CFP: Reading Elizabeth Bowen (4/27/05; MSA, 11/3/05-11/6/05)

Modernist Studies Association Annual Conference

November 3-6, 2005

Chicago, IL

Call for Papers

Proposed Panel: Reading Elizabeth Bowen

In recent years, Elizabeth Bowen has been called one of the finest
writers of twentieth-century English fiction and a Virginia Woolf
wannabe. She has been judged as crucial a writer to twentieth-century
studies as Samuel Beckett and has been disparaged as being an outdated
and insignificant social realist. Her work has been upheld as
exemplifying many of the transformations of the twentieth-century novel
and has been derided for its want of talent. This panel will investigate
the critical debates that have surrounded Bowen's work for the past
forty years. Papers that address ways that Bowen's work negotiates with
intersecting systems of contemporary concern such as gender,
colonialism, sexuality, class, ethnicity, literary tradition, and
aesthetics are welcome, as are papers that examine ways the debates,
past and present, that surround Bowen's work have helped shape and
continue to help shape our conversations about modernism. Because much
of the current interest in Bowen's work is due to recently articulated
ideas about different modes of reading and to newly articulated ideas
about how and why the concept of "coherence" is determined and
understood as it is by psychoanalytic critics, reader-response critics,
post-structuralists, deconstructionists, Marxists, and New
Historicists-to name only a few, special attention will be given to
papers that discuss ways the identity and role of the reader and our
understanding of the reading process itself is being challenged by ideas
evolving from recent analyses of Bowen's work.

Please send a 250-word abstract plus a 2-3 sentence scholarly biography
by April 27 to S. Osborn at susosborn_at_patmedia.net. No attachments
please; paste abstract to email.

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Received on Sun Apr 03 2005 - 15:41:32 EDT