American Literature Association 2024 (Chicago, May 23 – 26, 2024): “Stevens and the Little Magazine”

The publication, circulation, and reception of little magazines made modernism happen. They set modernist poetry in motion, rattling and humming. The little magazine was a medial form, a technology, an infrastructure, a format, and a context for reading. Organized by the Wallace Stevens Society, this panel welcomes scholars to consider Stevens’s work in little magazines and to consider little magazines as mediators of, or resonators for, Stevens’s work. We seek abstracts that draw Stevensian poetics and criticism into contact with cultural and textual studies of the little magazine.

We are open to all manner of proposals on the topic. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Stevens’s crucial relationship to Harriet Monroe’s (and Chicago’s) Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, established in 1912 and which published some of his most important early work (as well as early poetry by Sandburg, Pound, Eliot, Hughes, Williams, Moore, H.D., and Frost). Monroe and Poetry in the context of Stevens’s art, career, and life.
• The little magazine as a conduit for new or less-charted avenues in Stevens criticism and scholarship, especially around publication and textual studies. 
• Little magazines as a shaping force in Stevens’s poetics and/or career path. Design or editorial influences on Stevens’s craft.
• The little magazine and the international or global circulation of Stevens’s work and influence (or influences on Stevens).
• The little magazine and the poem cluster. Who and what was published alongside Stevens’s poems in magazines and journals, and why those textual relations matter. The cluster as a scale or context of reading and poetic reception.
• The form and format of little magazines and the modernist/Stevensian lyric. Little magazines at the intersection of textual studies and lyric theory/historical poetics.
• The form and format of little magazines and modernist/Stevensian criticism.
• Little magazines as conduits for connecting Stevens’s writing to other art/design forms (including the non-literary).
• Stevens and the material culture of literary ephemera. 

Please direct all inquiries and submissions to Zachary Tavlin at ztavlin@saic.edu. Submit abstracts of 300 words and a brief bio note by Thursday, November 30, 2023.