This conference will ponder the legacies of 1922, an annus mirabilis for the literatures of modernity – within the English language, but also, more broadly, in global cultures. It will discuss literary aesthetics, but also the complex social and political contours of such legacies.

 

1922 witnessed the publication of two of the greatest literary monuments of the past century. In Ulysses, James Joyce decanted a formidably wide scope of human experience in the narrative of a single day in the life of a small group of fairly undistinguished characters. T. S. Eliot’s broadly evocative The Waste Land may be held as the epitome of the modern/ist (anti-)epic. Both works acknowledged and challenged the impacts of myth, religion and literature on cultural memory, and did so with a vividness that combined with boldly experimental techniques to depict a world that no longer offered security and solace. Joyce and Eliot may therefore be taken as representative of an engagement with the past that fuels modernism’s approach to modernity just as it strives to define itself as a break, and often a violent break, with the intellectual legacies of former ages. Works like Ulysses and The Waste Land contributed to the constitution of a watershed moment in contemporary cultural history, as borne in the fortunes of the term “postmodernism” for the period that followed.

 

Relational Forms VII commemorates the centenary of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land by addressing their artistic, philosophical, and sociopolitical wake. It will encourage a focus on articulations of modernity as manifested in the imaginative production of the intervening century. The focus of the conference is accordingly broad and international, as well as intermedial, in keeping with the rationale that has been guiding the Relational Forms research group.