The 49th NeMLA Annual Convention
April 12-15, 2018 - Pittsburgh, PA
Call for Papers for the Panel: 'Spaces of Harmony and Fragmentation in post-Romantic and Modernist Poetry'
The verse collection
Les Fleurs du Mal, first published in 1857 by the French poet Charles Baudelaire, has been widely recognised as a turning point in modern poetry. While preserving, on the one hand, the Romantic notion of harmony, unity, and ‘universal
analogy’ associated with the natural landscape, Baudelaire on the other hand introduced into poetry images of fragmentation and multiplicity linked to the representation of the modern urban metropolis. In Baudelaire’s wake, many post-Romantic and Modernist
poets incorporated into their aesthetics a dialectic tension between spaces of ‘harmony’ – usually connected, nostalgically or ironically, to a past tradition perceived as irredeemably threatened or inherently obsolete – and spaces of fragmentation, depersonalisation,
and modernity that coincide with the advancements of science and progress.
This panel examines the various spaces of harmony and fragmentation found in post-Romantic and Modernist poetry in any language, whereby the concepts of harmony and fragmentation might be seen in open opposition, involving the conflict between past and
present values/notions/literary or linguistic norms, or in relation between each other.
We welcome submissions on, but not limited to, the following types of spaces:
·
contemporary landscapes/sceneries, such as T.S. Eliot’s poetic ‘fragments’ of an infernal London as described in
The Waste Land, or F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist fragmented syntax used to depict the Battle of Adrianople in
Zang Tumb Tumb;
·
historic places, such as W.B. Yeats’ vision of the harmonious city of Byzantium in which the soul and the body of the poet unite into ‘the artifice of eternity’, in ‘Sailing to Byzantium’;
·
fictional/abstract landscapes, such as Arthur Rimbaud’s images from
opéras-comiques that are harmoniously combined with descriptions of real sights in ‘Scènes’, as well as in other poems of the
Illuminations.
Please submit abstracts of up to 300 words for papers of 15-20 minutes, along with a short bio, through the NeMLA submission site by September 30th, 2017: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/16781
For more information, please contact Alessandro Cabiati at [log in to unmask]
or visit https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html
