“)one’s eye / / perceives”: New Approaches to E. E. Cummings (deadline extended)
The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 49th annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, February 24-26, 2022, at the University of Louisville (http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com). Recent criticism of the works of Cummings has gone beyond his well-documented engagement with modernist aesthetic and poetic innovations. From Cummings’ visual and temporal poetics, to iconic meta-sonnets and rhythmic portraiture, to iconicity and ecology, and even to disability studies, the iconoclasm of Cummings in art and language presents a multi-dimensional i/eye that perceives and receives. The recent Norton Critical Edition of E. E. Cummings: Selected Works (2020) further highlights Cummings’ virtuosity in various genres. In addition to his primary vocations of poet and painter, Cummings also wrote plays, memoir-novels, a ballet, lectures (which Cummings called “nonlectures”), fairy tales, and numerous essays, satirical articles, along with “A book without a Title.” Although only selected, this edition has opened Cummings from aesthetic to cultural and even interdisciplinary approaches (art, history, linguistics, literature, philosophy, economics, nature, science, political theory, sociology, performing arts, visual culture, and media studies, etc.), motivating ongoing study from different critical and theoretical perspectives. We welcome studies that examine ways other disciplines can illuminate Cummings’ experimental and typographical modernism, and methods of incorporating his poetry, prose, and art work into dialogues between aesthetic and interactive/intersectional cultural space and time. Studies that examine Cummings’ poetry, prose, drama, and visual art across genres are also welcome.
Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 10, 2021 to: gch7u@uvawise.edu
Gillian Huang-Tiller
Professor of English
Department of Language and Literature
University of Virginia-Wise
Wise, VA 24293
P 276-376-4552