Pandemic, Crisis, and Modern Studies: The Intersection of Your Research with the Pandemic/Crisis – A Twitter Conference

Countervoices, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

12 June 2020 | Twitter

Over the past few months, the spread of Covid-19 has profoundly impacted the lives of people around the globe. Whether politically, through the ever-shifting government policies, culturally, by virtual access to cultural artefacts, or socially, through individual isolation, the rapid spread of the pandemic has changed how one lives in the world. Undoubtedly severe as the consequences of the virus are, it boosts new insights into human relation(ship)s, communities, and environment, with imaginative responses such as singing on balconies, and considerable drops in air pollution. For individuals, communication has become confined to the virtual space, forcing us to find original forms of expression.

This conference attempts to initiate a robust and meaningful discussion on how the pandemic or crisis shapes our past, present, and future. We invite discussions about the pandemic as a global crisis from passionate and creative intellectuals in different disciplines of modern studies (from 1830 to present). Featuring an opportune interdisciplinary response to the contemporary changes and new experiences brought about by the crisis, this conference will spark new debates over ontological issues, shed new light upon research in humanities and sciences, and engage and inspire a broad range of audiences in and beyond this country.

The conference welcomes submissions of abstracts for twitter-papers consisting of 10-15 tweets (with pictures/slides) about the way your studies intersect with the pandemic or crisis. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Physical and mental health: vulnerability, fragility, illness, health, care, death, and resilience, therapy, and recovery.
  • Cognition and memory: trauma, recollection, history, erasure, monument, and memorials.
  • Space: architecture, geography, regions, nations, transnation, and globe.
  • Identities, groups and agents: identities in relation to crisis (victim, survivor, volunteer, helper, expert, hero, scapegoat, whistleblower, etc.), groups and authorities in operation, effects on particular groups in the population (gender, race, class and human rights), creation of new groups and new identities.
  • Changes and reactions: changes to habits (shopping, behaviour, social norms), cognition, human relationships, cities, businesses, economies, and policies that initiate (or do not initiate) such changes.
  • Communication and language: rumours, fake news, instructions, slogans, hashtags, and new words.
  • Apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, utopian/dystopian visions.
  • Material objects and metaphors: necessities (food, toilet roll), tools of self-preservation (masks, hand-sanitizer, vaccines, ventilators, and weapons).
  • Animals and the environment: non-human, ecology, environment, and post-human.
  • Representation in literature, music, art, cinema, documents, archive, or records.

Please send your abstract (200 words), a short bio (50 words), and your twitter account (@XXXX) to [email protected] by 15 May 2020. Participants will be invited to present their papers (thread of tweets) on 12 June using the hashtag #Cmodspan2020 and tagging the Countervoices (@cmodspgforum1) and CModS (@cmods1) twitter accounts according to the conference programme and handbook, which will be updated at the end of May. We will host the conference and retweet your tweet-papers in a single thread, under the title of the conference. For those who don’t have a twitter account, we can help you tweet your discussion. The best papers presented in this conference will receive Amazon vouchers worth up to £50. We are grateful to the Centre for Modern Studies for making it possible for us to offer these awards.

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Fay Bound Alberti (York) & Dr. Beryl Pong (Sheffield)

Find us on Twitter , Facebook or our website.

Call for Essays: Katherine Mansfield Studies

Call for Essays for vol. 13 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press, together with details of the associated essay prize for 2020. This year’s theme is Katherine Mansfield and Children, in all its possible contexts.

Katherine Mansfield and Children

Editors: Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK; Todd Martin, Huntington University, USA

Virginia Woolf once remarked that Katherine Mansfield had ‘a kind of childlikeness somewhere which has been much disfigured, but still exists’. This ‘childlikeness’ is indeed a facet of Mansfield’s personality which permeates every aspect of her personal and creative life. It is present in her mature fiction, where some of her most well-known and accomplished stories, such as ‘Prelude’ and ‘At the Bay’, have children as protagonists; it is present in her early poetry, which includes a collection of poems for children intended for publication; it is also present in her juvenilia, where many of the stories she wrote from an early age for school magazines and other publications, feature children. As Tracy Miao notes of her mature fiction, ‘in Mansfield’s modelling of her child artists […] there is more than a simple “childlikeness” […] but a serious thought process on art and the artist’.

