CFP: Pastoral Modernism (4/23/05; MSA, 11/3/05-11/6/05)

Modernist Studies Association 7th Annual Conference
November 3-6, 2005
Chicago, Illinois

Proposed panel: Pastoral Modernism

Deadline for proposals: April 23, 2005

Most often, it seems, modernism and modernity are bound to
the city and other urban signifiers. Was modernism an
exclusively - or at least primarily - urban phenomenon? How,
then, do we read the rural topographies of writers like
Robert Frost, Edgar Lee Masters, or Lorine Niedecker? In this
panel, I am interested in exploring the status of modernism's
other landscapes: small towns, large trees, rolling hills. As
both a theme and site of production, what new possibilities
did pastoral economies offer to their writers? Are these less
congested rural spaces a scene of the modern or an attempt to
retreat from its grasp? I am especially interested in papers
that discuss

- The evolution of the pastoral form: is the modernist
pastoral "new"?

- Reading the affective landscape of rural spaces:
alienation, loneliness, etc.

- Rural communities and their relation to urban centers

- Aesthetic valuation and the form of the pastoral

- Pastoral utopianism

Please send a 300-word abstract to mgirard_at_uiuc.edu by April
23.

Melissa Girard
Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

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Received on Fri Apr 01 2005 - 04:13:38 EST