CFP: Dismodernist Poetics / Post-Ableist Poetics (March 17; Modernist Studies Association
annual convention 06, October 19-22)

The purpose of this panel is to bring two interdisciplinary fields (Disability Studies
and Modern & Contemporary Poetics) into conversation, putting pressure on emerging
terminology in these fields, with a view toward imagining a "post-ableist poetics."

Lennard Davis' founding study, Enforcing Normalcy, posits the source and salient
character of ableist ideology as specifically Modern, while his recent work on "Dismodernism"
envisions "a new category based on the partial, incomplete subject whose realization
is not autonomy and independence, but dependency and interdependence." Deliberate
or not, this phrasing reads practically identical to axioms in innovative poetics
(re: readership as well as composition), specifically those poetics associated with
Modernist, avant-garde, and contemporary poetries of "indeterminacy."

Classical and neo-romantic conceptions of aesthetics' relationship to eugenics has
been a salient point of scrutiny in Disability Studies thus far. It remains to
bring Davis' cue into a new conversation about the ways in which Disability Studies
and poetics can serve one another. Thus, I'm seeking papers addressing forms, processes,
and systems--ways of making--which engage or engender new subjectivities which may
be specifically post-ableist.

* This panel is proposed, not yet accepted. Send an abstract and short bio (or
CV) by March 17 to patrickdurgin at earthlink dot net. I will be in touch soon
thereafter. I am also seeking a chair / respondent for the panel.

Dr. Patrick F. Durgin
Lecturer in English Language & Literature
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Received on Thu Feb 02 2006 - 15:18:18 EST