Call For Papers (Issue 7 Dec. 2023)
Ex-Centric Narratives: Journal of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Media (Issue 7, Dec. 2023)
Special Issue Title: Trajectories from the Past: Modernist Futures and the Future of Modernism
Special Issue Guest Editors (Part I): Dr. Sara Dunton (sara.dunton@unb.ca) and Dr. Anna Fyta (annafyta@gmail.com)Since their inception, Anglophone modernist studies have executed careful investigations of the intersections between history, literature, visual art, and media. Many of these are targeted considerations of temporality, framed within the contexts of the radicalization of methods: new styles of warfare, the shift from the suffragette movement to feminist activism, the abstraction of visual and literary form. How do we now understand “radicalization” since the term itself implies a movement that disengages with the past to represent a “new” present? Were modernist writers and artists even interested in representations of the future? How is the modernist obsession with the directive “to make it new” imprinted upon modernist dystopian and utopian narratives and how does it evolve into digital representations? How is the issue of temporality resolved when “newness” occludes the past and periodization becomes increasingly problematic? And how is this ambivalence towards the past resolved in modernist visual arts, literature and especially in poetics?
Current conceptualizations of modernism encompass broader concerns about environmental challenges and climate change. In “Olive Moore, Queer Ecology, and Anthropocene Modernism,” David Shackleton defines Modernist Anthropocene as “a literary and cultural modernism that registers the environmental transformations such as climate change that are now considered to characterize this epoch, and offers the potential for rethinking the pressing environmental concerns of the present.” He heralds concerns and attitudes towards the future quests for “better ways of being in the world and better worlds—in the context of the pressing environmental concerns.” To what extent do emerging modernist methodologies, reflected in recent scholarship (like those opposed to the hermeneutics of suspicion or historicism), offer the possibility of moving beyond a desire for restoring historical contexts or ways for splitting the past from the present and also from the future?
The editors of this special issue aim to represent international matrices of scholarly work that examines any of diversified aspects of 21st century discourse outlined above. Additionally, we invite a range of leading scholars who may be eager to respond either with their own work, or with referrals to emerging scholars whose interests are relevant to conceptualizations of the future(s) of modernism. We are especially interested in encouraging participation from those who may not be familiar with Ex-Centric Narratives.
Possible topics may address but are not be limited to the following themes:
● Defamiliarizations of space and modernist articulations of the future
● Modernism and Periodization: still a legitimate connection?
● Modernist feminisms and cross-temporal, cross-cultural trends
● High modernism and restorative biographies
● Intersectionality in print and digital modernism: prospects
● Black modernism: film and aesthetics
● Modernist journals and periodicals: mapping the digital future
● Queer ecologies and modernist utopias
● Anthropocene modernism: conceptions of nature
● Cryptic modernism and clairvoyance: visualizations in past and future
● Liberalism and totalitarianism: radicalizing hegemonical narratives
● Temporality and the modernist divide/rupture between open and closed poetics
The deadline for the submission of abstracts is September 16, 2022.
Length of abstract: 150-180 words.
Your abstract submission should include:
• title
• author(s)
• author contact information
• affiliated institution
• Brief bio
• 4-5 keywords
Please send your emails to: Dr. Sara Dunton (sara.dunton@unb.ca ) and Dr. Anna Fyta (annafyta@gmail.com)