CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposed Panel
Modernist Studies Association 4th Annual Conference
University of Wisconsin-Madison, October 31-November 3, 2002
Modernism’s Ordinariness
I am seeking papers that focus our understanding of literary modernism
upon the ordinary -- not the epiphanic, not the extraordinary, but the
habitual, pragmatic actions of everyday life, what Wallace Stevens
describes as “round and round, the merely going round, / Until merely
going round is a final good.” Heightened moments of self-realization,
which our critical understanding of literary modernism often emphasizes,
should not be privileged over modernism’s infatuation with the routine
actions of daily experience -- actions, for instance, like walking to
work, eating a sandwich, or mending a dress. Modernism’s moments of
fantastic inner vision might be more appealing than these routines, but
modernism more frequently takes the ordinary as its central subject.
The ordinary, in many cases, does not transform itself into something
else, into something beyond our everyday world; the ordinary in fact
endures in and of itself, as a “final good.”
This panel seeks to explore how ordinary experience is replicated in
modernist fiction and poetry as well as the function of ordinary
experience itself. Papers might consider the following:
-- How does a writer replicate the ordinary (the non-represented, the
overlooked) if the nature of literary representation is to look closely
at its subject?
-- What happens to ordinary experience during trauma or during a time of war?
-- Are everyday routines acts of conformity? Of subversion?
-- How does habit function in narrative form?
-- What is the relationship between ordinary experience and realism?
-- How does ordinary language philosophy contribute to our understanding
of ordinary experience?
-- How is culture ordinary?
-- What forces helped to create a poetics of everyday life?
Please send 250-500 word proposals along with a brief c.v. to Liesl
Olson at lmo12@columbia.edu by April 25, 2002.
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