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We are eager to post announcements of all international, English-language conferences generated by both writing and academic communities -- when those events pertain to modernist studies and contemporary innovate poetries & scholarship, particularly when focused on the works of women authors. This section will be continuously UPDATED between the September and February issues. Please send Call for Papers, dates, location, website information -- with plenty of lead time -- to Up'date Coordinator Kate Fagan kfag6311@mail.usyd.edu.au

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CONFERENCES OF INTEREST

Twentieth-Century Literature Conference (21-24 February, 2002 at University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky)

Call for Papers Deadline: September 15, 2001

The Twentieth-Century Literature conference, now in its thirtieth year, has become an international event attracting more than six hundred participants annually.  Scholars in all languages and literatures are invited to submit proposals on any topic pertaining to literary works published since 1900.  The Conference also welcomes submissions by creative writers.  Reading committees select the best critical and creative works; the papers are then grouped for presentation at sectional meetings held on the campus of the University of Louisville.

Send submissions and correspondence to:

Danielle Day, Conference Director
Dept of Classical & Modern Languages
University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292
USA
Tel: 502 852 6686
Email: dlday@louisville.edu

We welcome inquiries by mail, phone, fax, or e-mail, but the conference will not accept electronic submissions.  Consult our website for additional conference information:

www.louisville.edu/a-s/cml/xxconf/

Lust for Life: The Writings of Kathy Acker (7-8 November, 2002 at New York University, New York)

Submission Deadline: September 20, 2001

We invite you to submit paper proposals for a conference on the writings of Kathy Acker, one of the most erudite, provocative, fearless, and influential writers of our time.  The conference will include scholars from various disciplines, including Catharine Stimpson, Eve Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Andrew Ross, and Avital Ronell.  Panels will address these and other issues: the politics of appropriation, gender drifting and geo-eroticism, the intersection of literature and philosophy, violence and desire, queerness and feminism, language and representation, visual art and performance, and the role of pornography.

‘Lust for Life’ is planned in conjunction with the publication of Essential Acker: The Kathy Acker Reader, edited by Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper, forthcoming from Grove Press; and an exhibition of Acker’s manuscripts and drawings from the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in Duke University’s Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library and the Fales Library at NYU.

The ‘Lust for Life’ committee—Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman, Avital Ronell, Marvin Taylor, Eric Zinner, Matias Viegener, Cristina Favretto—is working in conjunction with the Fales Library and New York University, where the conference will take place.  There will be a plenary session and panels, followed by a public reading from Kathy Acker’s writing.

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length.  Please email your proposals to:

Marvin Taylor at marvin.taylor@nyu.edu

Or send to

Marvin J Taylor
Director, Fales Library and Special Collections
New York University
70 Washington Square South
New York, NY 10012

PARTLY WRITING:

“Partly Writing” is a cross-institutional event in two inter-connected parts co-hosted by Dartington College of Arts (19-20 January 2002) and the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Oxford Brookes University (early April 2002). Both parts are co-organised by Romana Huk, Research Fellow, Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry (Oxford Brookes) and Caroline Bergvall, Associate Fellow in Performance Writing, Centre for Research in Contemporary Performance Arts (Dartington).

Description (subject to further development by participants):

The main rationale for the two events of talks, discussions, presentations is to bring together an international group of poets, text-based practitioners, critics and arts organisations to think over the question of writing for public spaces and the various modes and cross-arts forms in which this takes place.  Both events aim to mark out current intellectual and practical strategies, to examine enquiries set up by lines of practice and to promote peer exchange in environments conducive to in-depth discussions and critical exchanges.  At the core of these two complementary events lies the need to question the effectiveness of textual interventions for the regeneration of cultural spaces and poetic discourses. Although the overall format for each event differs slightly, specific discussions will start from a few headings to show up and push on from some of the approaches taken up by writers as a response to changing communication patterns: emerging and compound literacies, bilingual investment, collaborative developments, translation as a practice of localisation.  The question running through these issues is the extent to which innovative text practices function increasingly as a complex set of negotiations (cultural, linguistic, institutional, interpersonal) that both feed off and exceed specialist literary traditions and test out new modes of intervening with language and written text in a range of environments. This can affect perceptions around the privacy of process and highlight some of the ways in which writers are contributing to mixed-media strategies and ephemeral works.

