CFP: Bad Language?: The Poetics of the Erotic in Modernism

This is a call for papers for the 2009 Modernist Studies Association Conference:  MSA 11

Bad Language?:  The Poetics of the Erotic in Modernism

In the texts of modernist cultures, we find vulgar language, pleasures spoken and unspoken, and the generic and semantic challenges of sex.  Paradoxically, the deployment of the erotic in modernist texts, artifacts, and productions may have a decorum all its own. 

This panel will explore new ways of thinking about erotic language and its uses.  What languages are available to speak the erotic?  What are the erotic codes we find in modernist cultures, and how are they used?  Possible topics may include:  erotica in the modernist period (visual, textual, other); sex manuals, marriage manuals, the discourses of science and hygiene and their relationship to the erotic; sociocultural/historical influences on erotic language; erotica across/the erotics of race, class, nation, orientation; memoirs and diaries of erotic life; advertising; journalism; code-switching; dirty words; the impact of technology on erotic language; political and/or national movements and their languages around the erotic, etc. etc.

Abstracts of no more than 500 words accompanied by a brief CV should be sent by April 30 to Janine Utell, Widener University, at jmutell(at)mail(dot)widener(dot)edu.  Inclusion in the MSA 11 program is contingent upon the acceptance of the panel by MSA reviewers.