Call for Papers: Modernity and Technology

As Stephen Kern argued in his influential (1983) work, The Culture of Time & Space, 1880-1918, technological developments revolutionize the acutal experience of time and space; and cultural change revisions our perceiving and conceptualizing of these experiences. Amelia Jones argues that the "malfunctioning" machines drawn by the Dadaists can be read as expressions of a "neurasthenic modernism" during the World War I era, with the machine also expressing ambivalence vis-a-vis capitalism, industrialism and traditional masculinity; while Alex Goody argues that modern women writers "confronted the possibility of fashioning a New Woman liberated by the technological forces of the twentieth century." With recent scholarship on what Thomas Misa has called, the "co-construction of technology and modernity," how have avant-garde artists used new technologies as a mode of collaboration and resistance to urban hegemony, as participatory and democratising, rather than regulatory and isolationist? In this panel we seek to investigate the material use of emergent technologies in individual modernist or avant-garde aesthetic practises and to examine how this cultural work has been formative in our notions of the fashioning of the modern(ist) self and community. We are interested also in locating technology and modernity in spaces not typically looked at in this context, such as, for example, the rural, the interior, the feminized, the queered, the racialized, and the other.
Please submit abstracts of no more than 500 words together with a scholarly bio of two to three sentences to the co-chairs Irene Gammel and John Wrighton by April 10, 2011.

Conference Location: Buffalo, NY, USA
Conference Starts: October 06, 2011
Conference Ends: October 09, 2011

CFP Submission Deadline: April 10, 2011

For more information, contact: Irene Gammel or John Wrighton
Modernist Studies Association