PARTLY WRITING 1: Writing as Negotiated Space.
Changing Literacies: Technological and contextual investments (Dartington College of Arts, 19-20 January, 2001)

PARTLY WRITING invites participation in a number of differing modes. 

Its proceedings will issue in several stages to mark the ongoing process of the work; featured readings and initial- versus after-thoughts will appear on our website for all to follow, while various electronic and journal selections will precede our final volume of collected pieces published under Oxford Brookes’ developing imprint.  An open plenary discussion by way of follow-up is also being organized for the autumn.

The first part of the project, the seminar at Dartington College of Arts, will be the smaller of the two events, limiting its core participants to twenty-five and inviting ten auditors.  It will work from shared reading suggested by invited seminarians and posted on our website; its mini-interventions (five minutes per participant) will help to direct conversation generated out of the readings and will be loosely configured within four working sessions.  The invited participants involve an international range of poets, text-based practitioners, members of arts organizations and critics; there will also be up to seven spaces made available to others who might wish to apply to participate.  Auditors and applying participants will be given accommodations and selected meals in exchange for a seminar fee of sixty pounds made payable to Dartington College of Arts.  Selections of those additional participants will depend upon the relevance of their proposed interventions and history of writing completed to date.  An abstract, c.v. and photocopied samples of relevant past work should be sent by 30 September to Caroline Bergvall at c.bergvall@btinternet.com.

Inquiries welcomed by Caroline Bergvall

PARTLY WRITING 2:

Collaborative Imperatives
Translation Practices: Responsive Writings (Early April: date to be confirmed)

The second event to be held at Oxford Brookes University’s Centre for Modern and Contemporary Poetry will be open in terms of number of participants, all of whom (beyond invited practitioners) will be responsible for their own accommodations and meals in addition to the colloquium fee of 30 pounds (half-price concessions).  (Lists of inexpensive B&Bs are available from Simon Baalham, conference secretary at Brookes: sbaalham@brookes.ac.uk. )  Although its session headings will evolve in part out of conversations that take place in event one, the general program will be set by the end of the autumn and allowed to stretch to accommodate issues and problems that arise in the seminar.  One-page abstracts for strictly-timed twenty-minute presentations should be sent to Romana Huk at rhuk@brookes.ac.uk by 30 November. Inquiries welcomed by Romana Huk.

ACLA Annual Conference 2002 (11-14 April, 2002 at University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras)

Call For Papers:

Deadline for Seminar proposals: 1 August, 2001

Deadline for Individual Abstracts: 1 October, 2001

General Themes:

1. Carribean Crossings: For centuries, the Carribean has been a particular locus of border crossings of many kinds—cultural, linguistic, ethnic, etc.  We invite panels or individual papers focused on border crossings within the Carribean or on relations of Carribean countries with the world at large.
2. Translation issues: Both the act of translating from one language to another and the act of translating fromone culture or context to another are crucial to comparatists in a global context.  We invite panels or individual papers focused on translations, translation theory or translation as a metaphor.
3. Diasporas: From antiquity to the present, the migration of peoples, languages and literatures into new worlds has created a fertile context for comparative work.  We invite panels or individual papers focused on diasporas of various kinds and on how such movements affect literary texts, motifs or theory.

