To celebrate Cummings’ 125th birthday, the E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 48th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, February 20-22, 2020, at the University of Louisville (http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com). Cummings’ modernist aesthetic has always resisted and challenged positivist assumptions about the relationship between nature and culture that prevailed during the modern period. This session calls for papers that examine the relationship(s) among Cummings’ modernist aesthetic, the city where he lived and worked, his representation of the natural world, and twentieth- and twenty-first century concerns with the environment and the growing threats to our eco-system. Possible topics include: Cummings’ nature poetry, ecocritical approaches to Cummings criticism; anti-industrial and/or anti-scientific tropes in Cummings’ prose and poetry; posthumanist approaches to Cummings’ work, especially to his animal images; Cummings’ representations of science and technology. We also welcome abstracts that examine Cummings’ thematic and aesthetic provocations beyond nature writing. How does Cummings’ iconic or iconoclastic radicalism in language and poetic genres and other literary forms create a poetic environment that is ecocritical?  Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 8, 2019 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