Call for Papers

Modern Language Association Annual Convention

Dada/Surrealism Panel: "Making Dada History"

This panel considers the immense impact of historiographical and autobiographical production to the history of Dada, and the notion of Dadaism as an “art movement”: Memoirs, chronologies, diaries, letters, and manifestoes of the original Dada members establish the basis for a whole generation of historians, archivists, and curators who would write Dada history, inscribe individual sources (and perspectives) into this history, describe the “birth” of Dada as result of male creation, and exclude individual participants as “non-Dada” or “Surrealist”.

In what ways do Dadaist and later Surrealist authors control the definition of Dada? In what way do the “members” of the historical Dada movement and historians and literary scholars collaborate in writing an event that might have never taken place as such? What ties “Dada” to the autobiographical genre? In what way do individual accounts of Dada resemble or contradict each other? What is the actual difference between “Dada” and other avant-garde movements? Is there a difference between national discourses in regard to “Dada”? In what way is the exclusion of individual participants from Dada, notoriously mainly women, established through historiography itself?

Besides an exploration of the well known Dada autobiographies and chronicles of Hans Arp, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, Hans Richter, or Tristan Tzara, we invite presentations on “side figures” in the Dada movement or Dada opponents that are traditionally are not regarded as Dada: Guillaume Apollinaire, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Friedrich Glauser, Ferdinand Hardekopf, Emmy Hennings, Jakob van Hoddis, Max Jacob, Max Oppenheimer, Francis Picabia, and many others.

Please submit your proposal (250 words) to Nicola Behrmann at behrmannrutgers.edu by March 15.

This panel is sponsored by the Association for the Study of Dada and Surrealism. Please also consider responding their second panel: “The Surrealist Enlightenment”: Papers welcome with new approaches to studying avant-garde responses to the Enlightenment, from baroque wonder to modern science, in theory, politics, poetics, and psychology. 1-page proposals to Jonathan Eburne, jpe11psu.edu by 15 March 2014.