Abstracts or proposals for seminars should be submitted either in hard copy or by email to:

Professor Kathleen L. Komar
Department of Comparative Literature
UCLA
212 Royce Hall
Box 951536
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1536
USA

Komar@ucla.edu (Please enter “ACLA 2002” on the subject line of your emails)

For further information, please consult the conference website at:

htttp://www.complit.ucla.edu/acla02/acla02_en.html

Modernist Studies Association Third Annual Conference (12-16 October, 2001, Rice University, Houston, Texas)

Plenary Speakers include:

Homi Bhabha (Harvard University)

Martin Jay (University of California, Berkeley)

Ramon Saldivar (Stanford University)

Vera Kutzinski (Yale University)

Barbara Hernstein Smith (Duke University)

Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University)

Panels include:

Formalism Reformed: Towards a New Poetics

Ten Years After: The Gender of Modernism, vol. 2

Queering Modernist culture

Modernism and Jewish Studies

Modernist Polemic, Obscenity, and Censorship in the Arts

Did the Harlem Renaissance Fail: Literary Fact or Critical Myth?

Seminars include: “The Status of Gender in Modernist Studies” and many others (some of which may still be open)

Please refer to the website for further details:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/associations/msa/nm3info.html

Prose Acts: Transgressive Writing and Music (18-21 October, 2001 at Buffalo, New York)

Prose Acts brings together importantly fearless poets, writers, and musicians for an incisive four-day affair in Buffalo, New York.  It looks like a conference but thinks more like a festival.  It acts like a festival but will be like a big brainstorm.  Our confirmed participants include Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles, Dodie Bellamy, Kevin Killian, Robert Gl�k, Matthew Stadler, White Collar Crime, Roberto Tejada, Ether Drag, Lawrence Braithwaite, Swis Dot, and The National. SCOUT, a live compilation of writers and musicians that began at Threadwaxing Space in Manhattan is doing a ten-day event at Hallwalls in Buffalo.  The first week overlaps and joins forces with Prose Acts.  Confirmed artists include The Need, Michelle Tea, Bruce Benderson, Mary Gaitskill, Ishle Park, Magic Twelve, and many more.

Conference Organizers: Brandon Stosuy and Christopher W. Alexander

Check web-site for further details at:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/conferences/01/proseacts

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: American Women Writers of Color in the 21^st Century (19-21 October, 2001, at Carousel Hotel , Ocean City, Maryland)

Ninth National American Women Writers of Color Conference
Scholarship on: African American, Asian American, Hispanic/ Latina and Native American Women Writers in the U.S.

Plenary Session featuring:

Mary Helen Washington, specialist in African American Literature, University of Maryland, College Park

Eliana Rivero, specialist in US Latina Literature, University of Arizona

Submissions closed July 15, 2001 but for further information regarding the conference, refer to our web site at:

www.ssu.edu/Schools/Fulton/English/awwoc.htm

Narrative: An International Conference (11-14 April, 2002 at Michigan State University)

Keynote speakers:

Joan Copjec, SUNY-Buffalo

William Gass, emeritus, Washington University

Rosalind Krauss, Columbia University

Garrett Stewart, University of Iowa

Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, the Narrative Conference is an interdisciplinary forum addressing all aspects of narrative theory and practice.  We welcome proposals for papers and panels on all aspects of narrative in any genre, period, nationality, discipline, and medium.  Please send five hundred word proposals and brief vitae by 25 October 2001 to: narrconf@cal.msu.edu or to: Narrative Conference, Office of Dean Patrick McConeghy, 200 Linton Hall, College of Arts and Letters, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA.

For further information, please contact Judith Stoddart at stoddart@msu.edu or Sheila Teahan at teahan@msu.edu.  Watch for our coming website at: www.cal.msu.edu/narrconf

Collage, Montage, Assembling: English Language Poetry (14-15 June 2002 at Universite Paris 7)

Groupe de Recherche Inter-universitaire sur la Po廥ie Anglophone (GRIP)

