Call for Papers for Special Session
Modern Language Association Convention
Philadelphia, 27-30, December 2004
THE POETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN POSTWAR POETRY
This panel will address the ambivalent fascination with dailiness and "the
ordinary" in postwar poetry (and the aesthetic and political implications
of that preoccupation), in the context of theories of everyday life from
literary theory, cultural studies, sociology, and philosophy. (Papers
could draw on, for example, work by figures like Michel de Certeau, Henri
Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Situationism, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin,
Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein, William James, John Dewey, Emerson, or
others). In general, I welcome papers that analyze how and why postwar
poetry (especially, but not exclusively, avant-garde or experimental
writing) invents new forms as it attempts to conceptualize and represent
the experience of everyday life in modernity. Issues and topics might
include:
-- poetic strategies for recovering and representing the quotidian or the
ordinary (is the goal to transform and transcend the drab, mundane events
and things of everyday life? to defamiliarize them? to capture them as
they are?)
-- the relationship between poetry and dailiness (for example: the writing
of daily poems, the use of journals, diaristic writing, the serial poem,
the ready-made, and found language, and other experiments in attending to
the everyday)
-- poetry and the politics of everyday life -- oppression, alienation, and
paralyzing routine vs. resistance, subversion, and autonomy
-- the ways in which gender, race, sexual orientation, and/or class
profoundly inflect how one conceives of and writes about "everyday life"
(and such categories as the domestic, work and leisure, urban experience)
-- the everyday in relation to the culture of consumption, commodities, and
capitalism
-- the notion of the poet as flaneur
-- the relations between the everyday and the popular
-- questions about repetition, habit, banality, and boredom and their
relation to poetry and poetics.
Send abstracts by March 19 (extended deadline) to
Andrew Epstein
<mailto:aepstein@english.fsu.edu>aepstein@english.fsu.edu
Andrew Epstein
Assistant Professor
English Department
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580
850-644-8110
aepstein@english.fsu.edu
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