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Modernism and Language

June 26-27, 2025

Ewha Womans University, Seoul

Submission deadline:

January 15, 2025

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Website
Programme

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Keynote Speakers 

 

Rebecca Walkowitz (Barnard College, Columbia University)

Janet Poole (University of Toronto)

 


Call for Papers

 

 

The modernist movement is defined by a heightened awareness of the limitations and potentialities of language. From the cacophonies and multiple languages heard in The Waste Land and the phonetic transcription of foreign languages that reflects Miriam Henderson’s sensory experiences in Pilgrimage, to Stephen Dedalus’s critical musing on the English language in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, modernism is characterized by experimentalism and skepticism in its dealings with language. The representation of language, depictions of multilingual spaces, and critical reflection on dominant languages are defining elements of modernist literature and art. In this period of rapid, unprecedented internationalization, canonical and non-canonical works, including those far beyond Anglophone sphere, addressed language with delight, with urgency. Moreover, such tendencies are found not only in literature, but in forms of modernist art, including photography, radio, and cinema, which define new visual and auditory languages through which to reach across cultural boundaries.

 

This conference offers an opportunity to approach modernism and language from a wide range of global perspectives and disciplinary angles, with the aim of opening new discussions on the enduring legacies and significance of modernism. 

 

Topics may include, but are not limited to: 

 

  • representation of language(s) 

  • monolingualism

  • multilingualism 

  • diglossia

  • global modernisms

  • language and gender 

  • language and nation 

  • language and colonialism 

  • babelization and debabelization  

  • vernacular modernism(s)

  • classical and modern languages 

  • language as a form of cultural capital

  • defamiliarization 

  • dominant and non-dominant languages

  • minority languages  

  • war and language 

  • film as a universal language

  • language and media 

  • language and education

  • literacy 

  • dialogues 

  • dialects 

  • translation 

  • language and affect

  • non-verbal languages 

  • artificial languages

  • othering and otherness 

  • discrimination and marginalization

  • metamodernism 

 

Please send 200-word abstracts for 20-minute papers along with a short biography to msia2025conference@gmail.com by January 15, 2025. Participants will be notified by early March 2025.

 

 

Conference organizers:

Boosung Kim (Ewha Womans University)

Kate Hext (University of Exeter, Ewha Womans University)

Soomin Kim (Ewha Womans University)

Postgraduate Roundtable
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