poetry

British Romanticism and American Literary Naturalism might seem an unlikely pairing. Romanticism's investment in a sublime yet beneficent natural world and the power of the individuated self contrasts starkly with Naturalism's interest in deterministic doom and urban degeneration of. Yet the relationship between the two movements is more complex than this binary allows. This panel seeks papers that consider the ways British Romanticism as practiced by poets, essayists, prose stylists and other writers of the early 19th century was repurposed in the works of late 19th and early 20th American literary naturalism.

This seminar seeks papers that interrogate, trouble, and (re)articulate the interrelations of performance, poetics, and community within a critical hemispheric lens. Papers that examine how publics enacted through poetry and/in performance can potentially reaffirm, realign, and reorganize themselves out from the obfuscations of contemporary living are particularly welcome.

In their 1999 essay "Deformance and Interpretation," Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann propose deformative criticism against a rigid, theoretical, informative mode of reading in humanities. Deformance is an action, an imaginative, creative poiesis that does not necessarily aim to set a meaning of a text but reimagines it as a performance. Usually perceived in opposition to the more analytical camp of Digital Humanities, deformative criticism or deformance seems to be one of the very real and material alleys that Digital Humanities has offered to the structured, institutional, and perhaps all too ossified forms of production and exposition of knowledge.

The deadline for abstracts for the Twelfth Annual Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference has been extended to Thursday, September 10:

Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference

The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst will host its twelfth annual graduate student conference on Saturday, October 10, 2015. We are delighted to welcome Anne Lake Prescott of Barnard College as our keynote speaker.

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy.