Entries tagged with conferences
January 19, 2026
“Avant-Garde Poetics of the Zone:
Interchange, Transposition, Translation”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY JANUARY 30 (CONFERENCE DEADLINE FEBRUARY 1)
European Network for Avant-Garde
and Modernism Studies (EAM)
10th Annual Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
2–4 September 2026 /flyer here … More
August 27, 2025
“Particularity, Nonnarrative, and Global Poetics:
Critical Regions of Cultural Transmission”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY OCTOBER 2, 12:00 P.M. PST
American Comparative Literature Association
Palais des congrès de Montréal
February 26–March 1, 2026 /submit proposal here … More
June 9, 2025
In 2013, I took the stage at a session of the Modern Language Association in Boston, on a panel hosted by the Marxist scholar Jason Baskin on “Marxism and Modernist Studies.” My hope was to extend an argument I raised about Language writing and neoliberalism at the 2008 Orono Conference to an account of modernist poetics—expatriate poet Eugene Jolas’s editing of transition magazine in the 20s and 30s. But I also wanted to start a dialogue, even a polemic, with the new school of Marxist poet-critics I had encountered there: Joshua Clover, Christopher Nealon, and Ruth Jennison. With Clover’s recent, untimely death, various tributes and memories have circulated, for example this Orono photo by Patrick Pritchett. I had some memories of Clover too, some of them benign and some less so, which when I mentioned them led to a considerable reaction and disclosure of an antagonistic post mentioning me, linked here. The link to Clover’s writing online led to the “blog” published in 2019 (see here for full discussion). It turns out Clover had published an anonymous hit piece on the “blog,” which up until then I could not place or interpret. The scene he describes, it turns out, was the session at MLA Boston in 2013. The main argument of my paper has since been published (see here), but without the opening polemic with Clover, Nealon, and Jennison. To understand, and refute, Clover’s anonymous “blog” post as participating in the larger group take-down of my work and person, it is necessary to return to the traumatic scene itself, which Clover describes in these terms: … More
November 16, 2024
Surrealism in Paris
October 2024
Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years, should not be considered as extant except in the a priori nonspecialization of its effort. I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on. —André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932; English trans. 1990)
In the spirit of a thought experiment, I offer my time spent in Paris attending the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference on Surrealism, one week before the American election, as charged with the co-presence of dream and reality. The first reality was Paris itself as elective site of a transformative moment—the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Being in Paris at that time, as it condenses all time passing between that moment and the present, had the feeling of co-presence of many moments all aware of each other and on the same level though not directly in contact. The crowds going about their business under a gray sky, during a school holiday where there was some release of tension and many children and families on the street, were not in direct contact with us streaming in cab or Uber to specific destinations, for instance the conference venue at American University Paris (AUP). Those presenting in multiple rooms, with visual aids and in three languages, were not aware of the cabs or Ubers picking passengers up and dropping them off. Just so, the meticulously curated book display of surrealism was not aware of the content delivered above. The array of editions, including many facsimiles of original texts, had a remote and uncanny feeling, as with the difference between books being opened and closed. The conference, as site for special knowledge (of “specialists in revolt”), was removed from the “nonspecialization” of lifeworld unaware of it outside. … More
March 13, 2024
“Discrepant Analogy:
Immanent Transpositions of Surrealism”
CALL FOR PAPERS/SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET
“Surréalismes Paris 2024
6th Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)
October 28–30, 2024 / pdf here … More
March 3, 2024
“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET
“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here … More
January 5, 2024
A Poetics of Encounter:
Dialectic of Outside with the Beats
Read at “Can We Teach the Beat Generation?”
Discussion organized by Erik Mortenson and Tony Triglio
Session 228, 5 January 2024, 10:15–11:30 AM, Loews 3rd Fl.
Modern Language Association, Philadelphia“The transmission of poetry is a passion unlike any other.”
“I too have started a riot in the academy.”
In this note, I want to call up certain moments of encounter that were, as with the visual image of a “diamond thunderbolt” or dorje, immediate, double-faced, and bivalent: outward in the transmission of poetry, from the Beats or New Americans and others; and inward, toward self-formation and a long process of professionalizing within the Academy. In charting such a poetics of encounter, I draw from my presentations at the “decades” poetry conferences at University of Maine, Orono, in the 90s and 00s that I, in the company of a shifting assemblage of poet/critics, took part in. I connect these moments to Steven Belletto’s genealogy of three early moments of encounter between Beats and the Academy: Jack Kerouac’s intervention at a symposium sponsored by Brandeis University in New York, 1958; Diana Trilling’s reaction to Allen Ginsberg’s being given an “unofficial” reading at Columbia, that same year; and Gregory Corso’s rebuttal to a symposium on the Beats in Wagner Literary Review, 1959. These are part of series of breakthrough moments: the Gallery 6 reading, San Francisco, 1955; Ginsberg’s appearance in Time magazine, 1959; the Vancouver Poetry Conference, 1963; the Berkeley Poetry Conference, 1965. What makes the first three definitively “Beat” aligns with two concepts from my essay on Michael McClure: antagonism and holism. In challenging the Academy’s scholastic pedagogy—I often thought of the English Department in the 60s or 70s as a kind of monastery, corridors filled with the brethren nodding to each other under hooded robes—the Beats took a position Outside that was, at the same time, subject to everything—“Is there a world?,” Kerouac asked; “Man does not exist,” opined Corso. The nature of this encounter between an unregulated Outside and a self-regulating Inside points to a dialectic of the Academy whose stakes are not only literary, pointing toward our volume’s significance not only for Literary but University Studies. … More
September 1, 2023
SESSION PROPOSAL WITHDRAWN
Poetry, Translation, and Crisis:
From the Post-Soviet Moment
to War and Emigration
American Comparative Literature Association
Montréal, 14–17 March 2024
Due to the difficult circumstances of the global present,
the organizers have canceled this session proposal.
Stay tuned for plans for a virtual colloquy in 2024.
In 1989 and 1990, eight American avant-garde poets traveled to then-Leningrad to meet with Soviet counterparts, experimental poets working under quasi-nonofficial conditions during late Perestroika. These meetings followed extensive travel and translation activities in the 1980s. Among then-Soviets, the poetic schools of “metarealism” and “conceptualism” were well represented—by poets such as Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parshchikov, Nadezhda Kondakova, Ivan Zhdanov, Ilya Kutik, Nina Iskrenko, Dmitrii Prigov, and Lev Rubinshtein. These events and developing contacts led to the publication of the collectively authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union and a flurry of translations. Three decades later, the dialogue between American poets and poets of the former Soviet territory, including both Russia and Ukraine, has continued. A comprehensive anthology of American experimental poetry, Ot “Chiornoi gori” do “Yazikovo picmo” (From Black Mountain to Language Writing), appeared from NLO in late 2022, with a publication event in Moscow and subsequent online reading. Other translations are imminent or postponed under the present circumstances, while interest in and translation of two generations of poets, now disrupted by war and emigration, continues. This session solicits contributions on past and on-going translinguistic, transcultural projects from both periods: the post-Soviet moment and now. What “cultural work” is being undertaken and advanced in these works of translation and affiliation, crossing over global spaces of conflict and establishing global poetic networks? The session language will be mainly in English, but contributions in Slavic languages are encouraged, and hopefully English translations can be arranged.
March 14, 2023
Diasporic Avant-Gardes Noir: Blackness, Innovation, Futurity
American Comparative Literature Association
Sheraton Hotel, Chicago, 17–19 March 2023
Register for Zoom link: http://bit.ly/3YW8A4w
Session 1 Friday, March 17, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7
Lauri Scheyer, “Jitterbugging the World: Calvin C. Hernton’s Diasporic
Avant-Garde and Anti-Movement Communitarianism”
Matthew Johnston, “N.H. Pritchard’s Avant-Pastoral”
Tyrone Williams, “Autobiography of a Middle Name”
Christopher Winks, “Downward Path, Inward Path: The Hermetic Poetics
of Magloire-Saint-Aude”
Session 2 Saturday, March 18, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7
Andrew Haas, “Black Power’s Free Improvisation and Its Afterimage
in Tongo Eisen-Martin”
Barrett Watten, “Horizons of Complexity: The Ends of Form in Anthony
Braxton and Language Writing”
Bryant Brown, Jr., “Architectural Non Sequiturs: Renee Gladman’s
Plans for Sentences”
Joseph Shafer, “Stanley Whitney: Opposition, Dramatic Struggle &
Literary Rhythm”
Session 3 Sunday, March 19, 8:30–10:15 AM, Executive Suite 7
Noah Hansen, “The Poetics of Garveyism: Situating Garveyite Poetry
in Space and Time”
Anthony Joseph, “Performance: Sonnets for Albert and the Frequency
of Magic”
Duriel E. Harris, “Re/Sounding Serious Play: Notes on Black Listening
with/through avery r young’s ‘groun(d)’”
avery young, “rock | paper | skittles: groun(d) as soun(d) monument
fo(r) trayvon martin”
Tracie Morris, “Black Hypertonality and the Performative Utterance”
Lauri Scheyer, British and American Poetry Research Center,
Hunan Normal University
Duriel E. Harris, English, Illinois State University
Tracie Morris, Writers Workshop, University of Iowa
Barrett Watten, English, Wayne State University
Image: AACM circa 1968: group photo in Wadsworth Jarrell’s back yard, Chicago. [Musicians t/k[ From George E. Lewis, A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (Chicago: U Chicago P, 2008).
February 20, 2023
Questions of Value: Rethinking the Discourse
of Valuation in Literature and Art
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
Saturday 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM Room: Humanities 109
Chair: Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
“Questions of Value: Poetics as Living Labor
and the Specter of Past Work”
David Kellogg, Coastal Carolina University
“Literary Values after the End of Curation:
Broadening the Scope, Limiting the Claims”
Tyrone Williams, University at Buffalo
“’Bessie, Bop or Bach’: Iconoclasm, Coterie, and/or
Communalism in Montage of a Dream Deferred”
Adeena Karasick, Pratt Institute
“In the Value of the Shadow of. . . : Questions of
Value in 21st Century Art and Literature” … More
