CFP: American Modernist Poetry and the Question of the Foreign (4/28/05; MSA, 11/3/05-11/6/05)

Modernist Studies Assocation
November 3 - 6, 2005
Chicago, IL
http://www.luc.edu/msachicago/
 
Call for papers for the following panel:
 
"Crossing the Line: American Modernist Poetry and the Question of the Foreign"
 
Since the interwar period, modernist and late modernist poets were forced to contend with the problem of crossing lines, insofar as "the line" figures both as a poetic unit and as a trope that represents any of a variety of limits (the line of difficulty that complicates communicability; the line that secures, articulates, and contains the consensus of community and political parties; and, most importantly, the border-lines that are patrolled to secure a nation's integrity). Through the embrasure of the foreign, though, poetries of the period sought to vex the poetic line and to cross any of a number of figural lines in order to rearticulate "the American" through a process of estrangement. In doing so, these poetries generated a defamiliarization that at one and the same time brings readers and writers alike into new senses of "home," "the familiar," and "family."
 
This panel will feature papers that focus specifically on the problem of the line, as it figures in modernist poetry's disruptions and reconstructions of nationalist discourses and ideologies. Do modernist revolutions in the poetic line reflect or seek to affect the political crises surrounding other lines--such as national borders--in late modernity? How does modernist poetry call upon or use the foreign in order to challenge the notion of the impossibility of exceeding cultural limits, of abiding by a supposedly desirable national containment or consensus? Does the border between poetic and political ontologies become permeable through representative strategies that oppose simple reductionist formulae of identity and difference, self and other, foreign and familiar?
 
We solicit papers that explicitly explore theoretical and philosophical approaches to author-specific poetries and poetics, perhaps engaging postcolonial theory, recent continental post-sovereign and post-national philosophies (such as those of Agamben, Derrida, Hardt and Negri, Virno), theories of gender and sexuality, theories of race and nation. We especially welcome papers that use modernist poetries and poetics as means of thinking through (or as means of exposing the limits of thinking through) contemporary crises revolving around such large concepts/constructs as nation, identity, globalization, internationalism, transnationalism.
 
Please send an abstract (no more than 500 words) and a brief cv by April 28 to:
Eric Keenaghan (ekeenaghan_at_albany.edu)
or
Josephine Park (jnpark3_at_english.upenn.edu)
    
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Received on Sun Apr 17 2005 - 08:06:23 EDT