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‘Risk Anything!’: Modernist Women between Centre and Periphery

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: UNSW Sydney
Deadline: Wed, January 31st, 2018

‘Risk Anything!’: Modernist Women between Centre and Periphery
A symposium presented by the Australasian Modernist Studies Network
Friday 6 April 2018
UNSW Sydney, Australia
Keynote: A/Prof Natalya Lusty (The University of Sydney)

“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.”
Katherine Mansfield, journal entry 14 October 1922, The Katherine Mansfield Notebooks: Complete Edition, ed. Margaret Scott, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 286.

The peripatetic New Zealand modernist Katherine Mansfield wrote these words towards the end of her life, urging herself to be courageous, to pursue her creative convictions. Mansfield’s approach to life and work is an example of the countless creative women who embraced, employed and drove the modernist cultural experiment.

Nearly a century later, our own era is equally defined by contingency and risk, offering a unique opportunity to reflect on the history and legacies of creative behaviour that defines itself in terms of risk. We invite proposals from scholars on topics relating to risk, women and modernist culture, and from female-identifying artists, writers and performers whose practice engages with the legacies of modernist women. We especially welcome contributions focusing on women who have traversed the ‘risky’ division between centres of modernism – Britain, Europe, and the United States – and so-called ‘peripheries’. These may take the form of a 20-minute presentation/10-minute question format or a team-led 90 minute roundtable discussion or workshop format.

Risk may be interpreted in relation to:
●   Creative experimentation and the avant-garde
●   Cultural and gender norms
●   Sexuality
●   Reputation
●   Failure
●   Personal motivation
●   Finance/business
●   Danger – personal, political, social
●   Political struggle

Selected papers will be published as a special journal issue.

Please send 250-word proposals for papers, roundtables or workshops, along with a 50-word bio to l.mayhew@griffith.edu.au by 31 January 2018. Responses will be distributed in early February.

Event organisers: Dr Baylee Brits (UNSW Sydney), Dr Louise R Mayhew (Griffith University) & Dr Helen Rydstrand (UNSW Sydney).

 

Posted on Tue, December 5th, 2017
Expires on Wed, January 31st, 2018

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