist aesthetics, with special attention to the relevance of satire and sentiment in the context of modernity. As responses to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century problems of bodies both public and intimate, these apparently incommensurable concepts--characterized by ideological simplification and extreme affect--also extend into the twentieth century, though often in surprising forms, as in Mina Loy's poetry, Langston Hughes's prose, or Charlie Chaplin's films. We invite position papers that work across a wide range of national, racial, sexual, and gendered positions to address either (or both) of these tenacious and unstable modes of cultural engagement.

Discerning Object Relations in Modern Literature
Walter Kalaidjian, Emory University

Although the tradition of object relations theory in psychoanalysis has a rich heritage reaching back to Sigmund Freud, through Melanie Klein and forward to W. D. Winnicott, it has not yet experienced the kind of rapid exfoliation into literary studies witnessed, say, in trauma theory during the 1990s. Aside from a minority of notable exceptions--as in the work of Leo Bersani, Juliet Mitchell, Julia Kristeva, and Jacqueline Rose, among others--attention to the pre-Oedipal domain of object relations has enjoyed only cursory readings in literary studies. Nevertheless, as Ramon E. Soto-Crespo and Esther Sánchez-Pardo have both argued recently, the Kleinian tradition proves salutary in reading the radically experimental and subversive side of non-representational modernism. This seminar explores the ways in which the uncanny objects of pre-Oedipal fantasy are inscribed in representative works of literary modernism.

Modernism and the Geopolitics of Exhibition
Kurt Koenigsberger, Case Western Reserve University

This seminar invites papers that attend to the geopolitical dimensions of showmanship and spectatorship in the modernist period. How do modernist writers' and artists' experiences of institutions, occasions, and technologies of cultural display shape their attitudes towards the nation, the West, the world? In what ways do modernist texts exploit novel practices of exhibition and spectatorship to cultivate cosmopolitan, Internationalist, anti-imperialist, nationalistic, or jingoistic perspectives? Papers might take up modernist engagements with older forms of showmanship and display (zoos, circuses, sideshows), emergent technologies and genres (the cinematograph, phantom train-rides, and panoramic travel films), or unique spectacles (Delhi Durbars, international expositions).

From Barcelona to Berlin: Modernism Goes to War
Phyllis Lassner, Northwestern University
Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University

This seminar will address questions about relationships between the trajectory of modernist cultural production and that of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Considering these wars individually and in concert, we ask: How do these wars produce, alter, and challenge modernist art forms as well as how we study modernism? What happens to Modernism as artistic commodity and as community in these wars? How do modernist artists and thinkers of Bloomsbury, the Left Bank, the Bombing of Barcelona, Café Royal, the Frankfurt School, or Hollywood respond to the ideologies and conditions of these wars?

Modernism and the Orient
Lidan Lin, Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne
Zhaoming Qian, University of New Orleans

Among modernist writers Yeats, Pound, and Forster, as far as we know, openly acknowledge their debt to Japan, China, and India. Are they the only ones who have had fruitful dialogues with the Orient? Is the verbal the only media through which the modernists explore Asian cultures? Where in their uses of Japan, China, and India do they betray linkage to nineteenth century orientalism, and where do they depart from it? Those who have written on the topic and those who share interest are invited to exchange insights and information.

Modernism Beyond the Blitz?
Marina MacKay, Washington University in St. Louis

Vincent Sherry remarks that the identification of London modernism with the Great War constitutes a critical incantation of "nearly sacral character." What then of the war that followed? This seminar investigates what the Second World War and its aftermath have to tell us about modernism, whereby "modernism" is understood as a way of reading (a period, a politics, but also a term of approbation) and as a way of writing (a challenge, a protest, an inquiry). Shall we call it late modernism, or valedictory modernism, or second-and-third-wave modernism? Is it the outcome of Great War modernism or a retreat from it? This seminar aims to shine new light on periodicity, canonicity, and the Blitz aesthetic.

Modernist Nostalgia
Dianne Sachko Macleod, University of California, Davis

In coining the term "modernist nostalgia," I am referring to the yearning for an idealized past which challenges the forward thrust and unitary ideology of progressivism. Rita Felski's notion of "Romanticism's nostalgia" posits woman as an ahistorical Other whose redemptive maternal body and authenticity are untouched by modernity, whereas Svetlana Boym's theory of reflective nostalgia identifies a longing that spurs an equivocal empathy with modern life. These concepts point to the elusive and contradictory nature of nostalgia. Is it static or energizing? Must its unifying consciousness be anti-modern or can it be simultaneously engaged and disengaged? This seminar will reconsider expressions of nostalgia in collections of objects, works of art, literary texts, critical debates, or cultural discourses.