Even as an adult, Mansfield’s love of the miniature, her delight in children in general, her fascination with dolls, all feature in her personal writing. Her relationship with John Middleton Murry was characterised by their mutual descriptions of themselves as little children fighting against a corrupt world. Alluding to their innocence, Mansfield once wrote to Murry: ‘My grown up self sees us like two little children who have been turned out into the garden’. Years later, speaking of Murry’s writing, she notes, ‘Take care of yourself – my beloved child with all these wild men about throwing stones and striking’.

Essays which address any aspect of the concept of Mansfield and children will be considered for this volume. Subjects might include (but are not limited to):

• Children in Mansfield’s fiction
• Children in Mansfield’s poetry
• Mansfield’s juvenilia – poetry and /or prose
• Mansfield’s early years
• The ‘childlike’ relationship between Mansfield and Murry
• Mansfield’s pregnancies
• Mansfield’s love of the miniature
• Mansfield and dolls
• The childlike in Mansfield’s personal writing
• Mansfield’s ‘innocent eye’ (John Ruskin)

Please email submissions of c.6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt. Times New Roman, double line-spaced, with a 100-word abstract + 5 keywords & 50-word biography, to the editorial team at [email protected]

PLEASE NOTE: ALL SUBMISSIONS WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE ENTERED FOR OUR ANNUAL ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION UNLESS AUTHORS INDICATE OTHERWISE.

Style Guide: Katherine Mansfield Society

We also welcome creative submissions of poetry, short stories, and creative essays on the general theme of Katherine Mansfield. Please send submissions for consideration, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to [email protected].

Deadline for Submissions: 31 August 2020

CRiSiS: Conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies

7th biennial conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies

17-19 September 2020 | University of Leuven, Belgium

Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism. Throughout their history, avant-gardists and modernists have faced crises, be they economic or political, scientific or technological, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. Modernists and avant-gardists have in turn continually stood accused of instigating crises, whether artistic or cultural, sensorial or conceptual, incidental or intentional, far-reaching or negligible, representational or other. The very concepts of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘modernism’ are time and again subject—or subjected—to conceptual crises, leaving modernism and avant-garde studies as a field on the perpetual brink of a self-effacing theoretical crisis.

The 7th biennial conference of the EAM intends to tackle the ways in which the avant-garde and modernism in Europe relate to crisi/es. Although we welcome panel, roundtable and paper proposals on any aspect of this relationship, we are particularly interested in new research on three topics.

First, we want to explore the theoretical complexity of the notion of crisis. For what is a crisis, really? The term is defined very loosely at times in modernism and avant-garde studies, and a quick survey illustrates that we seldom talk about crises of the same scale, import or impact. By clarifying what exactly counts as a crisis, surely we can gain a better understanding of the European avant-gardes and modernism. So what precisely do we mean by ‘crisis’? Is crisis above all a narrative device? Is there ever no crisis? Are there types of crisis, artistic or otherwise, that we have thus far neglected in our study of the avant-garde or modernism? And what (other) view(s) of crisis do avant-gardists and modernists themselves project?

Second, we are interested in proposals that touch upon the crises-laden historical trajectory of the avant-gardes and modernism. For while we often claim that a notion of crisis is key to a proper understanding of (late) modernity, the European avant-gardes and modernists faced different historical crises throughout their development. To what extent do all these crises, which span several centuries, share common denominators? What role do national and regional differences play over time? Does the project of the avant-garde and modernism, along with their critique of crisis, change fundamentally over time or not? Proposals touching upon a historical case study or submissions comparing several historical cases from different times or regions in Europe are therefore particularly welcome.

Third and finally, we wholeheartedly encourage proposals that look at the practical side of things, across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity: art, literature, music, architecture, film, artistic and social movements, lifestyle, television, fashion, drama, performance, activism, curatorial practice, design and technology. How do European avant-gardists and modernists give aesthetic shape to crises? What representational strategies and tactics do they use in their practices? What affective (and other) experiences of crisis does their work allow for? What crises do their experimental practices yield—in fact, do the avant-gardes and modernism create types or modes of crisis of their own?

The official languages of this conference are English, French and German. You may submit a proposal as a panel chair, as an individual or as a roundtable chair.

1. You may propose to be the chair of a panel. A panel consists of three or four speakers. One of the speakers is the chair who makes the submission and supplies the details and proposals of all of the proposed participants. You may also submit a double or triple panel. Panels should not consist only of doctoral students and panels composed of participants from a single department at a single institution are less likely to be accepted.

