cfp.english.upenn.edu

Papers solicited for 1-2 proposed special sessions at the American Literature Association conference in Boston in May 2013 considering the ways recent American poems address and respond to ecological, political, global, social, and/or other public events.

Topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

-directness and indirection;
-voice and persona;
-address;
-witness, silence, and immediacy;
-post-confessional and/or post-Language aesthetics;
-source materials, including found materials;
-methods of composition;
-didacticism and/or sentimentality;
-the representation of particular events (the 9/11 attacks, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hurricanes, oil spills, the economic crisis, elections, presidencies, etc.);
-the relation of recent American engaged poetry to earlier or international poetry;
-millennialism;
-nonprofessional (e.g., internet) poetry.

Accepted abstracts will be submitted to the ALA for panel approval. All proposals will also be considered for a collection of essays on this topic.

Abstracts by 1/10 to Jeffrey Gray (Jeffrey.Gray@shu.edu) and Ann Keniston (keniston@unr.edu).