poetry

A multidisciplinary research focusing on the complex interrelationship of music and literature has expanded rapidly in the recent years. There are numerous examples in European and American literatures, both in poetry and prose, where music plays a vital rolе (Leo Tolstoy, Chekhov, Proust, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, George Eliot, Henry James, and many others), and while there has been many published studies focusing on the formal relationship between the sister arts of music and literature (Steven Paul Scher “Literature and Music,” Werner Woft “The Musicalization of Fiction,” Delia de Souza Correa “George Eliot, Music and Victorian Culture”), there has not been much research focused specifically on music or musical performance within the text.

Race and Versification in Anglophone Poetry

Studies of versification tend to be silent on race, and with some exceptions (such as Anthony Reed’s 2014 Freedom Time), studies of race and poetic form tend to turn away from the mechanics of versification. As Dorothy Wang argues in Thinking its Presence: Race and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (2014), most accounts of poetic form revolve around the technical accomplishments of white poets, while minority figures are seen as more valuable for their poetry’s social or thematic content. What would happen if nonwhite poets were read for their proficiency with poetic forms, and were made the center of conversations about poetic technique? 

This roundtable will evaluate the relevance of the philosophical field of phenomenology—the rigorous study of the structures of consciousness and bodily experience—to twentieth and twenty-first century American poetry through a series of short paper presentations. “[W]ords … are,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues in Phenomenology of Perception, “ways of singing the world, and … they are destined to represent objects, not through an objective resemblance … but because they are extracted from them, and literally represent their emotional essence” (193).

“Self-Translations are No Translations at All” was the title of a roundtable discussion at the 2018 NEMLA in Pittsburgh, where participants discussed both their own self-translations and those by renown self-translating authors such as Nabokov and Miłes and also spatial metaphors occurring in theories of self-translation.

This creative session would build upon that discussion and in this specific format allow participants to focus on presenting their own experiences with self-translation and expound phenomena and examples of their own writings and translations to be shared with other creative writers and/or (future) self-translators. Topics to be discussed could include:

Plenary Speakers include: Prof. Kim F Hall (Barnard College), Prof. Nandini Das (University of Liverpool) Dr. Preti Taneja (University of Warwick)

Swansea University is proud to host the 2019 British Shakespeare Association conference on the theme of “Shakespeare, Race, and Nation”.