Modernist Sex - Provisional program

Please note that at this stage the program is only provisional. We may still have to make changes to it. 

Wednesday, June 24th – Nanterre

 

14h-15h

Keynote

Rachel Potter: Libertine Modernism

15h-15h15

Coffee break

15h15-16h45

Women, Sex and the Boundaries of Form/Genre

Leila Michelle Vaziri: ‘“The central point toward which life and death are spinning”:

Pregnancy’s Forms in the Modernist Novel’

Kirsten MacLeod: ‘“Aged freaks are all the rage”: The élégante as Modernist Female Type‘

Stacy Gillis: ‘“A Work of a Tendency So Grossly Immoral”: Public Morals, Copyright, 

and Women’s Writing in the Early Twentieth Century’

Knowledge Regimes: Erotics and Epistemology in the Modernist Novel

Mollie Copley Eisenberg:

Modernist Detective Fiction’s Erotics of Knowledge

Rachel Gaubinger:

“That Other Loveliest Thing”: Incest as Occlusion in D.H. Lawrence

Hubert Cook:

Bodied Knowledge Protocols: James Baldwin’s Modern Speculations of Sex and Captivity

Against Sex

Fiorenzo Iuliano: “A more durable purity”: Jewish Sexuality and the Struggle for Americanness in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep

Zakir Paul: “Modernist Erotophobia”

Bérengère Riou: “turn from easy pleasure”: Resisting Sex in H.D.

 

16h45-17h

Coffee break

17h-18h30

Transidentity and non-binary identity

Jenny Scoones and Laura Ludtke: The Trouble with Tiresias: Reading for Glandular Discourse in Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) and Sackville-West’s The Land (1926)

Chris Coffman: Nonbinary Sexuality in Bryher’s “Hellenics” and “Myiskos”

Jaime Hovey: Girl won and lost: sporting transmasculinity in Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and Enid Bagnold’s National Velvet 

Colonial and Postcolonial sex

Atim Mackin: (Pseudo-)Charting Colonial Sexualities: Docteur Jacobus’ Amour aux colonies (1893)

Sean Mark: “[E]verybody look like they frustrated in the big city the sex life gone wild”: On Sex in The Lonely Londoners

Justine Baillie: The Economy of Survival in Jean Rhys’ Voyage in the Dark and Good Morning, Midnight and Claude McKay’s Banjo

 

Surveillance and censorship

Rose Ducharme: Sex, Surveillance, and the British Empire in Claude McKay’s Writings on Jamaica

Andrew Thacker: “the spicy kind of books”: Sex and Censorship in the Modernist Bookshop

Rishona Zimring: Citizenship and Censorship: Rosika Schwimmer and Ignazio Silone

 

 

 

Thursday, June 25th – Nanterre

 

9h-10h30

Queerness (1)

Maurizia Boscagli: The Bed, and the Boat: Queer Sexuality in Djuna Barnes and Eileen Grey

Regine Eurydike  Hader: Modernist Dance Portraits as Queer and Gay Geometries

Ian Jayne: “Serious pleasure”: Narrating Queer Sexuality in Maurice and Alec

 

Maleness, masculinity, virility (1)

Fabio Colonnese and Marco Giunta: Luigi Moretti, Ettore Muti and the architectural representation of the fascist myth of virility

Kimberly Kotel: Space and Sexual Crowding in Miller’s Tropic of Cancer

Emma Frigo: “A nice cunt sandwich”: Henry Miller’s alimentary and sexual hunger(s)

 

Magazines and popularization (1)

Céline Mansanti: Sex and its suppression in the new US humor magazines of the 1920s

Will Straw: Sexual content and form in New York’s sensational magazines of the 1920s

Max Saunders:  Modernist Sex To-day and To-morrow

 

Promiscuity and Secrecy

Philippe Birgy:  Compromising promiscuity and entangling connexions in and around Rebecca West’s “Indissoluble Matrimony”

Jeremy George:  Cheating in the Short Story

Joseph Owen: Secrecy and Obscenity in Lady Chatterley’s Lover

 

