"Shaw and His Contemporaries"

Shaw Session at the Modern Language Association Convention

San Francisco, December 27-30 of 2008 

Deadline for abstracts EACH YEAR is March 15

 “The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.”   GBS--The Sanity of Art (1895)

This special session for the 2008 MLA convention in San Francisco will present papers on Bernard Shaw and his authorial and/or personal relations with his contemporaries.  Given the length and variety of Shaw’s life, the idea of “Shaw and His Contemporaries” should be broadly construed.  Among other more obvious topics, interest in Shaw’s relationship to modernism and individual modernists, to non-Western contemporaries, and to figures outside literary, dramatic, and theatrical contexts are all welcome. Please send one-page abstract and brief CV by 15 March 2008 to Charles Joseph Del Dotto via email attachment (cjd@duke.edu).

THE PROGRAM FOR “SHAW AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES”

Monday, 29 December

581. Shaw and His Contemporaries

1:45-3:00 p.m., Hilton San Francisco

Presiding: Charles J. Del Dotto, Duke Univ.

1. "Bernard Shaw and the Late Victorian Radical Public," Elizabeth Carolyn

Miller, Univ. of California, Davis

2. "The Nietzschean Motorcar: Shaw among the Futurists and the Vorticists,"

Lawrence Switzky, Harvard Univ.

3. "Introducing Georges Carpentier, the 'Boxing Genius': A Night at the Fights

with George Bernard Shaw," Christopher Whalen Rivers, Mount Holyoke Coll.