The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society's journal, Spring, invites abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 45th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, February 23-25, 2017, at the University of Louisville (http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com). This session welcomes papers on elements of Cummings’ modernism, cultural aesthetics, genre issues and visual effects, critical reception, and interactions with other modernists. We particularly welcome papers on Cummings' aesthetic and poetic modernism as a response to modern science, its theories of matter, space, and time, and its impact on so-called progress, in addition to his avant-garde testament to the radical changes of twentieth-century visual culture. To what extent does Cummings’ asyntactic poetic style and continued typographic experimentation respond to the post-Einsteinian understanding of “space-time” and to what extent does Cummings find the new science problematic? We are interested in papers that examine Cummings’ reaction to science, as well as his perception of a dynamic relationship between nature and self (his lower case "i") amid what he considers the mechanized “anaesthetic” science-worshipping unworld. 

Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 5, 2016 to: gch7u@uvawise.edu 

Or mail submissions to:

Gillian Huang-Tiller
Professor of English
Dept. of Lang. & Lit.
128 Zehmer Hall
University of Virginia-Wise
Wise, VA 24293
(O) 276-376-4552
FAX: 276-328-0173