May 2th, 2018

TEMPORALITIES OF MODERNISM

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

BABEȘ-BOLYAI UNIVERSITY,CLUJ-NAPOCA

2-4 May 2018

LINK TO THE EVENT HOMEPAGE

We are not only “the last men of an epoch” (…): we are more than that, or we are that in a different way to what is most often asserted. We are the first men of a future that has not materialized. We belong to a “great age” that has not “come off.”

(Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering, 1937)

The second CEMS conference, Temporalities of Modernism, was organized by  The Centre for the Study of the Contemporary British Novel (currently the Centre for the Study of the Modern Anglophone Novel) and the Centre for European Modernism Studies/CEMS (Universita degli Studi di Perugia, Italy), between 2-4 May 2018, at the Faculty of Letters in Cluj.

Keynote speakers:

Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania (USA)

Randall Stevenson, University of Edinburgh (UK)

Declan Kiberd, Notre Dame University (USA) and University College Dublin (Ireland)

Rarița Zbranca, ALTART Foundation, Cluj-Napoca (Romania)

Patrick McGuinness, University of Oxford (UK)

Christian Moraru, University of North Carolina, Greensboro (USA)

Topics

• Inventing modernism: the avant-garde moment – the relation between modernism and the avant-garde. Contexts of the avant-garde: geographical, economic, social, historical, cultural. Cosmopolitan and/vs. local modernisms: the modernist experience and the changes in the canon.
• Catastrophe and “the sense of an ending”: the politics of the avant-garde. The utopia of the avant-garde – messianic promise and the disruption of history. Modernism and the spectre of authoritarianism. Theorising the politics of modernism (Benjamin, Adorno, Broch). Reconsidering modernism after the Holocaust.
• Modernist poetics: rupture and event. Reinventing tradition: anti-modern modernism. Revolution as return, revolution as passage, endless revolution.
• Modernism and history: histories of the present, histories of the future. Historical explanation and historical nightmare. Regional histories versus global catastrophe.
• The legacies of modernism: modernisms in the age of “post-”. Institutionalising modernism: modernism as canon. Late modernism: continuities and the culture of opposition. Modernism in the 21^st
• Divergent temporalities, fuzzy, complementary chronologies: modernisms across Europe (including the Eastern/Central European scene).
• Transmission – circulation – dissemination. Modernists translating/translating modernism: (a)synchronicities, interfaces, influences. Translation and canonization. Disseminating the avant-garde: media and manifestoes: magazines, journals, performances, films, broadcasting – economies and politics of modernism.

Programme