CFP: “Modernism and Diagnosis” (prospective cluster for the Modernism/modernity Print Plus platform)

Call for Papers: “Modernism and Diagnosis” (prospective cluster for the Modernism/modernity Print Plus platform)

Edited by Lisa Mendelman and Heather A. Love

Proposed titles & abstracts due March 15, 2019

Selected essays due June 15, 2019

We seek proposals for short, provocative essays addressing the topic of “Modernism and Diagnosis” for a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw the proliferation of popular and scientific diagnoses. Ushered in by a standardizing culture of physical and mental health, individual and social measures of wellbeing and pathology abound during these years—from psychoanalysis and eugenics to self-help and the physical culture movement. Contemporary cultural productions drew from and commented on this evolving slew of analytics. Think, for example, of the representations of shell-shocked and institutionalized bodies in print, on stage, and on screen; formalist experiments that play with new models of selfhood through stream-of-consciousness narration and (sincere or satiric) primitivist aesthetics; and sweeping social diagnoses like Gertrude Stein’s “you are all a lost generation.”

This Print Plus cluster invites papers that meditate on these period dynamics and their implications for understanding modernism’s legacy. Individual essays might focus on questions of identification, categorization, epistemology, or ontology raised by modernist aesthetics (e.g., “cases,” dialect, primitivism), popularized discourses like psychoanalysis and eugenics, and evolving academic disciplines including psychiatry, sexology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and linguistics. Authors might also engage with the recent turns to cognitive neuroscience and sociology in literary studies, conversations about research methodology, modernist cultures of feeling / affect, and narratives of diagnosis as they pertain to contemporary analytic trends and enduring social categories including race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.

Papers should be inventive, provocative gestures, along the lines of a conference roundtable (2000-3000 words). We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by the digital setting of the Print Plus platform. Please send a titled, 300-word abstract and a brief biography to lisa.mendelman@menlo.edu and heather.love@uwaterloo.ca by March 15, 2019. 6 to 8 contributors will be invited to submit essays, after which the entire cluster will be sent out for peer review.

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Wharton in the News: Edith Wharton’s works on BBC Radio

News of possible interest:

1. Edith Wharton’s unpublished play _The Shadow of a Doubt_ was recently dramatized on BBC Radio 3. You can still listen for two more weeks, after which it will be removed from the site. (If you think it sounds like The Fruit of the Tree, you’re right.)

The Shadow of a Doubt

Phoebe Fox, Francesca Annis and Paul Ready star in the world premiere of a newly discovered play by Edith Wharton from 1901. Former nurse Kate Derwent carries a terrible secret.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xfl

1. A serialized version of The Custom of the Country  is available on BBC Radio 4:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pj44y

Thanks to Laura Rattray and Sue Hart-Stevens for alerting the EWS to these performances.

EWS Call for Papers for ALA 2019

Edith Wharton Society Call for Papers
American Literature Association
May 23-26, 2019 Boston, MA

The Edith Wharton Society will sponsor two panels at ALA in 2019. Scholars whose proposals are accepted must be members in good standing of the Edith Wharton Society by the time of the conference, and individuals may participate in only one panel.

The Case for Comparisons

The Edith Wharton Society solicits proposals for a roundtable discussion, comprised of 2 single-spaced-page position papers outlining arguments for studying Wharton’s work in relation to a particular writer and that author’s specific works.  What specific works of Wharton and another author pose compelling possibilities for teaching and/or scholarly work? What theories or histories or contexts would this comparison engage?  What do we gain from studying Wharton’s work comparatively? What potential pitfalls, if any, await us?  250 word proposals, with titles, by Jan. 7 to Melanie Dawson at mvdaws@wm.edu.

 

Wharton and the Family

The Edith Wharton Society invites proposals for 15-20 minute papers on “Wharton and the Family” for inclusion in the ALA 2019 program in Boston. Proposals may approach any aspect of Wharton and the family, including issues of maternity, paternity, childrearing, sibling relationships,  queer families, and more. Papers may also compare Wharton’s representations of families with those of her contemporaries. Titled proposals (approx. 300 words) are due to Jennifer Haytock (jhaytock@brockport.edu) by January 7, 2019.

 

Edith Wharton’s unpublished play “The Shadow of a Doubt” on BBC Radio 3, Sunday, 10/28

This programme will be available shortly after broadcast

The Shadow of a Doubt

Drama on 3

Phoebe Fox, Francesca Annis and Paul Ready star in the world premiere of a newly discovered play by Edith Wharton from 1901. Former nurse Kate Derwent carries a terrible secret.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000xfl
Introduced by Dr. Laura Rattray.

Listen to more Wharton information here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000ml8

Listen now

Edith Wharton

In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Wharton’s novels, which explore the world of the privileged in America’s Gilded Age, in which she lived, written in hindsight and with little mercy.

