UL ILFA researchers in Ghent

From 20 to 22 September 2023, the international academic conference “Uses of Modernism” is taking place in Ghent, Belgium. Participating under the shared panel theme “Modernist Poetry in Latvia: Masculinity, Hybridity, Temporality” are Institute of Literature, Folklore and Art of the University of Latvia (UL ILFA) Leading Researcher Kārlis Vērdiņš and researchers Ivars Šteinbergs and Artis Ostups.

• Kārlis Vērdiņš presents the paper “‘He Must Be a Magnificent Lover’: Proletarian Bodies and Male Desire in Aleksandrs Čaks’s Early Poetry”, within the FLPP project “A Walk through Time: Flâneurism and Modernity in Latvian Interwar Culture” (No. lzp-2022/1-0505).

• Ivars Šteinbergs presents “Modernism as Contraband? Some Aspects of Western Poetics in Soviet-Era Latvian Poetry”, supported by the project “Narrative, Form, and Voice: The Embeddedness of Literature in Culture and Society” (No. VPP-LETONIKA-2022/3-0003), implemented within the State Research Programme “Letonica for the Development of a Latvian and European Society.”

• Artis Ostups presents “Presentist Approach to Post-Soviet Modernism: The Case of Arvis Viguls.”

The panel traces three phases of modernism in Latvian poetry, corresponding to three different periods of social order. Vērdiņš examines rapid changes in representations of masculinity in Aleksandrs Čaks’s poetry written in the Latvian Republic; Šteinbergs analyzes the presence of Western modernism in Soviet-era Latvian poetry; and Ostups focuses on 21st-century poetry, where modernism is understood as an ongoing, unfinished project.

The full conference programme is available here:
https://www.modernism.ugent.be/program/