10h30-11h

Coffee break

11h-12h30

Queerness (2)

Andrea Lupi: T. S. Eliot’s Queerness, or on the Poetics of Indeterminacy

Arielle Marshall:  Queer Temporalities in Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack

Rachel Haines: Schoolgirls in love: The Queer Desire to be Smart in Dorothy Strachey’s Olivia

Maleness, masculinity, virility (2)

Jane Malcolm: From Male Genius to the Mother of Us All: Gertrude Stein and Dashiell Hammett Talk Sex and Gender

Clément Oudart: ‘You mean coitus?’: Priapus in the land of the eunuchs, or the stakes of hypersexualized writing in Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Dos Passos.

Thirthankar Chakraborty: A Crisis of Masculinity in Beckett’s Murphy and Ananthamurthy’s Samskara

 

Magazines and popularization (2)

Ciaran Hervás: Eros in the Museum: Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexological Museum in Photo-illustrated Magazines

Agata Ida Kozuchowska:  Picturing the perverse: the surreal, the Bizarre and issues of censorship in John Willie’s vintage S/M erotica

Piotr Kulak: Polish Caricature of the 1930s in Relation to the Phenomenon of Gender Affirmation

 

Hysteria, Perversion, Obscenity

Rosaria Murolo:  Augustine’s Gaze: Hysteria as Perversion of Bourgeois Sexuality

Tobias Jenkins: After Strange Gods: Masud Khan and Sexual Perversion

Savina Stevanato: Is “this stuff […] too stiff for us”? The Case of Eliot’s Sexual and Bawdy Poems

12h30-14h

Lunch

14h-15h30

Queerness (3)

Karo Strauch: Lesbian Polyamorous Utopia: Queer Futurity in Natalie Barney’s Women Lovers or The Third Woman

Naomi Toth: Against possession – Orlando Erotics

Melissa Bradshaw: “Who’s that Lady?: Decoding Intimacies in Amy Lowell’s Letters

Femininity and the female body (1)

Julyan Oldham:  “Hypothetical Virginity?”:  Sex and Modernist Virginity

Nora Pehrson: Modernist periods

Gwenda Koo:  Anais Nin and Feng Yuanjuan

 

Deviance, transgression and violence

Asiya Bulatova:  Masturbation as Device Sexual: Transgression and Modernist Form in Viktor Shklovsky’s Subversive Editing

Elsa Baroghel: Sade, Beckett and (post)modern sexuality

Gina Stamm: Femme-enfant-animal: Greta Knutson’s Sex and Structural Violence

 

Sexualized Spaces

Peter Kurtz: “Dat sure is the sullibrated word!”: Magdalene Laundries and Sequestered Sites of (Re)circulation in Finnegans Wake’s Poetics of Waste and Sex

Louise Kane: Zhang Ailing’s “Sealed off”: Sex, Shanghai, and Chinese Modernism

15h30-16h

Coffee break

16h-17h30

Queerness (4)

Andrew Koenig:  Isherwood, Hockney, and Gay (Post)modern(ist) Identity in LA.

David Reckford: “I will always love you though I never loved you”: the haptics of differently oriented New York School poets and artists

Maxime Petit:  “The Actual Deed of Sex”: Homosexuality, Obscenity and Censorship in the Fiction of E.M. Forster

 

Femininity and the female body (2)

Izabela Sobczak: Fragmented Figures: Modernist Metonymies of Desire (Djuna Barnes, Virginia Woolf, and Hans Bellmer) 

Neethi Alexander:  Erotics of the Unbeautiful: Sexuality, Ageing, and the Female Body in the works of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Djuna Barnes

Barthélémy Rolland : From “Lost” and “Found” to “For Paul”: Lorine Niedecker’s Politics of the Body After Sex

Degeneration, eugenics and birth control

Sylvain Belluc: Eugenics and Birth Control in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

Janice Ho: Birth Control and The Politics of Development in Aldous Huxley’s The Island 

