poetry

An “Aesthetic Apartheid” occurs when the artistic innovations of a minoritized group are neglected due to their difference. [1] The focus on white and western innovations in literature have created the assumption that non-white avant-garde poetry, "however singular its ‘voice’ is not ‘formally innovative’.”[2] Examples of this bias are evident in monographs about the avant-garde, in which people of color are far too often excluded. Dorothy Wang writes that “anyone who has spent time in avant-garde poetry/and or critical circles in the States [….] knows that these circles are overwhelmingly unpigmented.”[3]

This panel reflects on the place of confusion in British and American modernism. Confusion has not been traditionally considered a proper scholarly response to textual analysis; critics are supposed to interpret a text rather than allow themselves to experience its uncertainties. What happens when we explore the confusion we feel when reading not as something to be worked through, but as something to be worked with? Building on affect theorists’ work on how our feelings can influence the way we read, such as Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading and Rita Felski’s reflective and post-critical reading, how can considering confusion change both our experience of reading and our critical practices?

Call for PapersAmerican Literature Association Symposium“Regionalism and Place in American Literature”September 7-9, 2017Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

*NEW: deadline for proposals extended to May 26 2017*

Craft Modernism: an assembly

Sussex University, 15 June 2017

We cordially invite you to come and take part in a new type of collaborative event: an assembly of thinkers and of ideas.

We want to gather a group of scholars and practitioners who are interested in instances or representations of craft in modernist writing, visual art, and sound.

We are open to inventive interpretations of the terms ‘craft’ and ‘modernism’. We welcome creatively imagined short presentations that will introduce an image or excerpt that the presenter will ‘speak to,’ and explain the connection to craft.

Some texts resist the place(s) of genre classifications and are nevertheless—in spite of the resistances they perform—constituted as within these boundaries: Plato, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, for example, tend to be held within disciplinary bounds of philosophy. In this panel, a focus will be on texts that seem to strive for displacement, for other places or, more radically, for a continual re-placement or release from place(s) of genre.