An international conference organised by CETAPS in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy

Relational Forms VII: Modernity and its Wake: Remembering and Reimagining 1922

FLUP, 10-12 November 2022

Keynote speakers:

Gualter Cunha (Univ. Porto)

Frances Dickey (Univ. Missouri)

Declan Kiberd (Univ. Notre Dame)

Fran O’Rourke (Univ. College Dublin)

This conference will ponder the legacies of 1922, an annus mirabilis for the literatures of modernity – within the English language, but also, more broadly, in global cultures. It will discuss literary aesthetics, but also the complex social and political contours of such legacies.

1922 witnessed the publication of two of the greatest literary monuments of the past century. In Ulysses, James Joyce decanted a formidably wide scope of human experience in the narrative of a single day in the life of a small group of fairly undistinguished characters. T. S. Eliot’s broadly evocative The Waste Land may be held as the epitome of the modern/ist (anti-)epic. Both works acknowledged and challenged the impacts of myth, religion and literature on cultural memory, and did so with a vividness that combined with boldly experimental techniques to depict a world that no longer offered security and solace. Joyce and Eliot may therefore be taken as representative of an engagement with the past that fuels modernism’s approach to modernity just as it strives to define itself as a break, and often a violent break, with the intellectual legacies of former ages. Works like Ulysses and The Waste Land contributed to the constitution of a watershed moment in contemporary cultural history, as borne in the fortunes of the term “postmodernism” for the period that followed.

Relational Forms VII commemorates the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land by addressing their artistic, philosophical, and sociopolitical wake. It will encourage a focus on articulations of modernity as manifested in the imaginative production of the intervening century. The focus of the conference is accordingly broad and international, as well as intermedial, in keeping with the rationale that has been guiding the Relational Forms research group.

The organisers will welcome proposals for 20-minute papers in English responding to the above. Suggested (merely indicative) topics include:

• modernism across boundaries: nations, styles, generations, disciplines

• modernism, modernity and philosophical traditions

• the modern as reverberation / reinvention / rejection of the past

• echoes of modernism: modernity and late/post-modernity

• domesticating the revolutionary: modernism canonized

• the politics of modern(ist) art

• modernism and spirituality

• modernism and the World Wars

• modernism and the city

• the many -isms of modernism: theory and creativity

• modernism and its others: Classicism, Romanticism, Victorianism, Naturalism…

• modernism in / and translation

• remediations of modernism: from literature to audiovisual to digital media

As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the seventh in a series of academic events that reflect the ongoing concerns of the eponymous research group (Relational Forms), based at CETAPS (the Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies).

Submissions should be sent by email to [email protected]

Please include RF7 in the subject line of your email and organise your proposal into two separate files:
• a file containing the full title and a 250-300 word description of your paper;
• a file containing the author’s data: name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s bio-note (150 words).

Please name these two documents as follows:
Surname_Name_Abstract_RF7
Surname_Name_AuthorInfo_RF7

DEADLINES (extended)

Deadline for proposals: 25 July 2022
Notification of acceptance: 31 July 2022
Deadline for registration: 15 October 2022

Registration Fee: 80 Euros
Student fee: 60 Euros
Registration details will be posted online in September 2022

All delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.

More information available at https://cetaps.wixsite.com/relationalforms7

Organised by the Relational Forms research area

http://www.cetaps.com/research-areas/relational-forms-medial-and-textual-transits-in-ireland-and-britain/

Executive Committee:

Rui Carvalho Homem (coord.) | José Meirinhos | Jorge Bastos da Silva | Miguel Ramalhete Gomes | Jorge Almeida e Pinho | Márcia Lemos | Katarzyna Pisarska | Mark Wakefield

For further queries please contact:

CETAPS – Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto
Via Panorâmica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO
PORTUGAL  [email protected]

Supported by

Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
UIDB/04097/2020 | UIDB/00502/2020