Queries & Replies:

Hi folks! My name is Lily Curtis, and I am a high school teacher at Shepherd Hill Regional High School in Dudley, Massachusetts. I teach two different sophomore classes who are both currently reading Ethan Frome. My plan for an end of unit assessment is a piece of narrative writing where students either extend the story or change the ending as the time period switches back to that of the present with the narrator. I want them to include narrative elements and dialogue appropriate to characterization. I would love to involve the society in some way to make the assignment more “real” for my students and get them writing for an authentic audience. If anyone would be available to come into the school as a guest member to listen to student adaptations when they are completed, it would be an amazing help! If anyone has additional ideas of how they would like to be involved, or come in and help during a writer’s workshop leading up the due date, that would be awesome! Feel free to email me separately!

Name: Lily Curtis

Email: lcurtis@dcrsd.org

Website: http://www.dcrsd.org/schools/shepherd-hill-regional-high-school

Wharton in the News: “The Lady’s Maid’s Bell” production in Auckland, New Zealand.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am writing to notify you of my stage adaptation of The Lady’s Maid’s Bell for a local community theatre here in Auckland, New Zealand. As far as I am aware this will be the first stage production of The Lady’s Maid’s Bell since the story was first published. If you have any members in Auckland, the following information may be of interest to them:

https://pumphouse.co.nz/whats-on/show/one-act-play-festival/

The Lady’s Maid’s Bell by Edith Wharton plays nightly at 7.30pm at The Pumphouse Theatre, Takapuna from 9th to 13th October.

If you require any further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thank you.

Kind regards,

Jason Moffatt

Edith Wharton Society Secretary and Member-at-Large Ballot 2019-21 Term (Voting deadline: October 8, 2018)

Edith Wharton Society Secretary and Member-at-Large Ballot

2019-21 Term

[EWS Members will soon be receiving an email from Jennifer Haytock containing this information and a link for voting. Here are the candidate biographies for the election.] 

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When you receive the email link, please vote to affirm or not affirm the candidate for Secretary and candidates for Member-at-Large (two positions open). Voting will be open until October 8, 2018.

Secretary

Myrto Drizou is Assistant Professor of English at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, where she teaches American and transatlantic literature. She received her PhD in American and Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo and has previously taught at Valdosta State University and the University of Illinois at Springfield in the US. She is associate co-editor of the Edith Wharton Review and editor of the volume Edith Wharton for the series Critical Insights (Salem Press, 2018). She has also served as book review editor of the Edith Wharton Review and as membership coordinator for the Edith Wharton Society. Her work on Wharton has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Edith Wharton Studies (Cambridge UP, 2019); Gothic Landscapes: Changing Eras, Changing Cultures, Changing Anxieties (Palgrave, 2016); 49^th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies (2016); and Critical Insights: American Writers in Exile (Salem Press, 2015). Other published work includes essays on Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Henry Adams, and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman. She is currently editing a special issue on the global dimensions of American literary naturalism (forthcoming in The New Centennial Review) and is working on a comparative study of American and Greek literatures, in which Wharton is placed alongside early twentieth-century Greek writers, such as Alexandros Papadiamantis and Konstantinos Theotokis. As an Americanist scholar of Greek descent whose work has matured through the cross-cultural experience of teaching in both the US and abroad, Myrto is invested in sustaining the international scope of the EWS and supporting the network of Whartonians across the world.

Members-at-Large

 Katie Ahern, PhD candidate in the School of English, University College Cork, Ireland.

I hold a BA, and a Masters in American Literature and Film from University College Cork. My PhD research examines representations of marginal figures in urban space in twentieth-century American literature, with a particular focus on on the writing of Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska. I am an active member of the American Studies community in Ireland and served for two years as the Postgraduate and Early Career representative on the Executive Committee of the Irish Association for American Studies. During my tenure, I organised two symposia dedicated to postgraduate and early career researchers, developed strong links with colleagues in the British Association for American Studies, and helped to create a vibrant network for postgraduates and early career researchers in Ireland. I am interested in fostering a more inclusive environment for postgraduates, ECRs, and those who are not in traditional academic roles. I believe I can play a part in increasing participation in Wharton studies, particularly here in Europe, which would encourage diversity in the discourse around the work of an author so dedicated to her trans-Atlantic identity.

Rita Bode, Ph.D. (University of Toronto), is professor of English Literature at Trent University, Canada. Her research interests center on women writers of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries. She has presented at several Edith Wharton conferences, and her article on Edith Wharton’s and George Eliot’s historical novels appears in Edith Wharton and Cosmopolitanism. Other publications include work on Harriet Beecher Stowe and George Eliot, and Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery, a contemporary of Wharton’s. She is a past president of the Northeast Modern Language Association, and was the VP of Organizational Matters and Conference Director of the 2015 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference. She is very pleased to be nominated for a member-at-large position of the Edith Wharton Society.