2. You may submit an individual proposal without specifying a panel and the organisers will assign your paper to a panel if accepted.

3. You may propose to be the chair of a roundtable. Roundtables consist of a maximum of 6 participants who each write brief “position papers” (4 pages) that are read and circulated before the conference. During the roundtable, participants briefly present position statements, after which a discussion takes place moderated by the chair. Roundtables can consist only of doctoral students yet roundtables composed of participants from a single department at a single institution are also less likely to be accepted.

Roundtable proposals (deadline 1 Jan 2020) should include:

1. Title of the roundtable and language (English, French, German – one only)

2. A 500-word summary of the roundtable’s topic and rationale.

3. The chair’s name, a one-page curriculum vitae, and contact information (address and email).

4. Name, postal address and email contact of at least 5 (maximum 6) participants in the roundtable.

5. Short biography of individual participants

Panel proposals (deadline 1 Feb 2020) should include:

1. Title of the panel and language of the panel (English, French, German – one only)

2. Name, address and email contact of the chair

3. A summary of the panel topic (300 words)

4. A summary of each individual contribution (300 words)

5. Name, postal address and email contact of individual contributors

6. Short biography of individual contributors

Individual proposals (deadline 1 Feb 2020) should include:

1. Title of the paper and language of the paper (English, French, or German)

2. Name, address and email of contributor

3. A summary of the contribution (300 words)

4. Short biography of the contributor

Please submit your proposals in Word format only to [email protected]. Acceptance will be notified via email by the end of May. A detailed conference programme will be available on the EAM website before summer. With any questions, please always make sure to check this page first, as it will be updated in due course.

Full information: CRiSiS Conference

MSA Brooklyn 2020

MSA Annual Conference: “Streets”

Hosted by the Modernist Studies Association

22-25 October 2020 | Brooklyn, New York

New York City has long been a stage for what Marshall Berman called “modernism in the streets,” a modernism that encompasses not only the speed and scale of modernity at large, but also the democratic energies of diasporas, migrant communities, and social movements that stake their claims at street level. MSA 2020 will consider the modernist street as a site of movement where the demand for new worlds has become legible in countless creative ways.

MSA 2020 will be held in downtown Brooklyn, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, itself an inspiration for the painter Joseph Stella, photographer Walker Evans, and poets ranging from Hart Crane and Marianne Moore to Vladimir Mayakovsky and Federico García Lorca. A separate city until 1898, Brooklyn’s relations with the other four New York boroughs invite renewed reflection on questions of development at street level. In particular, Brooklyn, whose “ample hills” Walt Whitman extolled, has undergone a dramatic population shift in the new millennium. Though people of color still make up the majority of Brooklyn’s residents, gentrification has not only made parts of the borough financially out of reach for many, it has also turned a borough famous for its working class and ethnic neighborhoods into an international brand.

“Streets” is a capacious rubric, inviting new perspectives on modernist cultural production at a local and global scale. Streets can be imagined as a way of thinking; as sites of overlapping temporalities; as networks; and as material, populated places.

As part of the MSA’s initiative to promote a more diverse Association, the 2020 conference will feature five streams of interrelated interdisciplinary panels, more than any previous MSA conference. Each stream solicits proposals for individual papers and aims to draw speakers and audience members from constituencies historically underrepresented within MSA.

Keynote events will include a presentation by novelist Zadie Smith and a plenary roundtable on “The New York Sound,” featuring Daphne Brooks (Yale), Brent Edwards (Columbia), Sara Marcus (USC), and Elena Martinez (Bronx Music Heritage Center).

Proposal deadlines:

Individual Paper Proposals: due 30 March, 2020.

Seminar Proposals: due 7 February, 2020.

Workshop Proposals: due 24 April, 2020.

Panel Proposals: due 30 March, 2020.

Roundtable Proposals: due 30 March, 2020.

Digital Exhibits and Posters: due 24 April, 2020.

