The Reader Over His Shoulder: Reading Public(s) Exemplified in the Work of Robert Graves, 7-10 Jan 2016, Austin, Texas
Non-guaranteed Special Session proposed for the 131 annual MLA Conference
In the preface to his Collected Poems, 1945, Robert Graves states: "I write poems for poets, and satires or grotesques for wits. For people in general I write prose, and am content that they should be unaware that I do anything else. To write poems for other than poets is wasteful."
These views reflect Graves's lifelong preoccupation with the complex question of a reading public—for whom should a writer write, and how does the notion of a reading public (even if only an idealized meta-public) inform an author's creative vision, the sense of his or her vocation and relationship to history.
The purpose of this panel is to open for questioning how Graves's evolving and enigmatic conceptions of the reading public are central to and express themselves within all of the overlapping spheres of his prolific creativity, consider the extent to which they shape and color his writing and perhaps discuss what they might talk back to the critical project of our panel.
Some paper topics might include:
— In what sense is Graves's rigid compartmentalization of reading publics supported by his written works and in what sense are they undermined or problematized?
— How do Graves's comments about reading publics relate to his actual reading public—the people who bought his books, the poets and the critics who responded to them in published essays, reviews and poems?
— How does the economical notion of a select audience of poets reflect the manuscript-culture of the trenches, in which soldier poets like Graves, Sassoon and Owen exchanged handwritten poems?
— How do Graves's views on readership inform the evolving character of his poetry?
— How do our assumptions about a reading public influence or prefigure our attitudes toward the poetry of Robert Graves and, broadly, how do they condition a contemporary evaluation of his place within the map of modern poetry?
— To what extent was Graves misleading readers when he claimed to write prose for the general reader and dismissed his novels as "pot-boilers"?
— How might the new audience for his mediated novels (audiobooks, TV dramatizations) fit into Graves's original schematic? Here, one might draw on Graves's enthusiastic reactions to Josef von Sternberg's 1937 production of I, Claudius. Will Graves ultimately be remembered as an eminently adaptable popular novelist who also wrote poems—perhaps in a future in which Eliot is remembered primarily as the author of Cats?
— How do Graves's beliefs about a poet's proper reading public legitimize his iconoclastic critiques of other poets? One might focus on any period—on the two critical texts published before On Modernist Poetry, or the two works co-authored with Laura Riding, or on the later criticism written after The White Goddess.
— How much of our evaluative readings of Graves is determined by a concern for how well he lived up to his dedication to write for other poets or to a Muse? To what extent have they pre-empted criticism? Are our criticisms somehow beside the point, either because there is nothing to criticize about his merely popular prose, or because his poetry is explicitly not our concern? And again, with regard to his poetry, in what meaningful sense have we been excluded from his reading circle? Do we feel included by approving of our exclusion, content to critically eavesdrop, in the sense of Eliot's first voice, on the poet's private reflections—even though, as the reader over his shoulder we have explicitly been warned away? How does a critical reader's awareness of being doubly excluded provide an entry into the enigmas and conundrums of Robert Graves?
Papers will be preferred on the basis of their intellectual rigor, grace and good-humor, and how well they work in conversation with other papers. Please send 250-word abstracts by 25 March 2015 to Michael Joseph (mjoseph@rci.rutgers.edu).