Panels:
Genre and Global Modernism
Panel Organizer: Lily Saint (Wesleyan)
Panelists: Nicole Rizzuto (Georgetown)
Respondent: Catherine Taylor (Ithaca)
Ethics and The Aesthetics of Difference
Panel Organizer: Ania Spyra (Butler)
Panelists: Chris Bush (Northwestern) & Josh Miller (Michigan) & Chris Holmes (Ithaca College)
Respondent: Emily Hyde (U Penn)
Fictions of Authoritarianism and the (Re)turns of Modernism
Panel Organizer: Magali Armillas-Tiseyra (University of Mississippi)
Panelists: Lanie Millar (University of Oregon) & Anne Garland (University of Arizona)
Respondent:
Modernism and Internationalism
Panel Organizer: Aarthi Vadde (Duke)
Panelists: Thomas Davis (Ohio State University) & Nico Israel (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College)
Respondent: Chris Holmes (Ithaca)
English, Spanish, and the Politics of Global Modernisms
Panel Organizer: Gayle Rogers (University of Pittsburgh)
Panelists: Harris Feinsod (Northwestern) & Lori Cole (Brandeis University)
Respondent: Lily Sheehan (Oregon State)
Center and Periphery Modernisms
Panel Organizer: Jennifer Spitzer (Ithaca College)
Panelists: Lily Sheehan (Oregon State University) & Tim Wientzen (Harvard)
Respondent: Stephen Cope (Hobart William Smith)
Panel Topics:
Genre and Global Modernism
Panel Organizer: Lily Saint (Wesleyan) Panelists: Nicole Rizzuto (Georgetown) The global turn in literary studies challenges many of our field’s central assumptions about genre, enjoining us to consider the interplay of local, international, and transnational forms and thematics, augmenting our understanding of the literary, as well as expanding our understanding of what constitutes literature itself. Franco Moretti’s reorientation of the genealogy of the novel, to take one genre’s example, makes clear that most national trajectories of the novel, in most countries in the world, involved a considerable set of negotiations between local and foreign aesthetic forms and traditions, as well as local and transnational circuits of knowledge production and exchange. A reassessment of genre through the optic of global studies is particularly important for modernist studies, since modernism’s historical compass positions its generic innovations as coincidental with the peak of European and U.S. colonialism, as well as with its fragmentation and dissolution. This panel looks therefore at the intersections between contemporary questions of genre and global modernism(s). When Jacques Derrida suggests in "The Law of Genre," that generic laws resemble state laws, he invites our suspicion of the classificatory impulse, of the cordoning off and demarcation of borders that is the hallmark of our discipline’s division of literary works into genre, and of disciplinarity more broadly. Indeed, genres in the global South often testify overtly to different genres' inherent instabilities, as this panel will explore. How are those generic disruptions brought about by considerations of modernism through the lens of the global different from those generic disruptions traditionally associated with European modernism? Our three panelists will consider questions of genre across various geographic regions, with particular attention to economies of visual, oral, and textual exchange. How, for instance, have considerations of modernism as a global genre, simultaneously drawn our attention to the breakdown of generic distinction characteristic of modernism and modernity, but also to its aggressive re-instantiation? How have encounters between representatives, beneficiaries, and opponents of colonial and postcolonial capitalist expansion, contributed to re-conceptualizations of genre? Is modernism ipso facto a global mode of writing, and if so, what are its temporal parameters? Ethics and The Aesthetics of Difference Panel Organizer: Ania Spyra (Butler) Panelists: Chris Bush (Northwestern) Josh Miller (Michigan) Chris Holmes (Ithaca) The transnational turn in literary studies and pedagogy has assumed that in the age of globalization readers need to overcome the barriers of difference to learn to live with one another. Literary critics see this promise fulfilled through the careful reading of the texts of Others: a reader’s deep engagement with world literature leads to ethical gains. For example, Derek Attridge claims that the confounding moments of discomfort in Coetzee’s fiction are places of ethical growth. Even more recently, David Palambo-Liu in The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age argues for modes of affiliation and ethical thinking that develop transnational awareness. But to what extent does literature indeed deliver otherness to us? And to what extent does it produce it? And towards what ends? How extensively and in what ways is this otherness managed to assure communication despite difference? Or, on the other hand, how is it fetishized? If within immigrant and postcolonial literatures, writers often resort to what Graham Huggan has termed “strategic exoticism” to position themselves vis-à-vis both mainstream and sophisticated audiences, are readers ever in a position to engage with deep, radical difference? In considering these questions across various genres and geographical regions, our panel will engage in a debate over the ethical, philosophical and political uses of difference in contemporary critical discourses on transnational literature. Fictions of Authoritarianism and the (Re)turns of Modernism Panel Organizer: Magali Armillas-Tiseyra (U Miss) Panelists: Lanie Millar (University of Oregon) Anne Garland (University of Arizona) This panel focuses on literary representations of authoritarianism—regimes, leaders, and so on—with particular attention to the narrative modes or style in which these are portrayed. With Jameson’s comments on the conflict between realism and modernism as being a continual “return of the repressed” in his conclusion to the volume Aesthetics and Politics in mind, it will turn our attention to the various modes in which authors choose to represent a particular authoritarian regime or leader. Specifically, will address the role of the literary techniques typically identified with modernism in these texts in order to question the tension between the terms “modern” and “modernism” from a global perspective. Possible questions include: What is the status of the term “modernism” in relation to the literary representation of authoritarian regimes in what we can broadly term the “global south”? Does the presence of modernist literary techniques make these texts “modernist”? Does the turn to “modernist” techniques necessarily signal the exhaustion of realism in politically engaged writing? What might this “modernist turn” in fictions