"Terrible Beauty" (April 15 -17, 2016) [Updated]
We take our title from W. B. Yeats' poem "Easter, 1916" to invite new takes on an old tune: the relation of aesthetics to politics. This three-day graduate conference at the University of Virginia, featuring poet Paul Muldoon as keynote speaker, will mark the centenary of the Easter Rising in Ireland and invite fresh thinking about how art rises through its occasions.
Today it has become a commonplace within the academy that human artifacts—artistic or otherwise—be considered within the social and material contexts of their production. As Rita Felski has observed, "What word ["context"] could be more ubiquitous in literary and cultural studies: more earnestly invoked, more diligently defended, more devoutly kowtowed to?"
Yet such diligent attention to the social embeddedness of texts and artworks can sometimes lose touch with their life. Paintings, novels, symphonies, etiquette manuals, manifestos become mere symptoms of their era, rather than creations of and for particular human beings, including those of a potential future moment. As scholars working "after" critical theory, how can we attend to the social and political investments of such human artifacts while also honoring their enduring singularity, beauty, and power? Furthermore, how might we better acknowledge that our own dispositions—social, professional, affective—are themselves intimately tied up with the meanings we locate "in" texts and their contexts? Must the aesthetic always signal beauty—the political, terror?
We invite submissions of abstracts of 200-400 words that contemplate a terrible beauty—the very notion, specific instances—from the vantage of the present. While we welcome projects in the standard 20-minute conference-paper format, we also invite proposals that modify or challenge this format. We leave this invitation open to the imagination but want to extend a specific invite, given our keynote speaker, to MFA students and creative writers interested in presenting hybrid readings/talks that locate their own work within larger critical discussions of aesthetics and politics. If pursuing this option, please include a writing sample with your abstract (for poetry, submit one poem; for prose, no more than one page of fiction). Proposals are due by January 15 and should be submitted to terriblebeauty2016@gmail.com.
Possible paper topics might include:
-Forms of revolution: aesthetic, political, sectarian, institutional
-National and global legacies of the Easter Rising (and other rebellions)
-Religion in the context of art and violence
-The capacities and limits of academic critique
-The relation of affect to aesthetics and/or politics
-Narratives of history and social making
-Thing theory, art, agency
-Questions of return, revision, repetition, and remembrance
-Issues of the national, cosmopolitan, postcolonial, global/world
-Transmission and stewardship of texts and cultural artifacts
-Human expression in a digital age
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet and the Howard G.B. Clark '21 Professor at Princeton University. Dubbed "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War" by the Times Literary Supplement, Muldoon is the author of twelve major collections of poetry as well as works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, and radio and television drama. From 1999 to 2004 Muldoon served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Since 2007, he has been poetry editor for The New Yorker. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, Muldoon has been awarded the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin International Prize for Excellence in Poetry, and the Shakespeare Prize. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Muldoon's most recent collection of poems, One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, was published by Faber in 2015.
Herbert F. Tucker holds the John C. Coleman Chair in English at the University of Virginia and will lead a masterclass with Paul Muldoon open to conference participants. Tucker has lectured throughout North America and the British Isles and Antipodes, as well as in Israel, Lebanon, Malta, and South Korea. Most of his scholarship concerns nineteenth-century British literature, most of that Victorian, and most of that poetry from lyric to epic. His teaching portfolio includes courses on autobiography, comedy, fiction and nonfiction prose, Shakespeare, Restoration drama, and most recently magic, in support of a planned book on modern charm. Tucker is the associate editor of New Literary History and the Victorian series editor for the University of Virginia Press. He never misses a chance to plug his interactive web tutorial in the scansion of poems, For Better for Verse: http://prosody.lib.virginia.edu.
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