In its aesthetic formulations and engagement with consumer culture, modern literature played out a tension between the desire for a radical immediacy of sensation and a savvy appropriation of consumerist desire. Philosophers of the period (such as Bergson and James) debated the relations between consciousness and reality, resisting a purely spatial model. How has temporality in modernism influenced contemporary understandings of the subject's relations to objects and the experience of desire? And how does a reconsideration of modernism, in terms of its treatment of experiential modes, revise current critical configurations of that period?

Papers might treat such topics as:

• Habit
• Tensions between analytic philosophy and phenomenology
• The experience of the object in modern literature
• Shopping
• Re-definitions of the senses
• Early film's influence on modern notions of memory and experience
• Time and space in the linguistic medium

Send abstract and a short cv, by September 10th, to:

Christy Burns, Department of English, College of William & Mary, P. O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795 (clburn@wm.edu)

or

Margueritte Murphy, Department of English, Bentley College, 175 Forest Street, Waltham, MA 02254 (MMURPH2@Bentley.edu)