Full information: MSA Brooklyn 2020

The Modernist Studies in Asia Network: Call for essays for Modernism/modernity Print Plus

Global Modernisms’ Other Empires

The Modernist Studies in Asia Network, Modernism/modernity Print Plus

The Modernist Studies in Asia Network seeks proposals for short, persuasive essays addressing “Global Modernisms’ Other Empires” for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform. While the New Modernist Studies has productively expanded the locations and timelines of modernism, many figures, literary works, and images central to this expansion continue to be drawn from the British and French Empires. Yet, some of the strongest and most contested sites of imperialism in the modernist period involved locations and imperial aspirations beyond Europe’s core empires. This cluster invites papers which consider how literary modernism records the entangled imperial legacies of these empires or investigate how inter-imperial entanglements contribute the uneven or unequal effects of modernity on modernism’s global emergence.

This cluster aims to expand understanding of the relationship between modernism, imperialism and the global by reconceptualizing how modernism engaged with entangled colonial networks in which Europe is influential, but not the sole player. Individual essays might focus on how the study of imperial modernisms engage postcolonial criticism to better understand literary modernism’s relation to the nexus of asymmetrical and multidirectional global power relations, or how the vestigial imperial ambitions of empires such as Japan, China, Ottoman Turkey, Russia, and the Portuguese register aesthetically. While we particularly welcome contributions that focus on modernisms with connections to the Asian continent, proposed papers need not be explicitly connected to Asia to be considered.

Papers should be in the spirit of a conference roundtable (2000-3000 words). We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by the digital setting of the Print Plus platform. For more on the platform see: https://modernismmodernity.org/about

Please send a titled, 300-word abstract and a brief biography to [email protected] by 1 December 2019. Contributors will be invited to submit essays, after which the entire cluster will be sent out for peer review.

For full information: The Modernist Studies in Asia Network CFPs

Third issue of Feminist Modernist Studies now available

The third issue of Feminist Modernist Studies (Routledge) has now been published! Check out the editor’s and Amanda Golden’s co-edited free access introduction to the special cluster on “feminist modernist digital humanities.” See Table of Contents and free access link below.

Feminist Modernist Studies
Volume 1 Number 3 October 2018

Special Cluster: Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities, edited by Amanda Golden

“Introduction: Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities,” Amanda Golden and Cassandra Laity Free Access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24692921.2018.1503786

“Toward a Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities,” Shawna Ross

“Storm Clouds on the Horizon: Feminist Ontologies and the Problem of Gender,” Pamela L. Caughie, Emily Datskou and Rebecca Parker

“Feminist Designs: Modernist Digital Humanities &Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde,” Suzanne W. Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan and Susan Rosenbaum

“The Marianne Moore Digital Archive and Feminist Modernist Digital Humanities,” Cristanne Miller

“Visualizing the Uplift: Digitizing Poetry by African American Women, 1900-1922,” Amardeep Singh

“Talking Women/Women Talking: The Feminist Potential of Podcasting for Modernist Studies,” Sean Richardson and H. Green

“Prototyping Mina Loy’s Alphabet,” Margaret Konkol

Essay
‘“Another armored animal”: Modernist Prosthesis and Marianne Moore’s Posthumanist Animales,’ Dancy Mason

Out of the Archives, edited by Urmila Seshagiri
‘“Making Flowers”: The first English Translation of a Short Story by Dutch Modernist Carry van Bruggen,’ translated and introduced by Ruth Clemens

CFP: AMSN4 – Modernist Comedy & Humour, CFP deadline extended to April 27th

The Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference

University of Melbourne, 26-28 October 2018

Jandaschewsky Clowns, 1903. Image by Talma & Co. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.

Is modernism funny? During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Sigmund Freud theorized jokes and their relation to the unconscious, while Henri Bergson argued that laughter is produced by “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” English literary modernists held Victorian earnestness in contempt, often while taking themselves extremely seriously. Early twentieth-century Dadaists committed themselves to nonsense and irrationality and, in 1940, the surrealist André Breton edited and published an anthology of “black humour.” The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the rise of popular and parodic forms of comedy and humour such as the comic strip, vaudeville, camp, and Buster Keaton’s deadpan acting style. These comic forms and styles were bound up with histories of immigration, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and culture industries.

Humanities scholars are devoting new attention to the aesthetics, politics, and social significance of comedy and humour. For instance, in their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note competing trajectories of modern social life: on the one hand, “people are increasingly supposed to be funny all the time,” and on the other, “humourlessness is on the rise.” In the same issue, Ngai opposes the labor-saving operations of the “gimmick” to Victor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht’s practices of making methods of production visible. These tensions and oppositions suggest the usefulness of attending to comedy and humour in the field of modernist studies, which in recent years has rethought traditional oppositions among popular, high modernist, and avant-garde cultural forms.