Anthropological Modernisms
Marc Manganaro, Rutgers University

The aim of this seminar is to explore the diversity of ways in which anthropological methods, discourses, and subject matters are invested in, as well as become a way of understanding, modernist artistic production and practice. The seminar welcomes approaches that attempt to incorporate multiple understandings and definitions of both anthropology and modernism, and attend to the historical specificities of anthropology as a discipline. Also welcome are approaches that give attention to canonically neglected modernists, and to varieties of writing that, like anthropology, focus on the "other" and the "exotic" (e.g., science fiction, fantasy).

Figuring the Self in Modern and Contemporary Poetry
Timothy Materer, University of Missouri

The complex nature of the poetic self is expressed in Elizabeth Bishop's lines from "In the Waiting Room": "I felt: you are an I . . . . you are one of them." Bishop's "I" is observing another "I" whose identity involves being one of "them." Is the self she discovers a social construction or something anterior to other selves? Some critics assume that a poem is an expression of the self, and others that the "self" is simply one of its figures or metaphors. Self-consciousness may be considered either as an increased knowledge of the self or, on the contrary, a more intense alienation from it. Papers that contribute to this debate are invited.

Modernism at Home
Gail McDonald, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Insofar as we associate the word "home" with feelings of comfort and security and insofar as we associate the word "modernism" with efforts to disrupt contentment, the two concepts appear to be at odds. Does the evidence of literature, visual art, interior design, architecture, and other endeavors considered "modernist" support this view? To what extent are scenes of domesticity portrayed negatively (or positively) in modernist texts? How are we to understand the energetic investment in rethinking the design of houses, furniture, and articles of everyday use? What role does gender play in the separation of public and private spaces? What are the psychological stakes in rejecting Victorian notions of the home as sanctuary? Do modernists in fact reject that view, or merely revise it?

Modernist Excess
Jordana Mendelson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Modernism, as popularly understood, has often been described as a movement of artistic and literary restraint. This is especially the case for those critics who took architecture, abstract painting, and the aesthetic control of formalist investigations as the primary location for advanced artistic and literary strategies in the early twentieth century. As we know, this is only one side of the modernist coin. This seminar seeks to explore the other side: accumulation, over-production, and the intentionally unrestrained and often borderless activities shared by many artists, writers, and performers. Often, these more uncontrolled and provocative gestures lead to works that challenged the orthodoxy of modernist criticism (and comportment). We will, through the close examination of specific cases of modernist behavior and practice, attempt to come to terms with the relationship between excess and modernism.

"The women are out of it": Early Modernism and the English Gentleman
Tim Middleton, Bath Spa University College

Critics suggest that an exclusion of the feminine by the dominant culture of fin-de-siecle England was central to its intertwining of discourses of national identity and gender and to its rigorous policing of sexual difference. This seminar explores the ways modernist writers in England engaged with the period's constructions of masculine identity. Questions we might explore include: How did new prose aesthetics relate to the evolving problematics of gender at the fin de siecle? How do the discourses of inversion and imperialism interact with each other and with critical and fictional writing that represented, discussed, or appropriated the language of gender? How and to what degree do the works of such writers as Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Ford Madox Ford comprise a modernist critique of the English gentleman?

Chancy Modernism
Brian Reed, University of Washington, Seattle

In December 2004, Jackson Mac Low, a famed avant-garde poet and a pioneering practitioner of chance-generated art, passed away. In his honor, this seminar will reexamine the role of chance in modernist-era art and literature. Possible topics include accident; automatism; coincidence; corps exquis; drift; gambling; improvisation; interruption; objet trouve; papiers dechires; parapraxis; probability; simultaneity; typographical error; and the weather. When and why do aleatory techniques appeal to writers and artists? What might early twentieth-century invocations of chance reveal (or conceal) about more general questions, such as the nature of modern urban sociality, or the relation between aesthetics and the marketplace?

Identities, Arguments, and Economies
Sonita Sarker, Macalester College

The "international" often presupposes the "nation-state." This seminar invites you to explore how, why, and to what degree this assumption is negotiated by modernist writers. The modernist period appears to be a time of contradictory tendencies-of nation-states being formed simultaneously with a call for universal/international programs. These competing economies, both symbolic and material, attempt alternatively to (re)instate the nation as a basis for being-in-the-world and to supersede the same imaginary. The dominant rhetorics of nation-states often deploy normative metaphors of identity to argue both uniqueness and commonality. How do modernist writers locate themselves in these contradictory matrices, and use them for their own economies of art, culture, narrative, and rights? The seminar calls attention to indigenous as/and cosmopolitan modes of anarchist, imperial, surrealist, capitalist, dadaist, communist, and anti-colonial discourses. Comparative analyses across the north and south, east and west, in various genres and media, are welcome.

