Feeling for Modernism
NEMLA March 2004 Pittsburgh
This panel will connect the surge of scholarly interest in affect with
the study of literary and artistic modernism in the expectation of expanding
current definitions of "affect" and "modernism" alike.
To foreground emotion in the study of modernism might seem perverse,
given the avowed desire of many of the most prominent modernists that
their work be hard, austere, objective, and impersonal.
But when there is too much insistence on impersonality-when T. S. Eliot,
for example, writes in "Tradition and the Individual Talent" that poetry
must be an escape from emotion-we might suspect an over-compensation for
its perceived lack. We might, in other words, have reason to believe
that emotion is nonetheless a pressing modernist problem. The way to
resolve this "problem," as Michael Bell has written in his studies of
literary modernism and emotion, is not to deny or otherwise overcome it,
but rather to engage it-specifically, as a problem that interrogates the
nature of representation itself.
The current interest in affect is driven by a desire to question the
potential limits of textuality, discursivity or representation.
How then are we to understand affect's relevance to the artistic practice
of modernism? After all, modernism's paradigmatically self-conscious
formal products sometimes seem intended as case studies for the claim
that there is nothing beyond representation. And yet modernist art and
literature is obsessed with whatever exceeds and thus threatens it. This
excess has often been figured in terms of madness, trauma, or violence
but might be expanded through the term "affect" to include all emotions
and/or symptoms.
The task is to put this term affect to work, not only in interpreting
individual works but more fundamentally in understanding interpretation
itself. The panel's guiding question is thus: What is the nature of the
problematic encounter of an immediate sensation/experience and a mediated
linguistic/formal representation?
I solicit papers that consider the intersection of affect and modernism
as a way to think about the nature of representation in the early
twentieth century. Thus, while readings of particular affects in
particular works will be considered, such proposals will be of particular
interest if they go beyond offering a representation of an affect and
come to more general conclusions about representation and affect.
The theoretical nature of the panel is intended to facilitate
interdisciplinarity. I encourage proposals that examine not only
literary works from different linguistic traditions, but also works in
the fields of film, visual art, architecture, and music.
Please send a 300-word abstract by September 15, 2003 to:
Dorian Stuber
ds228@cornell.edu (no attachments, please)
or
Dorian Stuber
Department of Comparative Literature
247 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853
Applicants must be members of NEMLA by October 2003.
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