We invite papers that engage with comedy and humour across the interdisciplinary field of modernist studies. How do comedy and humour reflect and affect the geographical, temporal, and cultural expansiveness of contemporary modernist studies, and what might Australasian scholarship contribute to this expansion? When are comic genres and styles normative, subversive, or ambivalent? When is laughter a mode of detachment, and when is it a way of being in relation? Who is in on the joke, and why does it matter?

Possible topics might include:

  • Camp, kitsch, taste, judgment
  • Comic performance genres and styles: vaudeville, music hall, variety,
  • minstrelsy, burlesque, standup, the deadpan, slapstick, shtick, gimmicks
  • Humourlessness, earnestness, seriousness, the unfunny
  • Jokes, comic timing, comic tones
  • Comic strips, political cartoons, caricature
  • The ridiculous, the absurd
  • Humour and/of the avant-garde
  • Laughter and audience behavior
  • Ways and theories of reading
  • The mechanical, grotesque, or nonhuman; humourous objects
  • Pleasure, play, fun
  • Comedy as and at work
  • Commodity culture, advertisements
  • Affect and emotion
  • Ethnic, national, or cosmopolitan comic perspectives
  • Queer humour, sexual parody
  • Overstatement and understatement
  • The epigram, the bon mot, the cutting remark
  • Normative and subversive humour, harmlessness, vulgarity, offensiveness
  • Theories and histories of comedy and humour

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a bio of no more than 150 words to [email protected] as an attachment by April 27th 2018.

Confirmed keynotes:

  • Professor Nick Salvato (Cornell University). This speaker is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
  • Dr Gillian Arrighi (University of Newcastle)

Bursaries of up to $200 will be awarded on a competitive basis. Bursary recipients will also receive free conference registration. Candidates should be enrolled in, or recently graduated from a higher degree research program and have had an abstract accepted for the conference. Expressions of interest will be solicited after acceptances have been announced.

Conference committee:
Dr Sarah Balkin, University of Melbourne
Professor Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne
Elizabeth McLean, University of Melbourne
Jessica Marian, University of Melbourne

Questions may be directed to [email protected].

CFP: AMSN4 – Modernist Comedy & Humour, updated with bursary info

The Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference

University of Melbourne, 26-28 October 2018

Jandaschewsky Clowns, 1903. Image by Talma & Co. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.

Is modernism funny? During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Sigmund Freud theorized jokes and their relation to the unconscious, while Henri Bergson argued that laughter is produced by “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” English literary modernists held Victorian earnestness in contempt, often while taking themselves extremely seriously. Early twentieth-century Dadaists committed themselves to nonsense and irrationality and, in 1940, the surrealist André Breton edited and published an anthology of “black humour.” The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the rise of popular and parodic forms of comedy and humour such as the comic strip, vaudeville, camp, and Buster Keaton’s deadpan acting style. These comic forms and styles were bound up with histories of immigration, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and culture industries.

Humanities scholars are devoting new attention to the aesthetics, politics, and social significance of comedy and humour. For instance, in their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note competing trajectories of modern social life: on the one hand, “people are increasingly supposed to be funny all the time,” and on the other, “humourlessness is on the rise.” In the same issue, Ngai opposes the labor-saving operations of the “gimmick” to Victor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht’s practices of making methods of production visible. These tensions and oppositions suggest the usefulness of attending to comedy and humour in the field of modernist studies, which in recent years has rethought traditional oppositions among popular, high modernist, and avant-garde cultural forms.

We invite papers that engage with comedy and humour across the interdisciplinary field of modernist studies. How do comedy and humour reflect and affect the geographical, temporal, and cultural expansiveness of contemporary modernist studies, and what might Australasian scholarship contribute to this expansion? When are comic genres and styles normative, subversive, or ambivalent? When is laughter a mode of detachment, and when is it a way of being in relation? Who is in on the joke, and why does it matter?

Possible topics might include:

  • Camp, kitsch, taste, judgment
  • Comic performance genres and styles: vaudeville, music hall, variety,
  • minstrelsy, burlesque, standup, the deadpan, slapstick, shtick, gimmicks
  • Humourlessness, earnestness, seriousness, the unfunny
  • Jokes, comic timing, comic tones
  • Comic strips, political cartoons, caricature
  • The ridiculous, the absurd
  • Humour and/of the avant-garde
  • Laughter and audience behavior
  • Ways and theories of reading
  • The mechanical, grotesque, or nonhuman; humourous objects
  • Pleasure, play, fun
  • Comedy as and at work
  • Commodity culture, advertisements
  • Affect and emotion
  • Ethnic, national, or cosmopolitan comic perspectives
  • Queer humour, sexual parody
  • Overstatement and understatement
  • The epigram, the bon mot, the cutting remark
  • Normative and subversive humour, harmlessness, vulgarity, offensiveness
  • Theories and histories of comedy and humour

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a bio of no more than 150 words to [email protected] as an attachment by March 30th 2018.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Nick Salvato (Cornell). This speaker is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Bursaries of up to $200 will be awarded on a competitive basis. Bursary recipients will also receive free conference registration. Candidates should be enrolled in, or recently graduated from a higher degree research program and have had an abstract accepted for the conference. Expressions of interest will be solicited after acceptances have been announced.

Conference committee:
Dr Sarah Balkin, University of Melbourne
Professor Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne
Elizabeth McLean, University of Melbourne
Jessica Marian, University of Melbourne

Questions may be directed to [email protected].

CFP: AMSN4 – Modernist Comedy & Humour

The Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference

University of Melbourne, 26-28 October 2018

Jandaschewsky Clowns, 1903. Image by Talma & Co. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.

Is modernism funny? During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Sigmund Freud theorized jokes and their relation to the unconscious, while Henri Bergson argued that laughter is produced by “something mechanical encrusted on the living.” English literary modernists held Victorian earnestness in contempt, often while taking themselves extremely seriously. Early twentieth-century Dadaists committed themselves to nonsense and irrationality and, in 1940, the surrealist André Breton edited and published an anthology of “black humour.” The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries also saw the rise of popular and parodic forms of comedy and humour such as the comic strip, vaudeville, camp, and Buster Keaton’s deadpan acting style. These comic forms and styles were bound up with histories of immigration, gender and sexuality, race, technology, and culture industries.

Humanities scholars are devoting new attention to the aesthetics, politics, and social significance of comedy and humour. For instance, in their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note competing trajectories of modern social life: on the one hand, “people are increasingly supposed to be funny all the time,” and on the other, “humourlessness is on the rise.” In the same issue, Ngai opposes the labor-saving operations of the “gimmick” to Victor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht’s practices of making methods of production visible. These tensions and oppositions suggest the usefulness of attending to comedy and humour in the field of modernist studies, which in recent years has rethought traditional oppositions among popular, high modernist, and avant-garde cultural forms.

We invite papers that engage with comedy and humour across the interdisciplinary field of modernist studies. How do comedy and humour reflect and affect the geographical, temporal, and cultural expansiveness of contemporary modernist studies, and what might Australasian scholarship contribute to this expansion? When are comic genres and styles normative, subversive, or ambivalent? When is laughter a mode of detachment, and when is it a way of being in relation? Who is in on the joke, and why does it matter?

Possible topics might include:

  • Camp, kitsch, taste, judgment
  • Comic performance genres and styles: vaudeville, music hall, variety,
  • minstrelsy, burlesque, standup, the deadpan, slapstick, shtick, gimmicks
  • Humourlessness, earnestness, seriousness, the unfunny
  • Jokes, comic timing, comic tones
  • Comic strips, political cartoons, caricature
  • The ridiculous, the absurd
  • Humour and/of the avant-garde
  • Laughter and audience behavior
  • Ways and theories of reading
  • The mechanical, grotesque, or nonhuman; humourous objects
  • Pleasure, play, fun
  • Comedy as and at work
  • Commodity culture, advertisements
  • Affect and emotion
  • Ethnic, national, or cosmopolitan comic perspectives
  • Queer humour, sexual parody
  • Overstatement and understatement
  • The epigram, the bon mot, the cutting remark
  • Normative and subversive humour, harmlessness, vulgarity, offensiveness
  • Theories and histories of comedy and humour

Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a bio of no more than 150 words to [email protected] as an attachment by March 30th 2018.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Nick Salvato (Cornell). This speaker is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

Conference committee:
Dr Sarah Balkin, University of Melbourne
Professor Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne Elizabeth McLean, University of Melbourne
Jessica Marian, University of Melbourne

Questions may be directed to [email protected].