*CFP* "METAMODERNISM" CONFERENCE, RADBOUD UNIVERSITY

“Metamodernism”

Conference dates: Thursday 4 and Friday 5 July 2019

Location: Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Organisers: Dr. Dennis Kersten (RU), Dr. Usha Wilbers (RU) and Prof. Antony Rowland (ManMet)

Metamodernism registers how artists across different disciplines have recently responded to the ways in which postmodernism appears increasingly unable to account for recent developments in history and culture. Critics differ, however, in their response to this phenomenon, which can be roughly divided into two main perspectives. Tim Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker - working in the areas of fine art and cultural studies rather than literary criticism - propose that Metamodernism attempts to account for the emergence of a wider “structure of feeling” in the twenty-first century which responds to our historicity, bound up with the aftermaths of 9/11, the financial crash and austerity. David James and Urmila Seshagiri, on the other hand, present Metamodernism as a concept that explains the resurfacing, and reworking, of Modernism in contemporary fiction. This conference seeks to bring together the various strands in this debate by focusing on the question how Metamodernism, in the terminology of Vermeulen, Van den Akker and Alison Gibbons, upcycles “past styles, conventions and techniques.”

We welcome abstracts for presentations about case studies of Metamodernism—in various disciplines, genres and cultural contexts—which explore the way in which they relate to earlier ‘isms’, art movements and aesthetic legacies. We are specifically interested in papers which explicitly address issues of:

• Interdisciplinary Metamodernism 
• Architecture and Metamodernism 
• Poetry and Metamodernism 
• The resurfacing of Modernism and / in Metamodernism 
• Metamodernism and visual art 
• Metamodern music 
• Metamodernism and the ‘new sincerity’ 
• Metamodernism and ‘Up Lit’

We also welcome proposals for joint panels (three papers maximum).

Please send a 250 word proposal, including a brief CV, by 1 February 2019 to: Dennis Kersten: d.kersten@let.ru.nl / Usha Wilbers: u.wilbers@let.ru.nl / Antony Rowland: a.rowland@mmu.ac.uk.