From: Andrew Shail [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 04 March 2009 17:26
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP: Cinema & Modernism (journal special issue; abstracts 2 May
2009)

The relationship between cinema and literary modernism subdivides into
many 
dynamics, including the shared birth-date (in many accounts) of the two 
phenomena, the role played by modernists in originating many of the
forms of 
minority film culture, the idea that modernist literature was more
'cinematic' 
than contemporary cinema, and the question of whether cinema is an 
intrinsically modernist form. This proposed special issue seeks to deal 
specifically with cinema as one of the historical bases for the
emergence of 
literary modernism in the first place, asking how the emergence of
cinema 
occasioned changes in literary production that were as substantial as
those 
occasioned by such established modernist historical contexts as the
'discovery' 
of the psychodynamic unconscious and the First World War. Although it is

extremely common to remark that modernism is unimaginable without
cinema, can 
this be substantiated across the whole of modernism? Was modernism
really no 
more than frosted with formal equivalents of overtly aesthetic uses of
film?

Possible questions to consider include:
What particular social aspects of cinema stimulated writers to rethink
the 
nature of literary practice and literary institutions?
What widespread tendencies in film production provoked new protocols in
writing?
What intrinsic properties of the image proposed epistemological breaks
as 
substantial as those produced by the rise of collectivism? Or can cinema
be 
reduced to just a segment of historical modernity?
Does modernist content have its roots in the content of certain films or
film 
cycles?
If the First World War stands as modernism's prime precipitating
context, then 
did cinema in its wartime guise have any part in this?
Did cinema's impact on literature fall into two distinct eras of
attractionist 
and narratological protocols, or have these two poles always been part
of 
cinema's pressures on the practices of writing?
Do national differences in producing and imagining cinema have any
bearing on 
national modernisms?
Was cinema anything more than the culmination of a lineage of mass
cultural 
forms that were occasioning the genesis of modernism long before its
actual 
emergence? 

The journals to which I intend to propose the issue are (in the order of

preference):
Journal of Modern Literature
Literature & History
English Literary History
English Literature in Transition 1880-1920
Modern Fiction Studies
Twentieth-Century Literature
(I intend not to include Modernism/Modernity because they did a cinema &

modernism special issue in April 2006.)

So as not to waste anyone's time, I intend to, if possible, get the
special 
issue at least provisionally accepted by a journal before asking
contributors 
to write their articles, meaning that deadlines cannot be predicted now.
I will 
endeavour to give contributors plenty of time, and I will check with all

contributors should any journal ask us to fill an issue slot that is due
sooner 
than I would like.

Article length will depend on the journal, but will likely be around
7,000 
words.

Please send abstracts, of no more than 300 words, to
[log in to unmask] 
by the 2nd of May 2009.

-- 
Dr Andrew Shail, News International Research Fellow in Film
St Anne's College, Oxford