of authoritarianism signal about realism itself? Further, what new iterations of the term “modernism” become possible when considered in conjunction with these fictions of authoritarianism? Modernism and Internationalism Panel Organizer: Aarthi Vadde (Duke) Panelists: Thomas Davis (Ohio State University) Nico Israel (CUNY Graduate Center and Hunter College) The 1920s is considered the height of high modernism, but it is less often observed, at least in modernist studies, that the 1920s was also a key decade in the history of internationalism. The founding of the League of Nations presents an important experiment in the history of international governance while the Comintern stands as a powerful example of international dissidence. This panel will consider how global modernism intersects with and contributes to various philosophies and practices of internationalism as they unfolded in roughly the first half of the twentieth century. Some animating questions include: Did modernism's aesthetic practices of representation, abstraction, and synthesis contribute to novel understandings of communal forms like the nation, continent, or race? Are there parallels or connections between the development of modernist and avant-garde movements, for example, surrealism, Dada, Bloomsbury, and Negritude, and the development of social or political projects promoting internationalism in some form or another? In what ways has the shift from the traditional paradigm of "international modernism" to the paradigm of "transnational" or "global modernism" enabled us to rethink modernism in terms of international language practices such as translation and reprinting? In asking these questions, the panel takes global modernism to be a literary and cultural formation in which European and non-European literatures overlap. However, such a provisional definition does not preclude considerations of modernism's encounter with aesthetic rivals or the internal tensions that arise within modernist geographies that traverse metropolitan and colonial lines of power. English, Spanish, and the Politics of Global Modernisms Panel Organizer: Gayle Rogers, (University of Pittsburgh) Panelists: Harris Feinsod (Northwestern University) Lori Cole (Brandeis University) Translation is a familiar topic to scholars of modernist studies; the monuments of the modernist canon in English and in other languages all employ multiple languages and translational techniques. As the field has expanded toward more “global” conceptions of modernism’s emergence and legacies, studies of translation have also expanded to new languages, including creoles, pidgins, and hybrid tongues that were previously overlooked. But until recently, studies of translation in modernism, and of linguistic exchange (bilingualism, adaptation across languages, and more) have rarely approached the dynamics between English and Spanish. Even “global modernism” has more often signaled Pound’s or Lowell’s interest in Chinese poetry, or Tagore’s writings in English and Bengali. Relative to the dominance of English and French, Spanish seems to exist in a semi-peripheral state. (It is both a European tongue and a New World language, yet few scholars in the Euro-American core could name more than a couple of Hispanophone modernists.) As this panel will demonstrate, however, the exchanges and mutual influences between English and Spanish were vital to the reconceptions of language and its constitutive place in formulations of internationalism in the twentieth century. These multifarious processes took place in “contact zones” such as the Mexican-American border, in New York (where “Spanglish” has been said to have emerged), or in unique locales like Gibraltar or the Falklands. But it also took place in literatures that seemed removed from such physical proximity. Well-known figures including Pound, Williams, Hughes, and Dos Passos studied and translated Spanish intensively at formative moments early in their careers. By the same token, a host of major Hispanophone modernists—Borges, Ocampo, Lorca, Jiménez, Valle-Inclán—studied and translated English at various stages of their work. During the Spanish Civil War, writers ranging from Nancy Cunard to Stephen Spender translated Spanish poetry as an act of international sympathy with the embattled Republic. Our panel will range across media, genres, and geographies to approach the experimentalism that the varieties of English/Spanish exchange prompted, especially in the early twentieth century. In literature, magazines, films, and more, the contacts between English and Spanish—and the gaps that remained between them—help us rethink the globalism of the avant-garde or modernismo. Our panel will suggest that a further recovery and exploration of the political contexts and articulations of these interactions will lead to surprising conclusions about the shape of global modernist studies. Center and Periphery Modernisms Panel Organizer: Jennifer Spitzer Panelists: Lily Sheehan (Oregon State U) & Tim Wientzen (Harvard) What is the time and place of modernism? What is inside and what is outside of modernism? Within the ever-expanding field of the new modernist studies, which has been attempting to revise (or at least question) the temporal, spatial, and vertical coordinates of modernism, how do scholars account for those peripheral modernisms that challenge the very conceptual frameworks that have rendered the field both teach-able and study-able? What happens, for example, when we defamiliarize the conventional boundaries of modernism--codified as they were primarily by white Anglo-American critics in relation to white Anglo-American male authors? As these peripheral modernisms help us to defamialize our object(s) of study, do the supposed centers of modernism begin to lose their centrality? Do we discover that all modernisms are in fact “bad modernisms” or perhipheral modernisms in the end? Yet to lose our sense of center and periphery modernisms might also be to lose sight of the kinds of economic, colonial, racial, and gender hierarchies that have structured the uneven production, dissemination, circulation, translation and canonization of modernist texts. It may also be to lose sight of the kinds of hybrid experiments that could only be produced at the margins, in places of exile, alienation, encounter and underdevelopment. In reckoning with insides and outsides, this panel will consider what Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel call a “locational” approach, “a self-consciousness about positionality” that will help us to address peripheral geographies (Wientzen) and transnational racial communities (Sheehan) as important sites of modernism. |