Historical Modernisms Symposium
Monday 12 – Tuesday 13 December 2016, Senate House
Counter to the conventional perception of modernism as ahistorical, there have been recent academic and critical efforts to historicize it. The Historical Modernism Symposium seeks to contribute to this trend by inviting readings of modern/ist literature and avant-garde art movements in the historical contexts of their production and reception, while assessing their entanglement with history and modernity transnationally.
The symposium aims to look at the history of modernism and the avant-gardes in relation to and their place in (literary and art) History, addressing questions of their relation with modern times, raised, for example, by colonialism; nationalism; globalisation; economics; politics; tradition; technology; urbanism, classicism; mythology; mysticism; religion; psychology/psychoanalysis.
Importantly, it will examine pertinent philosophies of time, historiographical practices and representations of local and world historical events, such as the two World Wars, the Russian Revolution and the rise of Fascism.
Finally, it will also investigate modernist concepts of the spirit of the times as well as new notions of and approaches to literary history.
A core question posed by the symposium topic is how a modernist aesthetics of innovation transformed history in ways that make modernism not just a history of the present moment but also the history of our present.
For further information click here : http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/events/conferences/previous-conferences/historical-modernisms-symposium