MSA 2024 Panel

Transcendental Homelessness or Transcendental Localism: Topographies of Late Modernist Poetry

While Georg Lukacs claims that “transcendental homelessness” is “the epitome of modernity” and George Steiner perceives modernism as “a strategy of permanent exile”, this topographical pre-conditioning (or rather a lack thereof) of modernist aesthetics might not be very useful or accurate when it comes to late modernist poetic production. As noted in Neal Alexander’s study Late Modernism and the Poetics of Place (2022), it is especially in poetry where “tenacious survivals” of modernism can be registered “well into the post-war period.” As he observes, “the three decades from 1945 to 1975 marked a major new phase of experiment and achievement in Anglophone modernist poetry” which fact has received very little critical attention. This period saw publication, among other important poetic works, of William Carlos Williams's Paterson (1946–1958), Wallace Stevens's The Auroras of Autumn (1950), David Jones's The Anathémata (1952), W. S. Graham's The Nightfishing (1955), Hugh MacDiarmid's In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), Louis Zukofsky's A 1–12 (1959), Marianne Moore's O to Be a Dragon (1959), Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems (1960), H. D.'s Helen in Egypt (1961), Basil Bunting's Briggflatts (1966), George Oppen's Of Being Numerous (1968), Lorine Niedecker's North Central (1968), and Brian Coffey's Advent.

This panel seeks proposals for papers that explore poetry of this productive period primarily in terms of its location and topography. Possible questions and challenges to consider include:

• To what extent does “transcendental homelessness” still inform this poetry and to what extent is the permanent displacement of the wandering metoikos in high modernist poetry reoriented through a more “localised sensibility” (Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins)?
• What are the motives, forms and strategies of this localization for the individual poets?
• Should the two tendencies be interpreted as dialectical? And, are there any strategies used to present the shift to the local in/as a dialogue with the “unhousedness” (Steiner) of interwar modernism in these works? 
• Could their local focus be seen as the reason why some of these works have been marginalized in modernist studies?
• If “the place itself…might be a text” (J.C.C.Mays), how did the transcription/reading practices change from high to late modernism?
• How might these questions and re-considerations shape modernist scholarship in future?

Please do not feel limited by these questions when reflecting upon late modernist topographies.

This call for papers is open to graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, contingent faculty, independent scholars and regular faculty members. Please send your abstract of 250-300 words and a brief bio (100 words) to Lucie Kotesovska at luciek1@uvic.ca by February 24, 2024.