Posts in category: Events

At this year’s Modernist Studies Association meeting in Las Vegas I have convened a roundtable (where I will also be speaking) under the rubric
Beyond Modernist Periodization: Alternatives to the Canonical Half-Century.
8:30 a.m.–10 a.m., Red Rock VII, Flamingo Hotel, Friday, October 19, 2012.

Here are the (fantastic) people involved, and here’s what it’s all about.

Theory by the numbers

or, The yack of the hack of the yack

This is a longer version of my proposal for a THATCamp Theory 2012 session.

How we should go about mining the digital archive of the history of scholarship for theoretical resources? Let’s talk about text-mining journals, quantitatively analyzing metadata about scholarship, and living with closed access as theorists. And perhaps we can work on a dataset or two—I’ll bring some example data and laughably primitive visualizations!

I’m coordinating the Modernism and Globalization Seminar Series this year. We’ve just updated our webpage at the CCA, so check that out. The first MGSS event is a seminar with Heather Love on October 26. In March we’ll have a lecture by Jim English. More details to follow.

Anyone attending the ACLA 2012 conference in Providence at the end of this month is warmly invited to come join some or all of the seminar I have organized with Harris Feinsod on Bad Reception, Missed Connection, Clogged Circulation. We will be meeting at the invigorating hour of 8 a.m. from March 30 to April 1 in the Roberts Center, Room 225. The presentations are:

Friday, March 30

Katherine Mannheimer, University of Rochester

“The Rash Dexterity of Wit: Genre-Hopping Verbal Patterns in Restoration Drama and Poetry”

Molly Swift Metherd, Saint Mary’s College of California

“The Great Canal Race: US and Japanese Imperialism in James Weldon Johnson’s El Presidente, or The Yellow Peril”

Anne DeWitt, Princeton University

“Reading Reception of the Theological Romance”

Harris Feinsod, Northwestern University

“Modernism Aship: Recirculating Transnational Poetics”

Saturday, March 31

Andrew Goldstone, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts

“The Song of Misrecognition: Indian Love Lyrics in Yeats, Tagore, and Edith Hull” 

Sonam Singh, Cornell University

“The Bad Reception of the 1930s Anglophone Indian Novel: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Frameworks of Postcolonial and Modernist Studies”

Gabriele S. Hayden, Reed College

“Performing Blackness in Weimar Germany”

Sunday, April 1

Luke Parker, Stanford University

“Emigration, Backwardness, and the Search for an Alternative Present: Russian and American Writers in Interwar Europe”

Lee Konstantinou, Princeton University

“Bad Attitude: William S. Burroughs at the Birth of Punk”

Meredith Ramirez Talusan, Cornell University

“Negritude Without Filitude: Form, Language, and Possibilities of Reception in Modern Filipino Poetry”

Daniel R. Mintz, University of Michigan

“Bildung Towards the End: Kermode’s Mythic Temporality and Doctorow’s Book of Daniel”

I am organizing a seminar for ACLA 2012 (March 29–April 1 at Brown) with Northwestern’s Harris Feinsod on Bad Reception, Missed Connection, Clogged Circulation. This seminar is devoted to the ships in the night of literary history: the near misses, the affinities that should have formed but didn’t, the treacherous reception contexts that betrayed the promise of circulation. How can focusing on these blockages and (to use a term of Roland Greene’s) obversals enrich and complicate comparative literary study? As for my own paper, in a cross-over between two research interests of mine, the role of popular genres in the early twentieth century and the history of Indian writing in English, I’ll be discussing “Indian Love Lyrics” from Yeats to Tagore to E.M. Hull. I may or may not learn to sing the “Kashmiri Song” by Amy Woodforde-Finden.