American prose poetry: a Conference in Honor of Mary Caponegro

November 4-5 2014, Univ. of Udine, Italy

Contact mail: Daniela Daniele at danadaniele@libero.it

(Abstract submission deadline, Sept. 30, 2104)

Sala del Tiepolo
University of Udine, Italy
November 4-5, 2014

Keynote reader:
Mary Caponegro, Richard B. Fisher Family Prof. of Writing and Literature (Bard College)

Keynote speakers:
Olivier Brossard, Prof. American Literature and Translation (Univ. of Paris Créteil)
Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Prof. of French, English, American and Comp. Lit. (Graduate Ctr. CUNY)
Michel Delville, Prof. of American and Comp. Lit. (Univ. of Liège)

This conference will engage questions and insights on the use made by contemporary American writers of prose poetry as a genre rooted in the symbolist tradition. We will start from Michel Delville's writings on American prose poetry to study how lyrical narratives today creatively intersect with the coeval visual arts, in what Mary Ann Caws defined "an art of interference."
In this light, we intend to reconsider the experimental fiction of Mary Caponegro which eclectically re-elaborates artworks such as Joseph Cornell's boxes in her homage to Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death."
She will be present to read from her new compositions and to discuss how literary forms that reconfigure the boundaries between poetry and prose, and generate narrative through means derived from poetry (e.g. musicality, imagery, reprise, fragmentation) continue to animate the landscape of contemporary American literature.

Topics might include:
Prose poetry as a genre
Its relation with Postmodern narrative experiments
Issues of gender and autobiography in American prose poetry
Lyricism and ekphrasis in Mary Caponegro's work
Idiosyncratic reframing of Italian American fiction in Caponegro's writing
Mary Caponegro's lyrical narratives in relation to the works of other contemporary American writers (Don DeLillo, John Hawkes, Rikki Ducornet, Joanna Scott, Carole Maso, etc,)
Caponegro in translation

For individual papers, please submit 300-word abstract for twenty-minute arguments. Send your proposals to danadaniele@libero.it by Sept. 30, 2014