The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society's journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 47th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, February 21-23, 2019, at the University of Louisville (http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com).  In his Foreword to the first edition of A Miscellany (1958), Cummings comments on his own growth: “whereas times can merely change, an individual may grow.”  Taking up Cummings’ self-confidence in his own development,this panel invites abstracts that explore the extent of Cummings’ modernist growth as a poet-painter and as an individual. How does his poetic/aesthetic stance of an individual grow through his engagement with his own experimental, typographic modernism (as opposed to just the new art or the new poetry/vers libre)? How does Cummings' poetics of the self grow in ways in which he responds to the world of UN- (both to "an established order" and to "an established disorder")?  We invite abstracts that examine Cummings’ thematic and aesthetic provocations, not only as an artist but also as a poetic ironist working through a cultural i/eye. Topics ranging from -isms, nature, ecology, science, machinery, war, propaganda, race, gender and papers discussing critical receptions of Cummings’ iconic or iconoclastic radicalism in language and poetic genres and other literary forms are all welcome. 

Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 8, 2018 to: gch7u@uvawise.edu

Gillian Huang-Tiller

Professor of English

Dept. of Lang. & Lit.

University of Virginia-Wise

Wise, VA 24293

(O) 276-376-4552

FAX: 276-328-0173