poetry

*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.

Call for Papers: RSA - The Renaissance Society of America, New Orleans, 22-24 March 2018Petrarch Commentary and Exegesis in Renaissance Italy, c. 1350-c.1650 

The Romanticism panel is seeking papers on any aspect of Romanticism, but we are particularly interested in papers that will address the conference theme "The Sense of Sight: Visuality, Visibility, and Ways of Seeing." As part of the material culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writers have attempted to reify themselves through textual or visual representations (e.g., letters, fiction, verse, and fine art through portraiture, etc.). Paper proposals that delve into the value of such cultural constructions in the context of the Romantic era and consider the effect of the writer's self-fashioning and self-projecting representations are especially welcome.

Spenser's Pleasures: We seek papers on pleasure in Spenser's poetry: erotic, aesthetic, voyeuristic, indecorous, unlikely, limited, unruly, healthy and unhealthy.  Possible frameworks may include the Horatian pairing of instruction and delight, the didactic or anti-didactic value of pleasure, the relation of pleasure to action (as in a Ciceronian commitment to moving, for example), the relation of pleasure to questions of value (variously conceived), as well as pleasure's antitheses—disgust, pain, or loathing.  What is the place of pleasure in attacks on early modern poetry?  In poetry's defense?   We are interested in thinking about Spenser's verse in relation to the history of aesthetics but we are also interested in reversing