http://www.avantgardenet.eu/nyhedsbreve/EAM_newsletter_5.pdf 

MATERIALMEANINGS 

Third Biannual conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) * 7-9 September 2012 * the University of Kent, Canterbury, UK * 

http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/materialmeanings/index.html  

This conference investigates the avant-garde's reconfiguration of matter and materials in the quest to generate new meanings and effects. Its particular focus will be the manner in which different artistic disciplines adopt strategies, theories and techniques from each other, and how they translate, transform and integrate conceptions and modes of expression from other sign systems. Proposals are invited for contributions which deal with any of the following: the interference or conflict of artistic disciplines; the interaction of disciplines in artistic movements; the combination of media in single artworks or artistic practices; the treatment of sign as matter and matter as sign; the materiality of art and the art of materiality; art and material environment; the world as matter and meaning; text as thing, things as texts; the transfiguration of traditional or found materials; the material effectivity of the avant-garde; the relationship between manifestos and art; technology and the transformation of meaning; the incorporation of the foreign or extraneous. We welcome contributions across all areas of avant-garde activity: art, literature, music, architecture, film, artistic and social movements, lifestyle, television, fashion, drama, performance, activism, design and technology. We especially welcome contributions which explore the combination of different media or practices within a single work or within a given environment. Please subscribe to the conference email list: https://lists.kent.ac.uk/sympa/info/eam-2012-cfp

Read or download the entire newsletter 

International colloquium organised by Centre Interuniversitaire d’Études Hongroises et Finlandaises (CIEH&CIEFi – Paris 3) & l’Institut Finlandais de Paris 

Paris

Septembre / September 23-24, 2011

 The colloquium aims to lay the foundations for an international research program. The colloquium focuses on the functions of avant-gardes as well as on the transfers and appropriations of influences and intertexts in Central and Northern Europe in the period running from 1909 to the end of the Cold War. Avant-garde is here understood according to its two traditional interpretations as an artistic or literary movement that is willing either to take the role of “engaged art” promoting political and social progress or to position itself as a reflective, critical and even destructive element within modernisation.

After three decades of composition, Ron Silliman’s the Alphabet is complete, and published under one cover (University of Alabama Press, 2008). When this twenty-six-sectioned, thousand-plus-page poem was only available in discrete portions, in magazines, chapbooks, limited-run books, what punctuated each was not the poem’s next “new sentence” but concurrent claims and counterclaims on contemporary life.the Alphabet was written during decades when high theory and cultural studies had arrived in the academy to exact formal and mostly progressive social evaluations from culture and the arts, but still often at the expense of poetry’s own theoretical challenges to the academy’s institutional base; when intensified corporate consolidation of the mass media and new technologies were transforming existing paradigms of “the consumer society” (Baudrillard), its “captains of consciousness” (Ewen), and “culture of narcissism” (Lasch); and when, among other factors, manufactured consent (theorized equally by Burawoy for factory work as by Chomsky and Herman for mass media) propelled the US mainstream rightwards into postmodern politics. 

All queries should be directed to msa13@buffalo.edu. 

The organizers of MSA 13 invite proposals for panels, round tables, and seminars for inclusion in the thirteenth annual meeting of the Modernist Studies Association, to be held at the Hyatt Hotel in Buffalo, New York, October 6-9, 2011.

This year’s theme, “Structures of Innovation,” encourages the exploration of modernist innovation in literature, film, music, architecture, visual and performing arts, technology and industry, and the intersection of these fields with race, gender, the sciences, and law. An international border city, Buffalo has been home to many important poets, fiction writers, musicians, journalists, architects, and a center for visual and performing arts, as well as the site of various transportation and industrial innovations important to local, national, and global modernity. We welcome proposals having to do with modernist innovation, modernist structures, or modernist structures of innovation in all fields. This theme should in no way discourage proposals on other topics: we welcome all panel, seminar, and roundtable proposals. The primary criterion for selection will be the quality of the proposal, not its link to the conference theme.

All queries should be directed to msa13@buffalo.edu.

All those who attend the MSA conference must be members of the organization with dues paid for 2011-12. (MSA membership runs from July 1 until June 30 each year.)

Because we wish to involve as many people as possible as active participants, MSA limits multiple appearances on the program. Thus, you may participate once, but only once, in each of the following categories:

• Seminar, either as leader or as presenter
• Panel or roundtable, as participant (you may also chair a different panel or roundtable)
• “What Are You Reading?” session

You may lead a seminar, present a paper on a panel, and participate in a “What Are You Reading” session, but you may not present two papers. MSA rules do not allow panel or roundtable organizers to chair their own session if they are also speaking in the session. The session chair must be someone who is otherwise not participating in the session. Panel organizers are encouraged to identify a moderator and include this information with their proposals; the MSA Program Committee can also ask another conference attendee to serve as a moderator.

Dear Colleague,

The government of Bulgaria has declared war on the main research centre of the country, the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and has announced its intention to, de facto, liquidate it, an unprecedented arbitrary act in its 141-year history. Research funding of the leading university of the country, Sofia University, has been also  drastically cut.

In this critical moment, the Bulgarian scholarly community needs your support!  

To support us, please sign and circulate the letter at http://www.science.nauka2010.com/

Thank you!

The avant-garde has been popular for some time, but its popularity has tended to fly under the radar. This “popular avant-garde,” conceived as the meeting ground of the avant-garde and popular, avoids the divorce of art and praxis of which the avant-garde has been accused. 

http://www.rodopi.nl/functions/search.asp?BookId=AVANT+25