UFR d’ETHUDES ANGLOPHONES

UNIVERSITE PARIS 7-DENIS DIDEROT

10, rue Charles V,

750004 Paris

France

The object of this conference is certain forms of “making,” a making that can concern individual poetic texts, a series of poetic texts (collections, selections, anthologies…) or works that are mixed in that they use, for example, non-poetic material (prose, non illustrative visual material…).  It works from a series of metaphors which all raise the central question of fragmentation and articulation.  This double movement could be analysed from a historical, genetic, metrical, or syntactic point of view, or by examining the articulation of themes, or the points of those institutions that construct canons, distinguish genres, and periods.  The conference hopes to raise a series of aesthetic problems:

• the use, in critical texts, of technical terms from architecture, painting, cinema, music, photography, and ‘engineering’ (in, for example, notions like ‘play’ as it is used in ‘the parts had more play than was strictly necessary’)
• internal procedures like repetition, irony, lay-out, ‘pattern poems,’ ‘visual poetry,’ ‘concrete poetry,’ the functioning of tropes like conceit and simile, ‘seaming,’ ‘quilting,’ and the problem of edges (frayed, masked, etc…)
• the problem of frontiers (watertight?; porous?…) between the poetic text and ‘foreign’ material (notes, prose, quotations in a foreign language, ‘found objects’…)

A selection of the papers will be published in the Cahiers Charles V after the conference.

Proposals in French or in English (200 words for a 25 minute paper) to be sent to Professor Paul Volsik at volsik@paris7.jussieu.f before the end of October 2001, decision on acceptance by the scientific committee (GRIP) in November 2001, confirmation in December 2001.

Sub Voicive Colloquium 5

Theme: How do we perform that?

29 September 2001, London.

Contact SVC5, 32 Downside Road, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5HP, United Kingdom (include stamped addressed envelope or international reply coupon).  Or email sv.poetry@virginnet.co.uk with the subject line SVC5 PROPOSAL.

Nancy Cunard: A One-day Conference, 10 November 2001, Anglia Ploytechnic University, Cambridge

Keynote Address by Jane Marcus

Remembered through the photographs of Man Ray and Cecil Beaton as a stylish icon of 20s mythology, Cunard’s own achievements are undergoing critical evaluation.  Papers are invited on any aspect of her life, work or representation including her poetry, The Hours Press, The Negro Anthology, her political activism and her journalism.

Speakers include: Maria Balshaw. Rebecca Beasley, Sabine Broeck, Jane Dowson, Maroula Joannou, John Lucas, Laura Marcus, David Marriott, Drew Milne, Deborah Parsons, Ian Patterson and Carole Sweeney.

Closing date for proposals of 300 words: 1 May 2001.  For further information, please contact the conference organiser Dr Tory Young, t.young@anglia.ac.uk. The Lyric: An International

Conference, 15-17 November 2001, University of London

Where is the lyric now? Always connected with the forms and rhythms of particular life, as with the Greek modes of music and dance, it has survived from pre-literate to literate societies (and to post-literate ones too).  Anthropologically rather than historically, lyric crosses boundaries between non-literate and highly literate forms of society.  One of the prime characteristics of lyric is its verticality, complicated (in the last hundred years) by poetry that combines lyric with other types of material.  Lyric has also had to enter into dark places, and confront degradations of language and ethical life. Are ways of fitting words to music, and the forms of subjectivity that accompanied them, still useful models of the lyric? And, in more epistemological terms, does the verticality of lyric still hold in the age of electronic images? Has the ‘inner life’ been invaded? Do poets still write lyric? And does it speak to our necessities?

Organising Committee:

Professor William Row (Birbeck College, University of London)

Dr Stephen Clucas (Birbeck College, University of London)

Professor Anne Janowitz (Queen Mary College, University of London)

Dr Michael Baron (IES Conference Programme Co-ordinator, and Birbeck College)

Dr Stephen Regan (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Professor Jerome J. McGann (Royal Holloway and University of Virginia)

Professor Heather Dubrow (University of Wisconsin at Madison)

Professor John Roe (University of York, UK)

Conference Venue and Enquiries:

Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, Senate House (3^rd Floor), Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, United Kingdom

Tel: 0200 7862 8675; fax: 0200 7862 8672; email: ies@sas.ac.uk

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