Panel Chair:
Viorica Patea Birk (Universidad de Salamanca)
vioricap@usal.es
"Water, is taught by thirst.
Land--by the Oceans passed."
(Emily Dickinson)
"And the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure"
"Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is us, it is in the fishes"
(Sylvia Plath)
"I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable"
(T. S. Eliot)
"'Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature."
(Robert Frost)
According to the French philosopher of the imaginary, Gaston Bachelard, the realm of imagination is dominated by four elements: water, air, fire and earth. Very often water is represented as a being endowed with body, soul and voice. Water is associated with symbolic mirrors, dreams, quests, rites of passage, the deluge and the wasteland. Water extends an invitation to die, dream, and be born anew. It can be terrifying, regenerating and purifying. The Heraclitean mobility of water in its incessant change typifies human destiny and the passage of time. Water is seminal, full of mysteries. For the historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, water is the fons et origo of existence. It marks the beginning and end of historical or cosmic cycles. Immersion in water implies a regression into the preformal, a reintegration into the undifferentiated modality of preexistence. It stands for the matrix of all possibilities and embodies the very substance of death and life. The contemplation of water brings the revelation of one's own identity and duality, of cosmic and individual Narcissism. Water is associated with latencies, the germinal and virtual dimensions of existence. Water is dual: it typifies substantial nothingness as well as the elixir of life. Waters have a fertilizing effect. They fecundate earth, women, animals, vegetation. This panel invites papers that reexamine the literary, mythological, symbolist and psychological implications of the poetics of water in American Poetry.
Suggested topics:
- Symbolism, myth, images, analyses of poetic gestures, voyages, quests, epiphanies, immortal or seasonal brooks, rivers, lakes, wells, seas in American poetry
- Drowning and rebirth, dissolution and regeneration motifs,
- Looking into waters, transparent and troubled waters
- Mirrors, reflections, night, dreams, doubles and many other related topics are welcome.