poetry

Following the lead of the 2016 Slavic Studies Conference held in Padua and Venice, we propose to further the discussion of Slavic Studies among young scholars by hosting a new meeting at the University of Genoa. This second edition of the conference, directed at doctoral students and recent PhDs (whose degrees have been completed within the last 4 years), will be devoted to the topic of ostranenie.

This panel examines the imbrication of the avant-garde with mass-produced art in order to discern the relationships between the proliferation of images and capitalism in the advent of modern visual culture. Imitating the shock value of advertising, the avant-gardists appeal to the eye of the viewer to gain visibility in the domains of art and draw the consumer’s attention to its product, thereby revealing the profit-oriented motives of marketplace exchanges. Immaterialities such as images are thus transformed into commodities that blend high and low aesthetic genres that participate in the consumer society.

 This panel proposes that early modern transformations in rape law placed pressure on issues concerning female self-possession, sexual knowledge, pleasure, and consent and that these tensions were critiqued and, at times, exploited by playwrights and authors of the period. In what ways do sixteenth and seventeenth century poetry, drama, and literature explore the injustices and ambiguities arising from the elision of resistance, coercion, and consent in sexual encounters?

This ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) panel at the 31st annual meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts in Tempe, AZ 9-12 November, invites 15-minute papers that address the conference theme in terms of the Anthropocene. What might be lost and/or what might be gained with this new measure of geological time, and what it might mean to weigh and measure -- to demarcate meaning or value -- in an age at once characterized by a new awareness of vertiginous scale and complex interconnection, and by the seeming collapse of agency itself into a singularity, an idea of "Man"?

Autumn 2017 will see the much-anticipated publication of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1. Following on from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (2000) and Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004), this book is another landmark contribution in efforts by Plath scholars to piece together and recuperate Plath’s words that have for so long been fragmented. With The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1, Plath’s words and experiences will be drawn together to give readers a fuller insight into her creative process and richly artistic literary life.