Call for papers: NEMLA, April 12-13, 2002, Toronto, Canada
Orwell's Reading List: Poetry, Politics, and the English Language
Orwell's famous essay warning of the role of politics in draining
force and accuracy from language may hold the current record for being
most often anthologized. Both his argument and his examples should be
familiar to us, and we might be inclined, these fifty years later, to add
the advertising and public relations establishment and mass media in
general to politics per se as threats to the vitality and precision of
language.
Poets, though, continually strive to keep language fresh, precise,
true, and alive: words assembled to reveal, not to conceal. Poets whose
perspectives include visions of social or political reform--Muriel
Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, or Sonia Sanchez, for example--or whose
circumstances make political reference inevitable--Seamus Heaney, say--can
feel squeezed between sloganeering and repression. In an essay appearing
last March in the Los Angeles Times, Adrienne Rich captured the dilemma
clearly:
"[I]t seemed to me that an accumulating incoherence and disruption of
public language and images in the late 20th century was something poets
had to reckon with, not just for our own work. . . . I was looking for
poetics and practice that could resist degraded media and a mass
entertainment culture, both of them much more pervasive and powerful than
earlier in the century. . . .
"One of the questions that pursued me is whether, and how, innovative or
so-called avant-garde poetics are necessarily or even potentially
revolutionary: Do they simply embrace a language so deracinated that it is
privy in its rebellions only to a few? . . . The obverse question is
inescapable: Can a radical social imagination clothe itself in a language
worn thin by usage or debased by marketing, promotion and the will to
power? In order to meet that will to power, must we choose between the
nonreferential and the paraphrasable?
"I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the
compromised language of state and media. Yet how, I have wondered, can
poetry persist as a ligatory art rather than as an echo chamber of
fragmentation and alienation? . . . Is there a way of writing on the
edge?"
Where can we go these days to find such "writing on the edge"?
For this panel, I hope to collect presentations that will examine
the intersections of poetic innovation and political action from several
perspectives. Are there poets who appear to have fought and won a battle
for the clarity and originality of language in a political context? Who
have achieved their ends by subverting the automatic tokens of popular
cant through appropriation and parody? Whose originality of language has
revealed an ideological dimension where none might have been visible
before? Whose hoped-for power to reveal has been too easily reclaimed by
mass-marketed formulae?
Proposals are welcome that focus on individual poets or on particular
political contexts that several poets might have addressed. The purpose is
to examine the means by which poets have challenged and perhaps redeemed
the kinds of degeneration of public discourse that Orwell described five
decades ago.
Please send 500 word abstracts or completed papers by September 15, 2001,
to
William Waddell
Dept. of English
St. John Fisher College
Rochester, NY 14618
e-mail: waddell@sjfc.edu
FAX: (716) 385-7311
All submissions will be acknowledged. Anyone may submit a proposal, but
all prospective presenters must be members of NEMLA by November 1, 2001.
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