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Modernist Studies Association 15th ANNUAL CONFERENCE Everydayness and the Event University of Sussex, Brighton, UK 29 August -1 September 2013 Message from the MSA President This year the annual conference of the to the efforts of Carrie Preston, the Board’s the work of the Treasurer and the Modernist Studies Association returns to the Chair for Interdisciplinary Approaches. Membership and Elections Chair, with the UK. Since lead conference coordinator Sara We’re indebted too, to MSA Webmaster latter being newly charged to recruit a Crangle unveiled the MSA 15 poster at Las Matt Huculak, who designed the diverse membership. Earlier this year, the Vegas last year, I have felt like one of those conference website. MSA was signatory to an amicus curiae brief children peering through the gap in the in an important US legal case having to do fence, marveling at the massed barrels and I’m pleased to report that we were able to with copyright and educational fair use. And the spires in the haze, pondering from a award an unprecedented 40 travel grants to the Board voted unanimously to grant favorite perch what might happen next. The assist members in attending the conference. affiliate status to an esteemed UK image powerfully evokes the worn surfaces Having received a record 72 applications, organisation, the British Association for of familiar things and the strangeness of we decided to prioritise graduate and Modernist Studies (BAMS). impending ones, the co-presence of postdoctoral students, first-time grant immanence and imminence. Its diagonals recipients, and those with little or no access As of 1 September, David Chinitz will join the horizontal axis of the everyday to the to institutional support. Those who did not succeed me as President, with Rebecca vertical one of the event. One hundred years receive travel assistance this year are Walkowitz advancing to First Vice President after the Armory Show in New York and a encouraged to apply again in future years. and Stephen Ross joining the Board as year shy of the centenary of the Archduke Second VP. We will also welcome a new Ferdinand’s assassination at Sarajevo, 2013 is This has been an eventful year for MSA Treasurer in Gayle Rogers. I’d like to just the year in which to think together about governance. With the support of Bill express my gratitude to our out-bound how the event and the everyday—as Breichner, the Journals Editor at Johns Treasurer, Jesse Matz, and to Former concepts but also as strains of experience— Hopkins University Press, we have altered the President Susan Stanford Friedman, for their interrupt, undergird, and co-implicate one editorial structure of Modernism/modernity. exemplary service to the Association. My another. And where better for scholars of As of January 2015, the MSA office will serve hearty thanks go, too, to Karen Tiefenwerth, modernism to ruminate on Everydayness and as the journal’s hub and will be responsible who recently retired after six years as MSA the Event than at the University of Sussex, a for two issues per year, with the other two Budget Administrator. stone’s throw from Monk’s House and annual issues and book reviews being Charleston and Farley Farm House and home managed by Lawrence Rainey’s office at the Allow me to hoist a pint to what promises to to the Mass Observation Archive, the Centre University of York. Our search for the MSA be an unforgettable conference, truly one for for Modernist Studies, and so many valued Co-editor who will inherit the new structure the ages. And I’ll count on seeing you at colleagues in the field? is under way; we look forward to notifying future gatherings, including MSA 16 in you of the outcome this fall. Until the Pittsburgh (6-9 November 2014) and MSA Preparations for this event have occupied its handoff, current MSA Co-editor Ann Ardis 17 in Boston (19-22 November 2015)! UK organisers just about every day for the will continue to bring her commitment to last year and more. You’ll find the names of innovation and editorial rigor to the journal. Paul K. Saint-Amour those local organisers on subsequent pages MSA President of this programme; I’m confident I speak for Revisions to our bylaws, subsequently the Association as a whole in extending them approved by the membership, redistribute our heartfelt thanks. Here I can’t resist singling out Sara Crangle, lead conference coordinator, for special recognition. Every delegate who attends MSA 15 is the beneficiary of her foresight, persistence, care, and resourcefulness. The MSA Programme Committee, ably chaired by Victoria Rosner, has assembled a fantastic programme comprising 3 plenaries, 5 poster/demonstration sessions, 6 pre- conference workshops, 14 roundtables, 24 seminars, and 100 panels. The programme’s considerable disciplinary variety owes much 2 Message from the Conference Coordinator On 29 August 1913, Pablo Picasso posted continues today, and is held at the machinations inevitably associated with Gertrude Stein a note from Paris to University of Sussex. The founders of Mass any major organisation. That praise must be Granada; its four sentences include: ‘Paris Observation, anthropologist Tom Harrison extended to past conference organisers, is not too bad at the moment and we go and surrealist poet Charles Madge, invited among them, Beth Rosenberg, Cris Miller, out for car drives in the evening’ and ‘I am photo-journalist Humphrey Spender to and Stephen Ross, who have been doing some work.’ Perhaps surprisingly, this contribute to their project; Spender is now exceedingly generous in advising me dull exchange is typical of the considered a pioneer of British through this process. Modernists – correspondence between these two documentary photography. Permission to undergraduates, post-graduates, and faculty monumental figures of modernism, whose use Spender’s 1937-38 ‘Worktown’ alike – have enthusiastically agreed to act lives, on close inspection, prove as photographs in conference publications as volunteers. And Sam Cooper, my eminently banal as they were eventful. was generously provided by the Bolton conference administrator, has without Picasso’s letter, of course, precedes the start Library and Museum Services; to see more question made possible the coordination of date of MSA 15 by precisely one hundred of these images, please peruse their site at this conference. years. In that same year, F.T. Marinetti http://boltonworktown.co.uk/. railed against contemporary theatre for its Most of all, we are indebted to our ‘waver[ing] between historical More information on Sussex’s extensive delegates. What a response to our call for reconstructions…and photographic modernist archives can be gleaned by two papers! We are in regular correspondence reproductions of our daily lives.’ To no workshops on offer to delegates run by our with scholars from Asia, Australia, Europe, small degree, Marinetti’s despised dynamic manager of Special Collections. and the Middle East; even Canadians write oscillation is the celebrated subject of our This is one of eight MSA 15 satellite events us on occasion. We are so pleased that you conference, ‘Everydayness and the Event’. that speak to our regional modernist legacy. have all chosen to come to Brighton, a city In addition to visiting the homes of not as spectacular, but certainly every bit as In retrospect, the broadness of our theme Bloomsbury and British surrealism, delightfully seedy, as last year’s conference may well be inadvertently indebted to a conference participants can tour the UK’s site, Las Vegas. Bloomsbury aside, form of British pub names, which oldest cinema and the Brighton Gallery, site modernists associated with Brighton and traditionally encompass two diametrically of the 1913-14 ‘Exhibition by the Camden East Sussex include Grahame Greene, opposed but related nouns (‘Huntsman and Town Group’. For a taste of the way the Edward Carpenter, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hounds’, ‘Rose and Thistle’, ‘Punch and modernist legacy remains active, delegates Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, David Judy’). That said, it’s not difficult to find are invited to a pre-conference poetry event Jones, as well as Pound and Yeats. And evidence of the collision between the at the Hope Pub in Brighton, and have Brighton features as an idealised get-away grand and the minute in modernism. Too- been offered an innovative phono-poetry in the imagination of Joyce’s Leopold obvious examples include Joyce’s Homeric event curated by our co-sponsoring Bloom. Envisioning a better time for epic of daily life, or Kafka’s hunger artist, institution, Queen Mary, University of himself and Molly, Bloom thinks: ‘Tour the who makes a well-advertised, public London, at Brighton’s Nightingale Theatre south then. What about English watering occasion of his fraught relationship with on Friday 30 August. places? Brighton, Margate. Piers by food. Our participants have interpreted our moonlight. Her voice floating out. Those proffered topics of conversation as broadly Over this past year, my colleagues on the lovely seaside girls.’ as we had hoped: over the next four days, MSA steering committee have acted as delegates will discuss everything from excellent guides in thinking through We sincerely hope you enjoy your visit to everyday animals to eventful parties. And administrative and logistical concerns. Matt our English watering place. Be sure to say the traditional concerns of modernism – Huculak, MSA webmaster, has received a hello to the sea, and to visit one of gender, race, crisis, avant-gardism, truly disconcerting numbers of emails countless sweet shops offering you a stick philosophical self-reflexivity, temporality, to revising the endless work-in-progress that is or ten of Brighton rock. And perhaps, also, name just a few – have been inventively re- the conference website, remaining an keep an eye out at sunset for the flocks of interpreted through our thematic lenses.