In her 1981 study of surrealist poetry, The Metapoetics of the Passage, Mary Ann Caws considers the capacity of poetic language to simultaneously arrest itself and enable forward movement: "The word is situated, as Jacques Garelli reminds us, between two deaths, so that each cluster of sounds located within this regenerating rhythm is able to resume its impetus, thus refreshed, as if it were starting again." It is the practice of architextural reading, Caws argues, that reveals the sustained surface tension at work in written texts, a tension often concealed beneath plot, message, the presence of characters, or particularly potent visual images. Architextural reading draws attention to the text's structure as a building or dwelling that invites a repeated generation of meaning through the act of interpretation. Caws uses the extended metaphor of the passage to both define architextural reading and to connect the poetry of the surrealist movement to literary representations of the city. Both, Caws maintains, are defined by a series of passages: "The term 'passage' may be taken as the corridor between moments, situations, states, at once spatial, temporal, psychological [ . . . ] the place of ritual and psychological transformation [ . . . ] the consciousness of a textual turn." In other words, in this understanding of spatialization and narrative, we can both dwell in and move through texts in the same way we can dwell in and move through urban landscapes, and both types of movement have the potential to transform us.

This panel invites papers that think through the concept of textual transformation and regeneration by identifying and meditating upon metaphors of bodily orientation: moving toward, turning away from, disappearing, transcending, falling, running, wandering, jumping, pausing, lying supine. These metaphors may be read in conversation with the physical structures and tools that constitute cities: walls, streets, sidewalks, windows, monuments, shopping malls, surveillance cameras, street lights, construction sites, public parks. Papers should use the textual dynamic between bodies and spaces to consider the question of regeneration: to what extent to different types of narratives use bodily movement in space to suggest or enable various generative impulses, and how are those impulses imagined on the page or screen? What is being generated within these stories? Is there a relationship to be defined between stopping or stillness and forward movement or (re)generation? What are the cultural, social, political, and aesthetic contexts in which these generations happen? How can we envision their impact on future aesthetic humanities projects?

Please email Emma Spies at thespieser@g.ucla.edu with any questions.