The E. E. Cummings Society and the Society’s journal, Spring, invite abstracts for 20-minute papers for the 52nd annual Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, Feb. 20-22, 2025, at the University of Louisville (https://louisville.edu/artsandsciences/conferences/lclc). Considering Cummings’ ongoing appeal to and influence on an academic and mass readership from various critical perspectives (language, art, genre and culture, cultural divides, eco-criticism, zoopoetics, popular media, adaptation theory, and other approaches), the Society’s panel for this year would like to examine Cummings’ modernist aesthetics of motion in various art forms (painting, poetry, music, dance, theater, etc.). 

We are interested in papers that explore precision and movement in Cummings’ role as poet and painter, especially the interlinking of these roles in performance. In the Foreword to Is 5, Cummings draws an analogy between his kinetic aesthetics and the art of a burlesk comedian: "Like the burlesk comedian,I am abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement" (CP 221). He elaborates his aesthetics of motion in Him, “I have seen an instant of consciousness as a heap of jackstraws. This heap is not inert; it is a kinesis fatally composed of countless mutually dependent stresses, a product-and-quotient of innumerable perfectly interrelated tensions” (I.iv). In what ways does Cummings perform movement in his poetry and art works to achieve aesthetics of precision and how does he present “interrelated tensions” as kinesis? Papers examining Cummings’ aesthetics from social, ecological, aesthetic, genre-based, translation, and multimedia perspectives are all welcome, as are papers that situate Cummings in the context of modernist and post-modernist aesthetics. 

Please send 300-word abstracts (double-spaced and titled) and a brief bio by September 12, 2024 to: gch7u@virginia.edu

Gillian Huang-Tiller, Ph.D.

Professor Emeritus of English

Dept. of Language. & Literature

University of Virginia’s College at Wise

Wise, VA 24293

gch7u@virginia.edu