CFP: Movement and Modernist Interiors (5/13/07; MSA, 11/1/07-11/4/07)
Passing Through: Movement into Modernist Interiors
Due to the advent of new forms of travel and communication, movements in and
out of interior spaces substantially increases during the period of
modernism. This panel considers the impact of movements in and out of
modernist interiors on their construction and representation. Literary
modernism is fraught with ideas of inner spaces, such as the psychological,
the domestic, and the urban. And yet these interiors are inseparable from
figures of movement such as trade, travel, communication, and flaneurie. As
with all interior spaces, people and objects must inevitably move through
them. How do these movements, whether movements of travelers through
nations, flanuers through cities, telegraphs across wires, or narrative
lenses through the minds of characters, aid in the constitution of those
interiors? Interiors are often privileged locales, considered either safe,
sacrosanct, or stable in comparison with what exists outside their borders.
This panel considers how the crossing of the threshold (the entrances and
exits, the gateways and security check points) contributes to the formation
of these spaces.
Issues might include:
How can theoretical principles that consider the shaping effect of movement
on interior spaces contribute to our understanding of modernism? For
example: James Clifford's notion that travel is constitutive of place.
How does the representation of interiors, itself a form of intrusion, invest
or divest these spaces of meaning?
How do objects that pass into an interior, such as commodities and various
mediums of communication, alter, preserve, or diminish its integrity?
What historical, social, or cultural contexts help to situate the changing
conception of interiority and its connnection to the modern world?
Please send abstracts (250-500 words) and a brief CV to Kevin C. Piper
(kcpiper_at_wisc.edu) by 13 May, 2007.
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Received on Fri May 11 2007 - 18:32:58 EDT