[Bilimsel Haber] CFP for ed. vol.: "Savage Pivot: New Nationalism and WWI"

[Gonul Pultar]

Savage Pivot: New Nationalism and WWI

A new and aggressive nationalism, different from its predecessors in its 
thought, its appeal, its goals, emerged in Europe at the end of the 
nineteenth century. Earlier nationalisms mobilized a sense of communal 
destiny, a feeling that atomized states that shared a common language 
and culture belonged together, represented a higher moral and political 
unity: a nation. German Unification, French nationalism stemming from 
the birth of the republic during the French Revolution, and the Italian 
liberation from foreign domination are all examples of nationalisms, 
inward-looking, that focused on bringing political and geographical 
reality in line with a cultural imperative.

In its inward expression, the new nationalism of century’s end became 
increasingly intolerant toward “others,” blaming target groups for the 
dysfunctions of the emerging modern world. But it also looked outward. 
The new nationalism was imperialist, and territorial expansion was 
supported by philosophical and anthropological discourses on heroic 
instincts, on domination and subordination Here, the nation itself 
became the central protagonist in history, the agent of rising and 
falling fortunes. Finally, the new nationalism was the expression in 
politics of a movement, a zeitgeist, which would encompass both social 
thought and developments in the arts at the end of the nineteenth 
century. It was a movement that arose through profound antipathy to the 
rationalism that characterized the earliest attempts to grapple with the 
coming of the modern world. In philosophy, it rebelled against the 
positivism of the age. In politics, against the rational, calculating 
“economic man” model of liberalism, or the “scientific socialism” of 
Marxism. In the arts, the new nationalism challenged the 
institutionalization of continuity within tradition, one that merged 
romanticism, modernism, and impressionism, identified continuity between 
realism and naturalism, or traced links between Courbet, Cézanne, and 
early twentieth-century art.

By the outbreak of WWI, the far-reaching new nationalism permeated 
intellectual debates, literary and artistic production, and militant 
political practices of right-wing movements. The new nationalism 
insisted not only on the non-rational and unconscious dimension of 
thought, art and human action, but also on its primacy. Yet how did 
individuals and movements in various nation-states arrive at that point 
at the dawn of the 20th century? How did the contemplation of war—even 
its celebration—influence nationalist currents? Are there shared 
characteristics among different nationalist movements during the years 
leading up to the Great War? During the War? In its aftermath? How did 
intellectuals and artists respond to these profound new current?

The present edited volume will bring together a series of studies that 
relate the experience of war to the rise of new nationalist tendencies 
in both social and political events, and in literature and the arts, 
during the years leading up to WWI (broadly speaking, the first two 
decades of the 20th century). We are currently seeking submissions of 
chapter proposals of previously unpublished research for an edited 
volume scheduled to appear in 2014, the year marking the centenary of 
the start of WWI.

We welcome comparative and interdisciplinary approaches and invite 
submissions from a variety of disciplines and fields, including but not 
limited to: visual studies, literature, history, philosophy, political 
science, and sociology. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- representations of WWI through crises of nation-states in early 
twentieth-century Europe;
-the rise of right-wing movements as the cause of/in response to WWI;
- nationalism and redefinitions of foreign v. domestic space: nations in 
WWI and the expression of regional identity;
- nationalism and redefinitions of time: visions and revisions of 
history and heritage;
- manifestations of nationalism beyond the European continent, 1900-1920;
- war, national identity, and reflections on colonial practices;
- literary and artistic responses to the rise of nationalism and the 
experience of war;
-discourses on nationalism during WWI as related to race and ethnicity;
-literary and visual representations of nations and nationalism during WWI;
- WWI and nationalist currents seen in relation to language, form, and 
aesthetic thought.

Project description (800-1000 words) detailing your proposed 
contribution and a short bio-bibliography (up to 1 page) should be sent 
to both editors: larose at berkeley.edu and vrodic at berkeley.edu by May 15, 
2013.

Once the editors select paper proposals, they will secure a publisher 
and announce the deadline for chapter submission (5000-7000 words) and 
final publication date.


Selected Bibliography:

Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. (1991). Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. (Revised and 
extended. ed.). London: Verso.

Arendt, Hannah. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Schocken Books.

Berman, Marshall (1982). All That is Solid Melts into Air: The 
Experience Of Modernity. New York: Penguin.

Black, Jeremy (2011). The Great War and the Making of the Modern World. 
London; New York: Continuum International Pub. Group.

Cecil, Robert (1972). The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and 
Nazi Ideology. London: B.T. Tadsford

Cohen, Carl, ed. (1967). Communism, Fascism, and Democracy: The 
Theoretical Foundations. New York: Random House.

Doak, Kevin M. (2006). A History of Nationalism in Modern Japan: Placing 
the People. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers.

Griffin, Roger (2008). Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning 
under Mussolini and Hitler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hargrove, June and Neil McWilliam, eds., (2002). Nationalism and French 
Visual Culture, 1870-1914. New Heaven and London: Yale University Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, 
Reality. London, 1994.

Huges, H. Stuart (1958). Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of 
European Social Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Lewis, Pericles (2000). Modernism, Nationalism and the Novel. Cambridge UP.

Schorske, Carl E. (1980). Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Vintage.

Steinberg, Mark (2001). Voices of Revolution, 1917. Yale University Press.

Weber, Eugen (1959). The Nationalist Revival in France, 1905-1914. 
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.


Vesna Rodic
French Department
4125 Dwinelle Hall MC 2580
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720-2580
U.S.A.

Email:
vrodic at berkeley.edu
larose at berkeley.edu

Visit the website at http://crws.berkeley.edu/