Novembre 2021

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 1922/2022 – TOTAL MODERNISM: CONTINUITY, DISCONTINUITY, AND THE EXPERIMENTAL TURN Centro Studi “Arti della Modernità” 18-19-20 May 2022 – Torino (Italy) CALL FOR PAPERS The year 1922 signals neither the birth of modernism nor its comprehensive scope, but it can certainly point to a decisive divide marking ends and beginnings. Some key works of literary High Modernism were conceived, written, or completed in that year—T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, Kafka’s The Castle, Proust’s Sodome et Gomorrhe, just to name the most obvious ones. On the theoretical side, Arnold Schönberg published his Theory of Harmony, Viktor Shklovsky expanded on his idea of defamiliarization (“art as device”) in the direction of a theory of prose, Clive Bell and Roger Fry elaborated on “significant form”. Just as importantly, the year 1922 saw the emergence of other crucial cultural productions that the canon of modernism has been slow—or reluctant—to incorporate, such as cinema, cabaret, dance, popular music. A Dialogue between High and Low? Recent scholarship has drawn attention to explicit connections between high-brow modernist masterpieces and a host of other “low-brow” cultural forms, as the new arts were deemed then, which demand their inclusion into the canon of modernism, just as Benjamin, Kracauer and others were soon to point out. The year 1922 seems to highlight a historical watershed where traditional binary oppositions of high and low, old and new, order and chaos appear to be disrupted by the formation of more complex hierarchies. How did “high culture” uptake the popular arts and what was the meaning and outcome of such cross-fertilization? On the other hand, in what ways and to what results did the popular arts absorb modernist experimentation? Are those transformations, connections, and turns still of some interest to us today? What differentiates the high and the low? How do we define them? If we contrast the 2010s artistic productions and those ground-breaking experiments, do we find continuities or discontinuities and in what sense? Thinking back to 1922 from today, can we still talk of experimental art? Can a past revolution be inherited and in what way? The Centro Studi Arti della Modernità (http://centroartidellamodernita.it/) is organizing an International Conference on 1922/2022 – Total Modernism: Continuity, Discontinuity, and the Experimental Turn to be held in Turin in May 2022. The conference will be held in person unless circumstances change. We will keep updating should problems arise for international travel. This conference seeks contributions addressing these decisive aspects of modernism in its golden year of 1922, a year in which, as Jean-Michel Rabaté has suggested, “one might be tempted to replace ‘high modernism’ with ‘total modernism’” or argue that the main problematic “object of high modernism is totality just before it turns into totalitarianism” (Rabaté 2015). It is this claim for high modernism as “total modernism”, and its reverberations today, that this conference is committed to examine, exploring the ways in which “one sees a metamorphosis of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk into an artistic totality that combines all media (music, poetry, painting, staging, dancing, and film) and, moreover, superimposes the most experimental and the most popular” (Rabaté 2015). Academic Advisors: Alexander Etkind (European University, Florence), Marie-Laure Ryan (Independent Scholar), Jens Brockmeier (American University, Paris), Andrei Bronnikov (Independent Scholar), Roxana Preda (University of Edinburgh), Ann Banfield (University of California, Berkeley). Conveners: Franca Bruera (University of Turin), Giuliana Ferreccio (University of Turin), Roberto Gilodi (University of Turin), Luigi Marfè (University of Padova), Daniela Nelva (University of Turin), Massimiliano Tortora (University of Turin). Keynote Speakers: Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Ann Banfield (University of California, Berkeley, possibly on zoom), Peter Nicholls (New York University), Thomas Macho (Humboldt, IFK Wien), Raffaele Donnarumma (University of Pisa), Hubert Roland (Université Catholique de Louvain), Sigrid Weigel (Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin). The Conference Advisory Board will consider proposals for papers addressing, but not limited to, the following topics: • Form vs. Performance • Ends and Beginnings • The relation between words, things and ideas in literature and philosophy • Aesthetic autonomy / aesthetic totality • Citation, displacement, fragmentation • Plurilingual, Transnational modernism • Subjectivity and anti-subjectivism • Gesamtkunstwerk as the expression of an epoch • International Style: The Bauhaus, the Vhkutemas and others • Architecture: Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright • Classicism old and new • New music and the new visual arts • Photography and Cinema • Ballet, cabaret, popular music • Dada vs. Surrealism • Cosmopolitan diaspora • Conservative revolutions • East European Modernism • American vs. European Modernism • Expatriates in Paris, London, Berlin, Vienna • The city as total space Proposals of about 250 words may be submitted to convenors through centrostudiartimodernita@gmail.com, by 15 December 2021, together with a bio-bibliographical profile. Proposals will be read and evaluated by 15 January 2022. The time of delivery for each paper should be no more than 20 minutes. Registration fee for Participants: 70 euros; Graduate Students and PhDs: 40 euros. The conference languages will be English, French and Italian. A number of conference presentations will be selected for publication in Cosmo: Comparative Studies in Modernism (ISSN 2281-6658, http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/COSMO) the digital international, peer-reviewed journal of the Centro Studi Arti della Modernità. Accepted contributions will be published in Cosmo’s June 2023 issue.