David Ludwig: Sex, Modernism and Degeneration: Antimodernist Discourses from the Sittlichkeitsbewegung to Spengler

 

Film

Patrick Armstrong:  Scientific Films, Sex and Spectatorship.docx

Enda Duffy:  The Fire: Sexuality and an Alt-Biopolitics of Modernism

 

 

20h

Conference dinner

 

 

Friday, June 26th– Paris-Cité

 

9h-10h30

Visual arts (1): the nude

Jane Garrity: Art Monster: Vanessa Bell’s Photographs of Nude Girls

Anastasia G. Wildig: Intimate portraits: an examination of the artist-muse relationship and interpretations

of the female nude during the modernist period

Sirine Germani: From Orientalist Gaze to Pluralist Desire: The Politics of the Nude in Lebanese Modern and Contemporary Art

The politics of sexual liberation

Karla Kelsey: “The Vaginal Cry”: Martha Graham, Anaïs Nin, and Sexual Politics

James Dowthwaite: ‘Naked Liberation’: Sex and Modernism in Stephen Spender’s Hamburg

Allan Hepburn: Muriel Spark and the Sexual Revolution

 

Esotericism and Modernism: Hidden Knowledge Masking the Reproduction of the Normative (1)

Moderator: Brennan Kettelle

Jessica Albrecht: Masculinity and the Empire: Negotiations of Normativity between W. B. Yeats and R. Tagore

Tanya Cheadle : Heroic Masculinity, Neo-Paganism and Celtic Revivalism in the Adventure Romances of John William Brodie Innes (1848-1923)

 

10h30-11h

Coffee break

11h-12h30

Visual arts (2): expressionist & dada sex

Cole J. Graham: Bodily Matters: Egon Schiele and the Erotics of Disability

Martin Harries:  Sexuality in Kurt Schwitters’ Collages

Zanë Hadri: The Zero-Degree of Emotion: Francis Picabia’s Mechanomorphism as Affective Diagram of Modern Sexuality

 

Sex, writing and reading

James Dutton: Taste Matters: Proust, Writing and Dying for Sex

Brian Richardson:  Reading and Sex in Modernist Fiction

Samantha Lemeunier: “A secret having to do profoundly with her sex”:  William Carlos Williams’s Eroticization of Women’s Writings

 

Esotericism and Modernism: Hidden Knowledge Masking the Reproduction of the Normative (2)

Moderator: Brennan Kettelle

Christine Ferguson: Whiteness and Occult Detection in the Aeon of Horus 

Manon Hedenborg White: Turbaned Orientals and women of the underworld”: Whiteness and heterosexuality interrupted in early-20th century tabloid portrayals of Aleister Crowley

12h30-14h

Lunch break (buffet)

14h-15h

Keynote

Jean-Michel Rabaté: “All were lacking if sex were lacking”

          Freud, Eliot, Woolf, and Sackville-West

15h-15h30

Coffee break

15h30-17h

Visual arts (3): the male gaze and female exploitation 

Ya’ara Gil-Glazer: From Fin-de-Siècle Misogyny to Countercultural Women’s Liberation: Art Nouveau’s Sexual Imagery Reframed

Georgina G. Gluzman: The Visual Politics of Sex Work in Argentine Modernism: Art, City, and Body (1920s- 1930s)

Camille Rollando-Kozlowski: The City of Light, the City of Desire: Photography and Sexual Difference in Modernist Paris

 

Sex and/in Theory

Maurice Fadel:  Ambiguity and Sexuality in Formalist Literary Theory

Kevin Kennedy: Sex and Silence: Susan Sontag and The Failure of Representation in Modernist Literature

Luca (Lou) Pinelli: The Modernist Second Sex: Simone de Beauvoir as a reader of Anglophone Modernist women writers

 

Modernist Seductions

Olivier Hercend: Joycean Seduction: from the Heavens to brothels via billboards and pick up artists

Shirley Bricout: Adam and Eve: Figures of reclaimed sexuality in D. H. Lawrence’s works

Astrid Maes:  Faulkner’s Sexual Poetics of Ecstasy