CALL FOR PAPERS
Caietele Echinox / Echinox Journal
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
http://caieteleechinox.lett.ubbcluj.ro/
Volume 47/2024 : Integrated Modernisms
Editors :
Francesca Caraceni (Catholic University of Milan)
Anca Chiorean (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
Amalia Cotoi (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca)
Anna Dijkstra (Huygens Institute, Amsterdam)
Anandita Pan (IISER, Bhopal)
Paolo Bugliani (Tor Vergata University of Rome)
—
We, as Moderns, have always been on a quest for novelty: new methods, new literature, new
reality, new politics, new history, new technologies, new places, and so on. But what if we
were to take old objects from different moments in time and integrate them into the
contemporary, together with the newer objects, in “a regime of potentials” (de Toledo, 2016:
240)? What if the contemporary were to no longer support novelty as an act of “deliberate
forgetting” and a “necessary deviation” (North, 2013: 147)? What if the contemporary has more
to do with the way we choose to situate ourselves in the world, in Donna Haraway (1988)
terms, than with the stream of history?
When an author like Rene Gladman asks herself “how do we put the complex shape of our
interiority... into the straight line of the sentence?” (2019: 18), she is not only trying to question
the nature of both contemporary literature and novel theory today, as Timothy Bewes puts it
(2022: 6), but also the nature of modernist literature at large, showing the relevance of
modernism in our century. The modernists are the first in literary history for whom “the realist
ambition” (Salado, 2006: 114) is to shape the inner otherness within themselves. Moreover, in
Gladman ’s line of thinking, we could ask ourselves if the relation of that interiority (understood
as both life and content) and its sentence (understood as form) is fundamentally different from
the “the quality of the literature of our period: a quality of not only refusing to connect the work
and the world but of thinking, inhabiting, even forging the space of their disconnection”
(Bewes, 2022: 6)?
The connection that Modernist Studies has been establishing for three decades now between
literature and the modern world would not have been possible without the practices displayed
in recent years by pluri- and inter-disciplinary clusters such as cultural, (post)feminist,
postcolonial studies, sociology, and anthropology, or without all the other fields that Bruno
Latour (2013) would call “modes of existence” − technological, political, economic, scientific,
theological etc. Peter Adkins’ The Modernist Anthropocene. Nonhuman Life and Planetary
Change in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Djuna Barnes (2022) would not have been possible
in the absence of the ecological thinking of today’s society. Historical Modernisms: Time,
History and Modernist Aesthetics (2021), the volume co-edited by Jean-Michel Rabaté and
Angeliki Spiropoulou, would not be a major work today in Modernist Studies if it wasn’t for a
post-pandemic return to History, whose end was announced many times already. Rachel Cusk’s
novels would not help us illuminate and re-read aspects of Virginia Woolf’s texts that have
been in the dark until now (Boileau, Welshman, 2018:20) if it had not been for a death
certificate of postmodernism, signed by both the Modernist and the Memory Studies and
ratified by the ecological thinking at large. The same is true for Ali Smith, considered by
Andrew Marr (2022) a “thoroughly modern modernist, one turning the legacy of Joyce and
Woolf into vital fiction for the 21st century”.
If Modernism today is also determined by our own discourse about it, then integrating
modernism might mean to re-situate it within our own position in contemporaneity − a
contemporaneity understood both as an ethos and a bios, and as a simultaneous coexistence of
past and present. We therefore especially welcome original paper proposals that explore
modernism from an international, transnational, and postcolonial perspective, one that goes
beyond the limits of Anglophone modernities in literature and culture.
Possible topics of interests include (but are not limited to):
- New realism;
- Modernist Anthropocene;
- Modernism, postmodernism, contemporariness;
- Historical Modernism;
- Modernism Aesthetic;
- Fiction versus Post-fiction;
- Posthumanism;
- Long modernity;
- Flat Aesthetics;
- Theory versus Post-theory;
- Modernist authors in translation;
- Transnational Turn;
—
Abstracts should be sent to echinox.submissions@gmail.com by January 31, 2024, and full manuscripts by 31 July, 2024.
You will receive the notification of acceptance by March 31, 2024.
Please follow the Echinox Journal style sheet (available at
http://phantasma.ro/wp/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/Stylesheet.pdf ).