CFP: New Approaches to Time in Modernism (3/21/03; MLA '03)

For a proposed MLA Special Session

CFP: New Approaches to Time in Modernism
MLA 2003, San Diego

The modernist interrogation and reimagination of
time, long a topic of scholarship, continues to
provoke new problems for literary studies. Time is
an unsettled category of knowledge and speculation
in our discipline, a term invoked and applied to
analyze narrative form, subjectivity, alterity,
agency, culture, and the aporias of linguistic
representation. Time has become almost promiscuous
in its analytic functions, serving narratological,
psychoanalytic, phenomenological, Marxist,
identitarian, post-colonial, and deconstructive
readings of literature. The indefatigable question
that this implies – what, then, is time? – will be
posed more modestly in this panel: what do we mean
by time in modernist studies? What are the most
interesting, productive ways we can currently
describe time in modernism, and how have these ways
changed from previous ones? What modernist
approaches to time – in literature, science,
philosophy – remain influential today?

Papers should complicate temporal notions reducible
to such binaries as theme and form, sequence and
structure, subjective (psychological) and objective
(physical), the secular and divine. Such
complications might be found in such questions as:

-- how does the category of time organize
interdisciplinary critical projects?
-- how does re-conceptualizing time provoke new
epistemological categories, changing categories of
the knowable?
-- how is time implicated in emerging literary
critical discussions of ethics?
-- what political stakes did early 20th century
writers imagine for their literary interrogations of
time? What relationships between time and political
agency do modernist works suggest?
-- what are modernist relationships between time and
money as modes of value?
-- how is time an issue for modernist poetics?
-- how do modernist complications of modernity’s
quantified, rationalized time compare to those of
the Transcendentalists, Romantics, or others?

Please email 350-word abstracts and brief CV in text
(no attachments) to: drs211_at_nyu.edu

Deadline for receipt of proposals: March 21, 2003

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Received on Sun Mar 09 2003 - 17:33:53 EST