CFP: Modernism’s Dictators (4/2/04; MSA 10/21/04-10/24/04)
Modernist Studies Association 6th Annual Conference, 21-24 October 2004
Simon Fraser University and University of British Columbia (Vancouver,
British Columbia, Canada)
This proposed panel will look at the modernist fascination with and critique
of totalitarian leadership and, more specifically, the person of the
dictator. In the spirit of the conference theme—Other Modernisms/Modernism’s
Others—the panel examines how interest in figures such as Mussolini, Hitler,
Franco, Petain, Mosley, Stalin and, later, Mao, compelled modernists to
cross the boundaries of national identity in the search of national heroes.
Looking, for example, at Pound’s Cantos and Jefferson and/or Mussolini,
Stein’s support of Petain and Franco, Wyndham Lewis’s Hitler and The Hitler
Cult, or Natalie Clifford Barney’s admiration for Petain and Mussolini, we
see how the despotic other can come to represent a cultural and political
ideal.
How does literary modernism both admire and denigrate the totalitarian
figure, as in Virginia Woolf’s ambivalently charged description of the
“tightly cased,” uniformed body of the “German and Italian Führer or Duce .
. . the Tyrant or Dictator” in Three Guineas? The search for ideal
political authority often leads to a turn toward the extremes of
authoritarianism, but how does this identification and idealization
complicate the seeker’s national identity? How does the dictator figure—real
or imagined-- allow for writers to perform or explore their own authority?
In what ways do writers and artists negotiate their own national or gendered
identities vis-à-vis preoccupation with an idealized national other?
Although questions of dictatorship, identification, and national identity
are the focus, coverage may be broadly conceived in terms of medium and
genre. I encourage studies of these phenomena in Asian, African, and Latin
American modernisms as well.
Send queries, 200 word abstract, and brief c.v. (all preferably in the body
of the e-mail) to Annalisa Zox-Weaver at zoxweave@usc.edu by April 2, 2004.
Deadline for submission of our proposal to the MSA is May 3, 2004.
Information about the conference is available at .
Annalisa Zox-Weaver
English Department
University of Southern California
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