Dominique Bauer (KULeuven), Laurence Brogniez (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Marjan Sterckx (Universiteit Gent), Hingene, Belgium, 16-17 October 2020.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of a modern city culture within a globalised economy, built on industrial mass production, an early consumer society, and colonial expansion. Both modernism and colonialism led to the creation of otherness. Non-industrial, pre-modern or exotic societies, and furthermore the racial, moral or female other were not just conceived in reaction to the emergence of modernism, but were also interiorised.

This conference will bring together a number of papers that focus on how spaces can be read as the communication, disruption, counterpoint or subtext of modernism in Belgium. To this end, the chronological scope, from the 1850’s and 1860’s, when the generation of late nineteenth-century city culture was born, to the publication of the magazine Correspondance in 1924/1925, suggests an open beginning and ending around the central last decades of the nineteenth century. It aims to detect and explore the reshaping and (dis)continuity of legacies, such as that of German subjectivist idealism, as well as to bear in mind, at the same time, the particularly Belgian continuity towards a modernist future and surrealism, towards Flemish expressionism and (proto-) modernist literature.

For more information and the modalities of the CfP, please visit this link.

More information on the conference venue: https://www.kasteeldursel.be/over.html