MagMods Essay Club: Moretti Replies!

The Essay Club comes to an end, as the book club did, with a generous reply from the author.  Franco Moretti is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders (1983), The Way of the World (1987), Modern Epic (1995), Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005) and the chief editor of The Novel (Princeton, 2006). He founded the Center for the Study of the Novel and, with Matt Jockers, the Stanford Literary Lab.

First of all, thanks to all of you for your generosity and engagement. Though I cannot address all your points, I will try to include all controversial and/or interesting issues. Answers 1-3 concern the pamphlet; 4-6 broader issues, that are open or require more thought. And 7, a couple of problems raised by Matt Huculak.

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Re: The Copyright Rebellion (5/29/11)

Courtesy of The Chronicle of Higher Education, a spate of new articles appeared yesterday on potential legislation affecting copyright and ongoing battles over digital access in the wake of the March 2011 GoogleBooks decision.

http://chronicle.com/article/Out-of-Fear-Institutions-Lock/127701/

and…

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Professors-Fight-Over/127700/

Check out Related Content for others; all are likely to be of interest to several MagMods members.

CFP: William Carlos Williams, MLA 2012

Call for Papers: MLA, Jan 5-8, 2012 (Seattle)
William Carlos Williams’s A Voyage to Pagany and Pagany (1930-1933)

This panel invites papers for a session dedicated to both William Carlos Williams’s A Voyage to Pagany and Williams’s association with the little magazine, Pagany (1930-1933). Abstracts may include, but are not limited to, the following topics: travel writing, transatlantic modernism, cosmopolitanism, expatriates, nativism, romance, realism, landscapes, Paris in the 1920s, American modernism in Italy, collectivities, little magazines, the serialization of White Mule, or Williams in connection to other Pagany contributors, including Dos Passos, Caldwell, H.D. or Zukofsky.

Send 300 word abstracts to JillRichards@Berkeley.edu by March 10, 2011.

CFP: Mediamorphosis

“Mediamorphosis:  Print Culture and Transatlantic Public Sphere(s), 1880-1940″

Sept 9-10, 2011
University of Delaware

This two-day symposium will provide a forum for literary scholars, historians, media historians, and art historians to share works-in-progress on the transformations of print media and Transatlantic public spheres at the turn of the twentieth century.  The symposium will feature work that probes artificial literary-historical boundaries, challenges national divisions, traverses the divide between nineteenth- and early-twentieth century print culture, and links texts and or/writers across different genres or sectors of the print media of the period.  There will be ample time for open discussion; there will be no concurrent panels; participants will be expected to attend all sessions.  The symposium is conceived as a follow-up to the 2007 symposium, “Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940:  Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms,” which resulted in an edited collection under the same title (Palgrave 2008).

A wide array of work is welcome, but papers should engage substantially with several of the following areas of common interest:

*advancing our understanding of print culture’s role in the period’s movements for racial, class, and gender equality.

*identifying and theorizing the relationship between print culture, empire, and cross-cultural (transatlantic, transnational) writing, reading, and publishing.

*bringing the theories and methods of material culture studies to bear on the analysis of print artifacts as “objects” or “things.”

*grasping the increasing textual hybridity of the period’s print artifacts, by examining such phenomena as the interactions between illustration and text and the complex collage effects created by advances and experiments in typography and image reproduction.

*developing our knowledge of Anglo-American links, interactions, and networks among writers, publishers, editors, agents, and other participants in the period’s print culture.

*analyzing and theorizing the relationship between transformations in print culture and evolving notions of authorship and the literary, including the role of the nascent academic field of English, in Britain, the United States, and/or the colonies/commonwealth.

Send 500-word abstracts for 20-minute papers by April 15 to: printculture@bsu.edu

Database of Modernist Periodicals: Announcement and Question

I’m pleased to announce that I have begun planning a comprehensive database of Modernist Magazines to be called, “The Database of Modernist Periodicals.” This database was inspired by Scholes and Wulfman’s important contribution to periodical studies, Modernism in the Magazines.

I will make a more detailed announcement this spring, but in the meantime, the database will be designed to be a community undertaking. Much like Turbotax, the database will lead contributors through a series of questions in order to produce a bibliographical correct entry on any modernist magazine. As the database grows, we hope to implement network analysis tools to make it a robust teaching and research environment.

Later this spring, I will ask all of you to look over the draft document and make your own suggestions as to what YOU would like to see in the database.

Finally, I’m looking for a logo for this database. To start this project in a collaborative manner, I would like to ask you all to send me suggestions for “iconic” images of the modernist period published in magazines before 1923 (links to these images would be greatly appreciated).

I look forward to sharing more with all of you, and I wish you all the very best for this coming year.

CFP: Knowledge Networks

Here is another CFP that may be of interest: “Knowledge Networks: American Periodicals, Print Cultures, and Communities” at the University of Nottingham, UK, on May 27, 2011. The CFP states that, while the focus of the conference is on the nineteenth century, proposals for all periods of American print culture are welcome. The deadline for paper proposals is January 31, 2011.
Eurie.

Magazines and (m)LA, 2011

Well, it ain’t MSA anymore. The magazine slate at MLA is a lot less full than we saw in Victoria, but there’s a nicely diverse group, from Victorian reviews to Love and Rockets and from Irish journalism to Australian avant-garde poetry websites, reminding us of the many, many forms periodicals studies can and should take. Many of the panels have links to descriptions of the papers or panels.  If we’ve missed something, please let us know.

Thursday, 06 January

8. Serial Narrative: Theory and Practice

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Olympic I, J. W. Marriott

A special session.  Description here.

Presiding: Steven J. Venturino, Loyola Univ., Chicago