Ford Madox Ford's "Parade's End": Modernism and the First World War. A conference at the University of London (and a BBC adaptation)


Ford Madox Ford
(1873-1939)
Largely considered one of the best novel of the Twentieth century (W.H. Auden among the others) and one of the finest about the Great War (Anthony Burgess), the tetralogy of Parade's End (Some Do Not . . ., No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up and Last Post the four titles coming out from 1924 and 1928) will be the leitmotif of the upcoming international conference to be held at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, from the 27th to the 29th of September 2012. The topic seems to be hot, since an adaptation from this tetralogy, a BBC miniseries scripted by Tom Stoppard, was recently aired. From what we can learn from The Guardian, the adaptation has generated a "tipically British debate". Probably the adaptations from Parade's End cannot compete with the book. It happens. Anyway, coming back to the conference, for further information you can visit the dedicated website. To contact the organisers, Rob Hawkes and Ashley Chantler, please use this email address.

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Here you can download the program which is posted also below.


Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End:
Modernism and the First World War


Day 1: Thursday 27 September

11:00-11:30 Registration and Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 1
Christos Hadjiyannis (Institute of English Studies) – ‘Ford Madox Ford, T. E.
Hulme and the First World War’.
Rob Spence (Edge Hill University) – ‘Ford and Lewis: The Attraction of
Opposites’.
John Attridge (University of New South Wales) – ‘Englishness and Taciturnity
in Parade’s End and Andre Maurois’s Les Silences du Colonel Bramble’.
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-15:00 Keynote Address
Adam Piette (University of Sheffield) – ‘War and Division in Parade’s End’.
15:00-15:30 Tea/Coffee
15:30-17:00 Panel 2
Seamus O’Malley (City University of New York) – ‘All That is Solid Turns to
Mud: Parade’s End and the Liquidity of Landed Relations’.
Austin Riede (North Georgia College and State University) – ‘“Cleaned, Sand-dried
Bones”: Christopher Tietjens, Vera Brittain and the Anodyne of War’.
Isabelle Brasme (Université de Nîmes) – ‘Articulations of Modern Femininity in
Parade’s End: Womanhood as a Projective Space for Ideological
Ambivalences’.
17:30-19:30 Parade’s End: A Celebration
Q&A session with special guests including the BAFTA award-winning director of
the BBC/HBO adaptation of Parade’s End, Susanna White, and Rupert Edwards,
producer/director of Who on Earth Was Ford Madox Ford? A Culture Show Special.
Launch of the new Carcanet critical editions of Parade’s End, followed by a wine
reception, kindly sponsored by Carcanet Press and Oxford University Press.

Day 2: Friday 28 September

09:30-11:00 Panel 3a
Dominique Lemarchal (Université d’Angers) – ‘When I is Others: Parade’s End
and the Impossibility of Autobiography’.
Alec Marsh (Muhlenberg College) – ‘“Rossetti”, “Better Far” and Overcoming the
Pre-Raphaelite Inheritance in Some do Not… and The Good Soldier’.
Sara Haslam (Open University) – ‘“Hops, cannon, kettles and chimney backs”, or
From Conversation to Humiliation: Parade’s End and the Eighteenth
Century’.
Panel 3b
Christopher MacGowan (College of William and Mary) – ‘William Carlos
Williams and Parade’s End’.
George Wickes (University of Oregon) – ‘Hemingway’s Literary Godfather’.
Joseph Wiesenfarth (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Death in the Wasteland:
Ford, Wells and Waugh’.
11:00-11:30 Tea/Coffee
11:30-13:00 Panel 4a
Michael Charlesworth (University of Texas at Austin) – ‘The View from Montagne
Noir: Ford’s Panoramic Metaphor in No More Parades, No Enemy and It
Was the Nightingale Compared to Works by J. R. R. Tolkien’.
Liz Hodges (Merton College, University of Oxford) – ‘Sight and Scale in Parade’s
End’.
Alexandra Becquet (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3) – ‘Structure and
Memory in Parade’s End: (De)Composing the War’.
Panel 4b
Barbara Farnworth (University of Rhode Island) – ‘The Self-Analysis of
Christopher Tietjens’.
Erin Kay Penner (Rothermere American Institute) – ‘Swearing by Ford’.
Paul Skinner (Independent Scholar) – ‘Tietjens Walking, Ford Talking’.
13:00-14:30 Lunch
14:30-16:00 Panel 5a
Max Saunders (King’s College London) – ‘Sexuality, Sadism and Suppression in
Parade’s End’.
Sarah Kingston (University of Rhode Island/University of New Haven) – ‘“Sick
bodies are of no use to the King”: Insomnia in British Literature of WWI’.
Karolyn Steffens (University of Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘Freud Madox Ford:
Parade’s End, Impressionism, and Psychoanalytic Trauma Theory’.
14:30-16:00 Panel 5b
Tom Vandevelde (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) – ‘“Are you going to mind the
noise?” Mapping the Soundscapes of Parade’s End’.
Nathan Waddell (University of Nottingham) – ‘Ford Madox Ford’s Musical War’.
Angus Wrenn (London School of Economics) – ‘The World-Ash and Groby Old
Tree: Wagner and the Hueffers’.
16:00-16:20 Tea/Coffee
16:20-18:00 Film Screening – Part 1 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End, starring Judi
Dench.
19:30 Conference Dinner (Location TBC)

Day 3: Saturday 29 September

10:00-10:40 Round-table discussion with the editors of the new Carcanet critical editions of
Parade’s End: Max Saunders (King’s College London), Joseph Wiesenfarth
(University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sara Haslam (Open University), and Paul
Skinner.
10:40-11:00 Tea/Coffee
11:00-13:00 Panel 6
Eve Sorum (University of Massachusetts-Boston) – ‘Empathy, Trauma, and the
Space of War in Parade’s End’.
Meghan Hammond (New York University) – ‘Modernist Empathy in Ford’s Last
Post’.
Gene M. Moore (Universiteit van Amsterdam) – ‘Impressionism as Therapy’.
John Benjamin Murphy (University of Virginia) – ‘“The ’ind legs of the elephink”:
Pantomime, Prophecy and Tosh in Parade’s End’.
13:00-13:40 Ford Madox Ford Society AGM
13:40-14:40 Lunch
14:40-18:00 Film Screening – Parts 2 & 3 of the 1964 BBC adaptation of Parade’s End.