Universit\u00e9 Paul-Val\u00e9ry Montpellier3, 13-14 October 2022
\nAn International workshop organised by EMMA (Universit\u00e9 Paul-Val\u00e9ry Montpellier3)
\nIn collaboration with CIRPaLL (Universit\u00e9 d’Angers)<\/p>\n
This workshop on modernism and matter is an incentive to interrogate the meaning of matter, and investigate its power in modernist literature.\u00a0<\/strong>Our assumption is that modernist writings can help us answer the call for \u2018more complex understandings of materiality\u2019 (Alaimo).<\/p>\n A hundred years after the so-called\u00a0annus mirabilis<\/em>\u00a0of modernist literature, such a reappraisal of modernism should be appropriate. Over the last few years, revaluations of modernism or modernisms have been many, from Stephen Ross and Allana Lindgren\u2019s\u00a0The Modernist World<\/em>\u00a0(2017) and Douglas Mao\u2019s\u00a0New Modernist Studies<\/em>\u00a0(2021) to\u00a0Jean-Michel\u00a0Rabat\u00e9\u00a0and\u00a0Angeliki Spiropoulou\u2019s recent anthology\u00a0Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics\u00a0<\/em>(2022).\u00a0The focus has gradually shifted from canonical writers such as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot or Virginia Woolf to relatively neglected figures like Dorothy Richardson or Rebecca West and to lesser-known writers usually not labelled as modernists, as in Lynne Hapgood\u2019s and Nancy L. Paxton\u2019s\u00a0Outside Modernism<\/em>\u00a0(2000).\u00a0In order to embrace the rainbow-like nature of modernism, diverse methods – historical, literary or philosophical – and theories have been implemented, and\u00a0archival research\u00a0often favoured. Modernism has nevertheless remained associated with experimentation (as underlined by Rabat\u00e9 and Spiropoulou), the quest for the self and urban modernity, a vision that was promoted by the modernists themselves, as is well-known.<\/p>\n Only recently have critics begun to alter this image of modernism by drawing attention to the ecological sensibility that manifests within its bounds.\u00a0In his seminal\u00a0Green Modernism<\/em>\u00a0(2015), Jeffrey Mathes McCarthy stated\u00a0that \u2018Until recently, modernist studies has largely rebuffed the insights of ecocriticism thanks to the aesthetic armor of its autonomous, subjective, urban texts\u2019, and he proceeded to analyse Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and D.H. Lawrence in that new light.\u00a0Kelly Sultzbach (2016), Andrew Kalaidjian (2020), Michael Rubenstein and Justin Neuman (2020)\u00a0have each in their own way extended these reflections.<\/p>\n Building on this recent work on modernist ecologies and in a similar attempt at renewing our understanding of modernism – and\u00a0possibly, tease out some of its contradictions, we would like to draw attention to the specific connections between modernism and materiality. Indeed,\u00a0modernist writers were not only interested in the materiality of the books which they produced, but also in matter. The \u2018prosaic\u2019 concerns of the preceding generation were rejected\u00a0\u2013\u00a0Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy being labelled as \u2018materialists\u2019 by Virginia Woolf, because they wrote of \u2018unimportant things\u2019\u00a0\u2013\u00a0while the centrality of matter itself was reaffirmed in new and original ways, with Woolf herself devoting a short story to \u2018Solid Objects\u2019 and comparing impressions with atoms in her essay \u2018Modern Fiction\u2019.<\/p>\n Far from being inert, matter is considered as being alive and vibrant not only by biologists or physicists but also by philosophers such as Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and theorists such as Jane Bennett or Bruno Latour. What qualifies as matter for the writers of the modernist era? How do they define matter and represent it? How does it relate to the self they were so intimate with? How does the Modernists\u2019 conception of matter resonate with the contemporary scientists\u2019?\u00a0How do the ways they represent matter, materiality or material environments resemble or depart from those that characterize the Romantic and Victorian periods?<\/p>\n In order to address these questions, theories that embrace the \u2018insights of ecocriticism\u2019 or cut across those of New Materialism may be resorted to (although not exclusively); they will help to explore the plural form and plasticity of matter together with the connections between\u00a0the material and the psychological, the organic and the inorganic, matter and consumerism, matter and materialism, matter and myth, materiality, physicality, animism and mysticism, to give but a few examples. Such an approach should shed a new light on\u00a0modernist literature, its canonical and non-canonical figures, and\u00a0the\u00a0aesthetic, ethical, ontological or political role and power of matter.<\/p>\n Please send a 300-word abstract with a short biographical note to Christine Reynier (christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr<\/u><\/a>) and Xavier Le Brun (xavier.lebrun@univ-angers.fr<\/u><\/a>)<\/p>\n Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2022<\/p>\n Notification of acceptance: 30 June 2022<\/p>\n