Call for papers for the following panel at NEMLA's annual convention,
Boston, March 6-9, 2003:
"The New 'Sixty-year-old smiling public man': Perspectives on the Art and
Career of Seamus Heaney"
Now that Heaney has reached an eminence matched to Yeats's well-known,
self-deprecating description, this panel welcomes examinations of the shape,
the distinction(s), the challenge(s), and/or the implications of his career.
Seamus Heaney--Nobel laureate, poet, editor, anthologist, critic, professor,
cosmopolitan artist and intellectual--occupies a pre-eminent place among
poets writing in English. In the course of roughly forty years of "[lying]
down in the word-hoard" ("North," 1975), Heaney has passed through, often
several times, some of the most highly charged intersections of cultural
energy we know. Born to his work in a land where the poet's mantle weighs
particularly heavily on the shoulders, Heaney has crafted poetry that is by
turns personal, national, and international in focus. He has used the
individual lyric voice to claim and explore a share in public hopes and
griefs and devotions. He has fashioned a contemporary idiom that reaches
far beyond the local, yet remains at ease with an ancestral legacy of
language handled like sturdy, finely crafted and balanced tools, well-worn
and adapted to their uses.
What have been the defining moments of this extraordinary career--with
respect to craft, to vision, or even merely to reception? What can Heaney's
example tell us about the possibilities of poetry in our time? Has Heaney
been over-praised, or made to serve the interests of some narrow literary
establishment? If so, what readings--or misreadings--of his work and
sensibility have made that possible, and how has an authentic element in the
poetry escaped, if it has? "Now you're supposed to be / An educated man,"
his doomed character in "Casualty" challenges (1979). "Puzzle me / The
right answer to that one."
The purpose of this panel is to explore these questions and, I hope,
others-to take stock of a rich and vigorous body of work from a variety of
perspectives.
Deadline for submission of one-page proposals or completed papers is
September 15, 2002. Proposals are welcome from anyone, but all presenters
must be members of NEMLA and registered for the convention by December 1,
2002.
Send electronic proposals and queries to waddell@sjfc.edu
Or send hard-copy material to
William Waddell
Department of English
St. John Fisher College
Rochester, NY 14618
(585) 385-8209
on is required on your part.
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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