Category: Uncategorized

Flying through the ’Thirties

a one-day symposium on air travel and

interwar Britain

16 April 2016

The Aerodrome Hotel

Croydon Airport

London

In his seminal British Writers of the Thirties, Valentine Cunningham notes the ‘airmindedness’ of the decade; this one-day symposium aims at exploring the role held by flying in interwar Britain—actual, textual, material, cultural.

Held at Croydon Airport, a key site for aviation in interwar Britain, the conference will explore the texts and contexts that help to examine the impact of air travel on art, literature, film, space, perception and production.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

–       The imagery of flight in poetry, prose, painting.

–       ‘Airmindedness’

–       Flights taken by individual authors, explorers, adventurers.

–       ‘Airmen’, symbolic and real.

–       Travel literature and its response to flight.

–       The threat and reality of aerial bombardment.

–       Airport architectures.

–       Films featuring flying.

–       The luggage and logistics of air travel.

Please send a maximum 250-word proposal by

11 January 2016 to

flyingthroughthethirties@gmail.com

Conference organisers:

Dr Luke Seaber (UCL)

Dr Michael McCluskey (UCL)

Dr Amara Thornton (UCL)

Dr Debbie Challis (Croydon Airport Society)

‘As you all know, the greatest feat, the most stupendous risk in human history is being undertaken this evening by a gentleman who prefers to remain known simply as the Pilot.  His ambition is no less than to reach the very heart of Reality.’

                                                                                   W.H. Auden, The Dance of Death (1933)

Poetic Measures: Variable measure for the fixed

University of York, 1-2 July 2016

poeticmeasures@gmail.com

https://poeticmeasures.wordpress.com/ 

How do we measure poetry? The words ‘measure’ and ‘meter’, with their shared etymological origin in the Greek metron,have a long history of being used synonymously. When William Carlos Williams wrote that ‘[t]he key to modern poetry is measure, which must reflect the flux of modern life’, however, he proposed ‘measure’ as an alternative to the metrical foot in response to ‘the flux of modern life’ that demanded measures of more fluid and unstable permutations.

The ‘formless spawning fury’ of ‘this filthy modern tide’ compels W.B. Yeats in his poem ‘The Statues’ to search alternative measures from other art forms. Describing ‘the lineaments of a plummet-measured face’, the poem aligns itself formally with solidity and precision of sculpture, and rearticulates measurement in terms of spatial, rather than temporal, co-ordinates. Giorgio Agamben, for one, measured the ‘lineaments’ of a poem’s form by the tension between the line break and the sentence to define the lyric poem, a tension Jorie Graham described as ‘the pull from the end, the suction towards closure, and the voice trying (quite desperately in spots) to find forms of delay, digression, side-motions which are not entirely dependent for their effectiveness on that sense-of-the-ending, that stark desire’. These ‘side-motions’ of a poem’s lineation resist the linearity of the sentence, using ‘forms of delay’ not to heighten suspense, but to bypass conventional expectations of closure.

Although Eliot, in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, may have claimed that poetry can only be ‘measured’ against the ‘standards of the past’, his contention has to accommodate increasingly diverse and contested versions of both the past and the present. We thus welcome papers analysing the disparate measures modern poetry takes in a period of accelerated change, but also in a period symptomizing pervasive continuities in structures of privilege: papers investigating how we might count out poetry, but also how ‘measured language’ and its different uses might make poetry count. 

Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to

• form and genre
• scale in poetry
• brevity and length
• poetic sequences

• units of measurement in poetry
• form, proportion and balance
• the immeasurable and/or non-measurable in poetry
• beginnings and ends
• poetry and other art forms: music, visual arts and/or craft; ekphrasis
• poetry and architecture
• poetry and mathematics
• modernism and canon formation; periodization

Please send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers or panel proposals by 1^st February 2016 to poeticmeasures@gmail.com, and a separate biography of no more than 100 words. The biography should be written in the third person. Please attach the biography and abstract as two separate Word documents.

Poetic Measures_CFP

Poetic Measures Poster

The T. S. Eliot Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2016 annual conference of the American Literature Association, May 26-29, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. 

Please send proposals (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Professor Emerita Nancy K. Gish (nancy.gish@maine.edu.) Submissions must be received no later than January 15, 2016.

For information on the ALA and its 2016 meeting, please see the ALA website at www.americanliteratureassociation.org

Dear Colleagues,

Proposals are invited for the international conference to be held at Birkbeck, University of London, on 8-9 July 2016, on Forgotten Geographies in the Fin de Siècle, 1880-1920. The deadline for abstracts is 20 December. Please find attached the CFP and visit the webpage for more info:

https://forgottengeographies.wordpress.com/

The H.D. International Society is sponsoring a panel at the American Literature Association conference, May 26-29, 2016, at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, CA. The call for paper proposals is open ended, although we are particularly interested in projects that take advantage of the recent availability of H.D.’s later memoir writing and fiction. Please send a brief paper proposal (250 words) along with a 1 paragraph bio to Rebecca Walsh, rawalsh@ncsu.edu, no later than January 26, 2016.

Here is a link to the ALA site for more information about the upcoming convention: http://alaconf.org/

Rebecca Walsh and Celena Kusch, co-chairs, The H.D. International Society