twentieth century and beyond

Call for Papers, for a panel at the next NeMLA conference, in Boston, March 5-8, 2020.

NeMLA’s theme this year will be: "Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages, and Cultures"

Help Thou My (Un)Belief: Reading Belief in 20th- and 21st-century American Literature

In a letter written to Jacques Derrida in 1982, Gilbert Simondon poses a question to the project of deconstruction: “Why not think about founding and perhaps even provisionally axiomatizing an aesthetico-technics or techno-aesthetics?” Aesthetic thought has for too long remained at the level of subjective contemplation, which effaces any substantive understanding of technology’s effects upon the larger cultural sphere. The technical and the aesthetic, Simondon contends, should instead be understood as a “continuous spectrum” of experience, as each are composed of a “set of sensations” that emerge as matter is transformed, whether by the artist, the engineer, the designer, or the machinist.

CFP for the 51st Annual NEMLA Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, March 5 - 8, 2019

Tracy K. Smith, with four books of poetry, a volume of memoirs, a Pulitzer Prize and two stints as America's poet laureate, has every claim to be a major American poet at the pinnacle of success. It is easy to dwell on the mainstream acceptance that this success has earned. Her work is often described in highly aesthetic language, with an emphasis on its beauty and craft, and she sits neatly in the American poetic tradition. Among those poets she considers “most necessary” she invokes Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Larkin (Ordinary Light 336). 

"The only reason for the existence of a novel is that it does compete with life."

                                                                        --Henry James in "The Art of Fiction"

Women’s corpses, such as those of Snow White or Ophelia, are often depicted as a beautiful and passive objects, which has led scholars to posit cultural reflections concerning tacit assumptions in the link between femininity and death. In relation to modern literature and art, scholars such as Elizabeth Bronfen (Over Her Dead Body), Elizabeth Grosz (Volatile Bodies), Sarah Goodwin (Death and Representation) argue that dead women are an nexus of morbidity, alterity, and beauty that unconsciously encapsulates the anxiety of the inexpressible event of death, and, as such, dead women are given the value of the “other” in the most macabre fashion.