Welcome to SAAS

Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"The Image and the Word"

PANEL 21

21) "Poetry between Pleasure and Protest: Theory and Practice"
Panel Chair: Thomas Austenfeld, University of Fribourg
E-mail: thomas.austenfeld@unifr.ch 

From Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams, from Phyllis Wheatley to Claudia Rankine, American poetry has negotiated its place between pleasure and protest, between aesthetic challenge and social relevance. While the New Critics championed self-sufficient works of art, another strain of American poetry that foregrounds social critique and engaged advocacy has continually been present in much of 20th- and 21st-century poetic production. Williams famously proposed to "reply to Greek and Latin with the bare hands" (Paterson). Protest poetry was in the vanguard of the labor movements of the 1930s as well as the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. The Cold War and the Vietnam War marked periods of intense poetic activity. Lately, Ann Keniston and Jeffrey Gray have identified the "Poetry of Engagement" as a new movement since 2001 which has brought forth poetic voices in response to new wars, environmental degradation, and social disintegration in the United States. This panel seeks to illuminate the theories and the poetological assumptions that undergird American protest poetry from World War I to the present. Papers will easily connect with the main topics of the conference, ranging from pictoriality to resistance to representations on the written page itself.

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Please submit all paper proposals directly to the Panel Chair using this form no later than October 15, 2018.

Panel Chairs will notify applicants of their acceptance/rejection no later than November 15, 2016.

For information on the Conference Venue see the Organizing Committee's website.

SAAS members, ASA members, and other scholars (not necessarily affiliated with any of these associations), are invited to submit proposals to the panel of their choice. Donwload this form, fill it out, and send it via email to the chair of your selected panel.

In order to present a paper, participants who are not SAAS, ASA, APEAA or HELAAS members will be required to pay a one year's membership fee (and enjoy the benefits for the following year) plus the conference fee.

Students have to become SAAS members (if they are not SAAS/ASA/APEEA/HELAAS members already) and pay 50 percent of the registration fee (60€ early bird/75€ late registration) if they wish to present a paper and/or attend the "Félix Martín" Doctoral Seminar.

Deadline: October 15, 2018

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.