REMINDER - Poetry in “the Expanded Field”: Mapping Poetics in Interdisciplinary Territory

deadline for submissions: 
September 30, 2018
full name / name of organization: 
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 2019
contact email: 

The 50th NeMLA Annual Convention
March 21-24, 2019 - Washington, DC

What territories can poetry occupy today? To consider this question presupposes a spatial dimension of poetry, one that theorists of the form, including Heidegger, have long attempted to measure. While Heidegger’s efforts to delineate specific poetic terrain culminated in the declaration that poetry is the foundation of human dwelling—and does not inhabit space, but allows for the very possibility of inhabiting—recent experimental and interdisciplinary endeavors are increasingly challenging the boundaries of his mapping. Indeed, the space of poetry today seems to be shrinking, or expanding—depending on your vantage point—as diverse fields are annexed to poetic territories. Projects like the Centre for Expanded Poetics incorporate science and design studies in celebration of poetry’s “formal and ideological entanglement...with other forms of making,” while multi-media works likewise continue to subvert formal boundaries through engagements with performance and technology. In this milieu, what space can be said to belong to poetry itself, and what spaces does poiesis make possible? Moreover, what is the status of a “poetry itself” at all?

This panel seeks to explore the territory of poetry in and as “the expanded field” of interdisciplinarity. Is the singularity of poetry reinforced or dissolved by this permeability, and how can poetry negotiate its common ground with other disciplines? What defenses of poetry are possible now, and how might they revise historical traditions of poetic criticism? How can we read efforts to get beyond the conventional territory of the page, making medium matter in intersection with architecture, engineering, or life sciences? What, if anything, is lost by placing poetry in conversation with other fields? To what identity can the lyric subject lay claim in an expanded field?

Questions of new materialism, science and technology studies, post-structuralism, historicism, cultural studies, phenomenology, (new) formalism, and other methodological approaches are welcome.

Please submit your 300-word paper abstract through the online system here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17492

Abstracts cannot be accepted if emailed directly. Paper and submission guidelines may be found here: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html.

Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2018.

If you have any questions, please contact Emily Simon (emily_simon@brown.edu) and Noah Brooksher (noah_brooksher@brown.edu).