Call for Papers The multitalented woman of letters, writer of fiction, and theoretician Vernon Lee (Violet Paget, 1856-1935) very early –and deeply—marked the field of fantastic literature. Many of her works, like those gathered in the collection *Hauntings* or such as “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady”, make use of a background immersed in the supernatural, be it real or suggested, to deal with questions that are recurrent in her work. Art works (sculptures, portraits, music) or the *genius loci* (often the spirit of Renaissance or Eighteenth Century Italy, but also Greek and Roman Antiquity, or the great Jacobean houses in England), often provide in-between, liminal spaces that border on the present and the past, broken into by a fascination with the historic that disrupts all topographical and temporal landmarks. Readers familiar with Vernon Lee’s theoretical texts have identified narrative patterns such as the Apollonian being overwhelmed by the Dionysiac, or the frontier between past and present or between people being abolished. This conference hopes to ask, if we consider the fantastic as the irruption of the supernatural in everyday life, how can we then assess and understand Lee’s fantastic fiction when her own texts and theory suggest a complex, fundamentally psychological process, rather than supernatural phenomena as described in classic ghost stories? It is possible to argue that Lee’s chosen theoretical posture on the fantastic reveals itself when empathy is evoked by a work of art, a portrait, a natural place or a building which arouses a feeling of “hauntedness”. Yet at the core of so many ghost stories (some too, by Lee), there is the assumption that the powerful personalities of the past can be endowed with a supernatural existence being willed to do so by the dissatisfied living. So how should one interpret Lee’s fantastic texts? This conference would like to interrogate Lee’s position on, and place within fantastic literature. We would also welcome broader comparisons between Vernon Lee and other writers who shared similar geographical, historical or artistic predilections. Lee’s decadent and cruel celebration of the Renaissance may situate her within the “New Romance” movement whicb boomed in the late 19th century and is exemplified by another woman of letters, Marie Corelli. There may also be the inevitable parallels with Oscar Wilde, or resemblances drawn between Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient drama having cast a curse on the initial protagonist’s descendants. Perhaps the resurgence and the revival of art works or of gods and goddesses from Antiquity may connect Vernon Lee with a literary galaxy gathering authors like Prosper Mérimée, Arthur Machen, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Wilhelm Jensen, Robert W. Chambers, Théophile Gautier and many others, while the fascination of Renaissance portraits or haunted portraits is reminiscent of Robert Browning, of Walter Pater’s meditations on Mona Lisa, not to mention, to different degrees, novelists like Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Branch Cabell, all of whom endowed old portraits suggestive of some great tragedy with quasi supernatural powers. We invite papers in French or in English. Please send you 300-word abstract and short personal resume no later that 14 April 2022 to Pr. Marc ROLLAND garryowen@wanadoo.fr Pr Marc Rolland, Professor at the Université Littoral Côte d’Opale, recently published *Epouser la déesse, Essais sur la femme, le surnaturel et l’hyperbole*, éditions Shaker Verlag, 2021 <http://shaker.de/de/content/catalogue/index.asp?ID=8&ISBN=978-3-8440-7730-8> . We are delighted to announce that the annual event of the International Vernon Lee Society, co-organiser of the conference, is scheduled during this conference most aptly taking place in Vernon Lee’s own birthplace. Conference website: AAP: Vernon Lee et le fantastique, Boulogne-sur-Mer, 13-14 Octobre 2022