Panel "Between Information and Entertainment: Newspapers, Modernism, and Transnational Print Networks", 2nd NeMLA Convention

"Global Modernism, Newspapers and Print Networks", 52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

Organizer
Dipanjan Maitra, State University of New York at Buffalo
Location
Buffalo, NY
Country
United States
From - Until
11.03.2021 - 14.03.2021
Deadline
30.09.2020
By
Connections Redaktion, Leipzig Research Centre Global Dynamics, Universität Leipzig

This panel seeks contributions related to modernism (Anglophone/European/global) and its negotiations with the popular press and print networks.

"Global Modernism, Newspapers and Print Networks", 52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention

The 52nd Northeast Modern Language Association Convention is now going to be held on a hybrid/virtual platform between March 11 and 14, 2021. This means you can present your papers virtually from anywhere in the world without having to travel to Philadelphia, PA. We now hope to hear more from scholars and students living outside of the US. Please consider sending your abstracts by September 30!

"Between Information and Entertainment": Newspapers, Modernism, and Transnational Print Networks

Even as it claimed to shun mass culture and the popular press, modernism’s tryst with newspapers can hardly be exaggerated. As Patrick Collier (2006) puts it, it is a reflection of “multiple, conflicting, often productive if always ambivalent relations with emergent mass culture.” This panel invites papers that will examine ways in which modernists and modernism negotiated their links with the press and the masses. From the hack journalism of Gissing’s Jasper Milvain or the capitalized headlines in Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) to the many adventures of William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938), modernist fiction has had to contend with the rise of the tabloid press which for Lawrence Rainey (1998) caused a gradual blurring of the “distinction between information and entertainment.” But if the tabloid press and for that matter, modernism itself is to be understood as co-emerging alongside an “information society” where news as information was rapidly becoming a profitable commodity, how can an understanding of news and print networks help grasp the production of modernist texts? Similarly, can the increasing “spatial and vertical expansions” of the field of modernist studies (Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz, 2008) be mapped with more transnational or global communications circuits of print? Given, as Isabel Hofmeyer has shown (2013) news as printed matter often crossed national boundaries and colonial authority as abridged compilations, summaries, press-clippings, how does that complicate our understanding of the form of modernist texts? How did “intermediaries” (to quote Pascale Casanova) such as foreign correspondents, literary agents aid in the transportation and circulation of news items across borders?

This panel seeks contributions related to modernism (Anglophone/European/global) and its negotiations with the popular press and print networks. If modernism can be seen as emerging in an era of increased commodification of news as information, how can analyses of transnational print networks be relevant in understanding modernist textual production? Panelists might also consider the role of foreign correspondents, literary agents and intermediate institutions in transporting, distributing news items in various abridged compilations, summaries, press-clippings across borders.

Please consider sending an abstract by September 30, see https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18959

Contact (announcement)

Dipanjan Maitra
dmaitra@buffalo.edu

Editors Information
Published on
18.09.2020
Classification
Regional Classification
Additional Informations
Country Event
Language(s) of event
English
Language of announcement