Babeş-Bolyai University (Cluj-Napoca, Romania) hosted the 2nd biennial Centre for European Modernism Studies Conference between 2 and 4 May, 2018. Entitled Temporarilies of Modernism, the event focused on North-American, Western and Central European modernist trends in literature and visual arts with reference to their conception of time. Besides the approximately 60 presenters in the various sessions, keynote speakers of international renown – including Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania), Randall Stevenson (Edinburgh University) and Patrick McGuinness (Oxford University) – attempted to shed new light on the predominant conceptualisations and representations of time in the modernist era. Eszterházy Károly University was represented by Renáta Zsámba and Angelika Reichmann (Institute of English and American Studies). Angelika Reichmann presented a reading of David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937), a book-length war poem in the form of a dramatic monologue which commemorates the Battle of Mametz Wood in World War I. Professor Reichmann's interpretation was inspired by the aesthetics of the Anglo-Welsh artist-poet's Arthurian paintings and engravings. Renata Zsamba's presentation dealt with the memory crisis and post-war traumas in Great Britain as well as the symbols of Englishness in middle-class memory, more precisely the English house – big houses and Victorian homes – and how Golden Age crime fiction delineates its role in the cultural re-shaping of English identity. The paper focused on such notable queens of crime as Margery Allingham and Dorothy L. Sayers, whose novels portray the ambiguous role of these houses: they are mythical and eternal in the memory of Englishness on the one hand, but on the other hand, corrupt and contaminated due to their exposure to the modern world.

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