The Wallace Stevens Society - International Conference: “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” (Singapore, June 2025)

Recent work on Stevens’s transnational aesthetic sensibility has explored how Stevens’s poetry, prose, and philosophy opens a dialogue with Noh Theatre, Eastern intellectual thought, and non-Western poetic practices. The partiality of Stevens’s references to “othered” spaces and places are increasingly understood to invite the textual and cultural mechanisms of reception and translation as they unfold beyond Stevens’s own time and place. Participants are encouraged to reflect on what Gül Bilge Han calls the “border-crossing capacities of the poetic imagination” (“Transnationalism” 74) in Stevens as part of the global circuitry of Stevens as poet-figure of world stature.

The Wallace Stevens Society is organizing an international conference around the theme of “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” in Singapore from June 27 to June 28, 2025. Welcome topics include but are not limited to:

• Responses to Stevens from international poets
• Stevens’s representation of nations and cultures beyond the United States
• The relationship between Stevens’s poetic philosophy and the poetic practices of authors from other cultures
• Stevens in translation (how fungible are his coinages?)
• Teaching Stevens in the multicultural classroom
• World literature and the cultural reception of Stevens
• The indigenous and exotic in Stevens
• Stevensian climates and ecologies

The conference will take place at The Arts House, a multidisciplinary venue and cultural hub in downtown Singapore. The event will include a dinner for all participants as well as a tour of the historical districts of central Singapore.

If interested, please submit an abstract of 150 words and a brief bio to Dr. Ian Tan at ian.tan@nie.edu.sg by January 31, 2025.