“Asymmetrical Mimesis:
Cross-Genre/Cross-Cultural Poetics”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-
SESSION PROPOSAL/SUBMIT
BY SEPTEMBER 22, 2026
American Comparative
Literature Association
University of Houston
May 20–23, 2027
SUBMIT PROPOSAL here
Our colloquy will focus on innovative poetic, hybrid, and nonnarrative literary works and other artistic forms that work across genres, media, and languages. What brings them together is a concept of mimesis activated through the differences between complementary modes of representation. The seminar’s goal will thus be to bring together a breadth and depth of thinking about new possibilities of mimesis—ones that are not primarily concerned with the truth of representation or transparency of meaning but work transversally across modes of representation, which may be drawn from varying sources. Rather than seeking identity, these exemplary works are “asymmetrical” between modes of representation, offering a critical frame for their affective immediacy and interpretive productivity. A primary source of the asymmetry of representation is the tradition of jazz improvisation, from its origins in New Orleans (for example, Louis Armstrong’s solos on the Hot 5 and Hot 7 recordings) to avant-garde innovators like Anthony Braxton (For Alto) or the Rova Saxophone Quartet. Repetition and variation occur in relation to stated themes, but always asymmetrically; experimental African American writers who develop such forms of “telling it slant” are many, from Nathaniel Mackey, Tyrone Williams, and A.B. Spellman to Will Alexander and Renee Gladman. Establishing this usage illuminates numerous artistic practices in other genres and traditions: for instance, the importation of musical models in high modernism (Louis Zukofsky) or in Language writing drawing from the jazz tradition (Lyn Hejinian, Ted Pearson, Kit Robinson). How can mimesis occur asymmetrically between genres and cultures that are irreducible to identity? Radical acts of translation, from David Melnick’s homoerotic translation of Vergil in Men in Aïda to the translingual poetry of Oana Avasilichioaei and Uljana Wolf, also qualify.
Writers working with improvisation as asymmetrical include Carla Harryman, Steve Benson, Julie Patton, Edwin Torres, and the dramaturgs of Poets Theater: Kevin Killian, Rodrigo Toscano, and Tony Torn, where identity is always constructed and unstable. Barrett Watten’s sampling of Cocteau’s Orphée, creating an asymmetry between present meanings and dispersed origins, is another example; as would be Robert Fitterman’s refunctioning of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; and giovanni singleton’s work in mesostics, which rethink the improvisational impulse of John Cage’s chance operations. The seminar would welcome theoretical contributions that rethink the concept of mimesis, after Roger Caillois and Theodor W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson and Michael Taussig, elucidated by aesthetic examples.
Notes and links
Submit proposals to ACLA by Tuesday, September 22, 2027: here
List of seminars: here; seminar abstract: hereFor more information contact the organizers:
Barrett Watten barrett.watten@gmail.com
Lauri Scheyer lramey@exchange.calstatela.edu
giovanni singleton gsingle2@calstatela.eduImage: Man Ray, Explosante-Fixe, 1934; Pierre Boulez, score for Explosante-Fixe, 1971.
