CFP: Graphic Eroticism in Women’s Modernism

Web site for the MSA 2018 conference in Columbus, Ohio

This panel seeks to examine graphic eroticism in its myriad modernist forms. From the graphically risque or taboo to the textual representations of non-normative sex and sexuality in poetry and prose, modernist women writers often embedded eroticism within their literary experiments.  With H.D., for instance, her letters describe trips to erotica shops in Vienna to find pornographic photos for Bryher and the pressure she received from publishers to write a tell-all memoir about her relationship with Ezra Pound and other male modernists, while her prose and poetry codify seduction and sexual encounters in less literal, though no less “graphic” ways. This panel encourages explorations of the relationship between the explicit, the erotic, and the graphic in the queer, straight, and mixed networks of women modernists. We welcome papers that interrogate modernist eroticism through a women-centered lens and that move past critical models of “romantic thralldom” or gendered revision in their approaches to gender, sex, and sexuality.

While sponsored by the H.D. International Society, the panel welcomes proposals that address a range of women modernists.  Consider scholarship like Jeanne Heuving’s The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics (U Alabama 2016), Miranda Hickman’s The Geometry of Modernism (U Texas 2005), Susan McCabe’s Cinematic Modernism (Cambridge UP 2005), Diana Collecott’s H.D. and Sapphic Modernism 1910-1950 (Cambridge UP 1999), Cassandra Laity’s H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Cambridge UP 1996), not to mention work by Cynthia Hogue, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Eileen Gregory, and many more.

Please send a 250 to 300 word proposal with short bio to Celena Kusch (ckusch@uscupstate.edu) by April 7, 2018.