Peer seminar with Jahan Ramazani – TS Eliot Society (Rapallo, June 2016)

2016 T. S. Eliot Society Meeting

Rapallo, Italy, June 17-21

ADDITIONAL PEER SEMINAR ANNOUNCED

Peer Seminars

The Society will sponsor two peer seminars, led by Ronald Schuchard and Jahan Ramazani.  Participants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 pp) on the topic of the seminar by June 1, 2016 for discussion at a two-hour meeting on the first day of our conference, Friday, June 17.  Membership in the peer seminars is limited to twelve in each, on a first-come, first-serve basis. Please enroll by April 15, by sending an email with the subject line “peer seminar” to tseliotsociety@gmail.com with your contact information. No paper or proposal is required to enroll.

Seminar II: T. S. Eliot and the Global

Jahan Ramazani

This seminar invites papers that explore the transnational range, dynamics, and subsequent influences of T. S. Eliot’s poetry. Although Eliot has often been considered either canonically English or quintessentially American, we will examine his poetry’s overflowing of national borders, its global horizons and reach. Possible topics for exploration include:

• how, why, and to what extent his poems traverse a variety of literary and cultural traditions, as well as multiple geographies, languages, and religions;
• the meaning and significance of his appropriation of East Asian cultural materials in The Waste Land,Four Quartets, and elsewhere;
• the interrelations between the local and the foreign or even planetary in his work;
• Eliot’s influence on poets from the global South, as well as other countries of the global North.

Participants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 pp) on the topic of the seminar by June 1, 2016 for discussion at a two-hour meeting on the first day of our conference, Friday, June 17.  Membership in the peer seminars is limited to twelve in each, on a first-come, first-serve basis. Please enroll by April 15, by sending an email with the subject line “peer seminar” to tseliotsociety@gmail.com with your contact information. No paper or proposal is required to enroll.

Jahan Ramazani

Jahan Ramazani returns to the Society this year after giving the 2013 T. S. Eliot Society Memorial Lecture on “T. S. Eliot, Poetry, and Prayer.” He is University Professor and Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia and, most recently, author of Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres. His A Transnational Poetics (2009) won the 2011 Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association, awarded for the best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010. Previous books include The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (2001); Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime (1990). He edited the most recent edition of the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry (2003) and, with Jon Stallworthy, The Twentieth Century and After in the Norton Anthology of English Literature (2006, 2012). He is also an associate editor of the new Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (2012). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Virginia’s highest honor.

For information about Ron Schuchard’s seminar on “Eliot’s Prose,” and for the remainder of the CFP, please visit our website (http://www.luc.edu/eliot/activities.htm).