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International Conference, organized by
Anne Besnault-Levita and Anne-Florence Gillard
Estrada
Université de Rouen - laboratoire ERIAC : http://eriac.net/beyond-the-victorian-and-modernist-divide/
Keynote speakers:
Professor Michael
Bentley, University of St. Andrews
Professor Melba
Cuddy-Keane, University of Toronto
Ezra Pound’s injunction to “make it new!” or
Virginia Woolf’s “on or about 1910” statement have long been used in order no
support a version of modernism as a strictly aesthetic revolution — or
crisis — implying an essential break with Victorian art, culture and ideology.
In the last decade, however, the crucial transition between the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries has been variously reassessed. In the wake of the new
modernist studies and of the recent revaluations of the Victorian period,
a growing body of scholarship now challenges traditional periodisation by
examining the existence of overlaps and unexplored continuities between
the Victorians, the post-Victorians and the modernists. Once separated by a
critical and cultural break, Victorian and modernist scholars have become
preoccupied with a similar search for cultural and aesthetic complexities that
make it possible to move beyond doxic discourses and fixed dichotomies:
the past and the present, outer life and inner life, materiality and
spirituality, tradition and innovation, ideology and aesthetics.
This international conference would like those
scholars to join forces and contribute to this new phase in the
Victorian-modern debate from a broad range of perspectives across the
disciplines: literature, criticism, the visual arts, history, science and
philosophy. The emergence or re-emergence of ideas such as the “modern”,
the “new” or “change” at the turn of the century is an indisputable fact that
we want to acknowledge and re-contextualize by examining the different
meanings and practices they encompass. From there, we wish to explore the birth
and perpetration of two critical meta-narratives and their interdependence: the
myth of “high modernism” and the myth of “Victorianism”. If there is no clear
repudiation of history and heritage on the modernists’ part, if “rupture”
was a useful fiction, if the challenge to traditional aesthetics and ideology
was already a Victorian preoccupation, then we definitely need to remap
modernism and Victorianism simultaneously.
The papers that we call for are meant to contribute
to a trans-disciplinary publication whose synopsis could be the following,
although it is far from being fixed.
- Periods, words, labels: historicizing and contextualizing the idea of the “break”
- Victorian, Edwardian and modernist literature: unexplored lines of filiation
- Art history, aesthetic philosophy and the visual arts across the Victorian/Modernist divide
- Science, philosophy, ideology: landmarks for a new history of ideas
- New approaches to identity, gender and the self: from mid-Victorians to modernist ideologies and practices.
The proposals (300 to 500 words with a short
biographical notice) should be sent to both Anne Besnault-Levita (annelev@club-internet.fr) and Anne-Florence Gillard-Estrada (af.gillardestrada@orange.fr) by September
15th 2014. Notification of acceptance: October 15th.
See the selected bibliography as well as the
forthcoming information on the conference website: http://eriac.net/beyond-the-victorian-and-modernist-divide/
