twentieth century and beyond

What happens when the aesthetic traits of the classic Bildungsroman model are combined with those of postmodern narratives? There is a major shift in the postmodern period that puts into question issues of self-formation, identity, and the possibility to reach full maturity, aspects that were at the aesthetic center of the original Bildungsroman genre. Nevertheless, bildungsroman features continue to come back, almost obsessively, in late twentieth and twenty-first century fictions written in Spanish, signaling that integration and belonging are universal, timeless and ultimate human aspirations.

In 1950, Charles Olson published “Projective Verse,” an essay that deeply influenced many poets who would form the corps of the American poetic avant-garde from the 1950s into the present day.  But his legacy for contemporary women poets is quite complicated.  When he says in that essay, “keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen,” it’s unclear whether he means women poets to be fully and equally included in that poetic citizenry.  Some women poets have included themselves as addressees of Olson’s universal male pronoun in his prose and poems by unquestionably taking up the imperatives of projective verse, even in the face of direct sexism from their male colleagues.  Others, however, approach Olson’s work much more skeptically, seeing in Olson’s discour

The Cartographic Imagination: Art, Literature and Mapping in the United States, 1945-1980

A two-day international conference funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, in conjunction with the Centre for American Studies at the University of Kent and the Départment d’Etudes Anglophones at the University of Strasbourg.

Dates: 18-19 May 2018

Venue: Reid Hall, 4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006, Paris, France

Organizers: Monica Manolescu (University of Strasbourg) and Will Norman (University of Kent)

Proposed ACLA 2018 Seminar 

THE LANGSTON HUGHES REVIEW: A SPECIAL ISSUE  

“Art and Politics: Reexamining Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka”