“Pirandello and Politics”
We seek papers that engage Pirandello’s work from a political lens. We are especially interested in papers that examine political themes and motivations throughout his corpus. Some topics of interest might include (but are by no means limited to): questions of history and political struggle/identity in his works (such as I vecchi e i giovani, “Colloquii coi personaggi,” etc.), Pirandello’s view of contemporary politics and society (in works like Il fu Mattia Pascal or I giganti della montagna, for example), and his relationship to the burgeoning culture industry.
Please send 250-word abstracts by 21 March 2014 to Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni ([email protected]) and Michael Subialka ([email protected]).
“(Re)casting: The Pirandellian Lens”
For this panel we seek comparative and interdisciplinary papers that examine the resonance of Pirandellian themes, tropes, or images in the visual arts, film, or on stage. While critical attention has often been focused on adaptations of Pirandello’s works for stage and screen, less attention has been given to the ways in which Pirandellian aspects like these are recast in the production of other figures throughout the 20th century. To encourage examinations that look at the afterlife of the Pirandellian perspective, we invite papers that consider these resonances in a European and/or global context.
Please send 250-word abstracts by 21 March 2014 to Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni ([email protected]) and Michael Subialka ([email protected]).
“Labyrinthine Modernisms in Pirandellian Times”
The Modernist Studies Association and the Pirandello Society of America invite you to submit paper abstracts for a proposed joint panel at the MLA Convention in Vancouver (January 2015).
We seek papers/presentations that consider the use of labyrinths and puzzling structures/forms in modernist production, focusing both on Pirandello and on his contemporaries in Europe and across the globe.
Some potential questions of interest include (but are not limited to): whether specific modernist writers develop labyrinthine structures to achieve different outcomes (from aporia and confusion to social-political subversion, etc.); how the labyrinth functions within the text (is it disruptive or a source of continuity? Does it involve the reader, the author, the characters, a meta-fictional self-reflection, etc.?); what are the methods by which such puzzling forms are constructed and deployed; how do various types of modernist labyrinths compare with one another within and across boundaries (of geography, language, time, etc.)?
We welcome comparative and interdisciplinary approaches.
Please submit 250-word abstracts by 21 March 2014 to Leonard Diepeveen ([email protected]) and Michael Subialka ([email protected]).