Modernist Pedagogies
Morag Shiach, Queen Mary, University of London

This seminar will examine the literary pedagogies that emerge within modernism, by examining the modes of reading and of teaching that are implicitly or explicitly articulated by writers and critics such as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf or I. A Richards. It will then try to put these into some sort of critical relationship relationship with the range of pedagogical strategies we currently adopt to enable students to read, and to engage critically and historically with, the literary texts of modernism. Questions of canon formation, of the understanding of literary history, and of the coercions of reading are likely to be relevant to this seminar.

Modernism and Its Materialisms
Joseph Tabbi, University of Illinois at Chicago

From ideas about the materiality of the signifier to the more recent turn towards complexity theory and cognitive science to persistent questions raised by Marxist historicism, various approaches to Modernism have laid claim to the mantle of "materialism." But none of these approaches are in any clear sense the same, and may in fact be mutually incompatible. This seminar aims to put these and other materialisms brought to bear on Modernism into dialogue with one another and to begin to answer the question: in the realm of literary or cultural theory, what is materialism?

Modern(ist) Love
Janine Utell, Widener University

Modernist studies has been a vital site for the interrogation of gender and sexuality, for the construction and representation of the subject. Yet an ellipses exists among these questions that have so preoccupied the field: the consideration of love. This seminar will seek to intervene in this absence, asking, why do we not talk about love? If we did, what would there be to say? Topics might include the relationships among desire, sexuality, sex, and love; the use of irony, pathos, sentimentality in depicting love; love in high culture vs. mass culture; the construction and critiquing of love relationships and institutions; the representation of marriage, adultery, affairs; straight love, gay love, bi love; and, of course, the pain and shame that comes with the end of love.

(Surviving) Modernism at the Outbreak of the Great War: 1914
Michael Walsh, Eastern Mediterranean University

It was unpredictable, at the outset, what impact the Great War would have on the arts. For many of the practitioners and coteries in European capitals August 1914 brought with it the perfect subject matter that the pre-war modernist apprenticeship had prepared them so perfectly for, and was regarded, therefore, as an opportunity, not a threat. The critical reception of this radical modernism, however, had experienced a seismic shift in tolerance, verging on cultural hostility, and now this same war with its "purifying fire," it was felt, might actually sweep away such symbols of decadence and national threat. For others, the continuation and survival of pre-war cultural "progress" seemed vital in a climate where the Kultur of the Central Powers could not be seen to score an early victory against "the West." Or perhaps war and art had no natural relationship anyway, and should therefore be kept quite separate from one another, in the hands of guardians who, having sat the war out, would recreate national culture after the cessation of hostilities. The internationalism, radicalism and even patriotism of modernism was being challenged (or perhaps being chased across the Atlantic) through impassioned debates which questioned its relevance, nature and the merits of its survival, in an environment where the inescapable relationship to a now destructive modernity had to be seriously rethought.

This panel will focus on the year 1914 (though a slightly wider time frame can be considered (i.e., 1913-1915) and on contemporary projections/debates concerning what impact the war would have / had on modernism, in all disciplines (especially art, literature, theatre, music, architecture, fashion design) in Europe and North America, and assess its critical position by Christmas 1915.

Modernism, Realism, and the Intermedia Sensibility
(REVISED)
Paul Young, Vanderbilt University

The intersections between literary modernism and realism--including such offshoots as literary naturalism--have been noted regularly in recent years, often in connection with the invention of photography and its effects upon representational strategies. But with a few notable exceptions (such as the media philosopher Friedrich Kittler), little has been done to explore the aesthetic and ideological pressures exerted upon modernism and realism by early cinema and other new media technologies developed around the turn of the century (1890-1930). This seminar will unite literature and media scholars who place the cinema and other communications technologies, such as phonography and radio, into a constellation with literary modernism and realism's experimental approaches to representing vision, sound, and subjectivity.

Participants will submit five-page position papers related to the above; I hope to receive a nice mixture of case-study sketches and theoretical pieces. Though submissions need not address the intermedial contexts of both modernism and realism, a central topic of the seminar conversation will be the ways in which media research might shed new light on the relationship between these movements.