Lingering Modernisms (NEMLA) (NeMLA 55th Annual Conference)
Boston, MA
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA 55th Annual Conference
“Make it new.” The rallying cry of modernism supposes something which came earlier which is to be reimagined across the literature and arts of the early twentieth century. Ezra Pound’s maxim represents the bridge between the old and the new, as authors took up the pen to reimagine what life in modernity might look like across literature, the arts more broadly, and political documents including manifestos. The ‘new’ includes many famous and infamous works, but what of the ‘it’? As a response to the alienation of the modern city, the waning of global empires and rotting of the colonial enterprise, and wars beyond previous imagining, authors drew on the old to not only push towards the new, but also recontextualize the present moment using the familiar. Which genres lingered beyond their original contexts into the twentieth century, and why did authors reimagine them? Which literary forms endured or reemerged in response to war and trauma in its first decades? How does the deployment of a familiar form, or form itself, change when everything else has changed so drastically? How does the provisionality of modernism manifest itself when everything which once seemed solid becomes unstable? This panel seeks to address and offer potential answers to some of these questions, while also pressing beyond any specific set of dates which might bound modernism across literature and the arts. Likewise, texts outside the traditional canon and outside the geographical boundaries of western Europe are very much welcome.
Please submit abstracts of 200-300 words to: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20452
Presentations should be 15-20 minutes in length.
NeMLA membership is not required to submit an abstract. The conference will be held in Boston March 7-10th, 2024.
Daniel Dougherty
