Call for Papers
Modernist Studies Association conference, Vancouver
21-24 October 2004
Panel: Modernist Cartographies
While the conjunctions between space and aesthetics have been the subject
of numerous studies, and critics have liberally applied the metaphor of
mapping to their examinations of modernism, few scholars have focused on
the map itself as a modernist object. Yet the cartographic innovations and
advances in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?photography,
human flight, and international standardization, to name a few?altered
mapping procedures and the maps themselves to the extent that cartography
was transformed from a royal to a democratic science. The first meeting of
the International Map Committee in 1909 stands as a marker of this new
cartographic age. Moreover, the destruction of the land during World War I
and the changing national boundaries of the inter-war period provided fresh
impetus to redraw maps, even as these events also forced modernist writers
and artists to search for new ways to represent the subject in space.
Internationally, maps were central to emergent nationalist and anticolonial
movements as both imaginative terrains of struggle and utopian
representations of autonomous cultural identity.
This panel proposes to remedy this critical gap with papers that both
explore maps as material and literary artifacts, and examine how the act of
map reading and map-making in literature and art connects to the modernist
search for new orders and modes of representation. In doing so we will be
asking how cartography may function both as an instrument of power and as
an aesthetic artifact. What kind of relationship between the cartographic
and the literary exists in modernism, and how do maps inform modernist
representations of space, geography, and culture? Papers that deal with
visual art and cultural artifacts, as well as with literature are welcome.
Please send 250 word proposals to Eve Sorum (esorum@umich.edu) or Jon
Hegglund (hegglund@wsu.edu) by April 29th.
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