Modernism, Intimacy and Emotion

Australian Modernist Studies Network Symposium 2012

6 - 7 February 2012

Hosted by the Writing and Society Research Group and the School of Humanities and Languages, Western Sydney University.

Since the special Critical Inquiry issue on 'Intimacy' edited by Lauren Berlant in 1998, there has been an increasing interest in the relationship between emotion and the aesthetic.  Recent volumes include Rei Terada's Feeling in Theory (2001), Brian Massumi's Parables for the Virtual (2002), Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings (2005), Patricia Ticineto Clough's The Affective Turn (2007) and Jonathan Flatley's Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (2008). The topic has attracted a diverse range of critical approaches from areas including cultural studies, historicism, psychoanalysis and neuroscience. This conference explores the role of intimacy and emotion in modernist studies.

Keynote Presentations

The intellectual content contained in these audio recordings remains under the copyright of the author/speaker and must be acknowledged appropriately if referenced in another context. We gratefully thank all those presenters who permitted the Australian Modernist Studies Network to make these audio recordings of their conference presentations available to the wider modernist studies community.

Sascha Bru 

Presenter: Sascha Bru, Professor of Literary Theory, K.U.Leuven; founder and executive committee member of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)

Title: The Shock of the Now: The Sensual Experience of Time in the Modernist Avant-Gardes

Audio: Listen to Sascha's paper (right click and "save link as" to download).   

Gail Jones Presenting Her Paper 

Presenter: Professor Gail Jones, leading Australian novelist  and member of The Writing and Society Research Centre.

Title:‪ ‪"Growing small wings": Walter Benjamin, Lola Ridge and the political affect of modernism‬‬

Audio: Listen to Gail's paper (right click and "save link as" to download).   

Johnathan Flatley

Presenter: Jonathan Flatley, Associate Professor, ‪Department of English, Wayne State University‬

Title: ‪Liking, Likeness, and the Color-Line in Andy Warhol‬

Audio: Listen to Jonathan's paper (right click and "save link as" to download).   

Henry Sussman

Presenter: Professor Henry Sussman, Visiting Professor, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Yale University; Fellow, Center for Advanced Studies Morphomata, University of Cologne.

Title: Theory on the Fly: Critical Synthesis Under Conditions of Material Pirating and Borrowed Time: Benjamin's Passagen-Werk

Audio: Listen to Henry's paper (right click and "save link as" to download).