Modernist Revolutions: Paradigms of the New and Circulations of the Word in American Poetry

Journées d’études internationales sur la poésie américaine moderne et contemporaine organisées par POETHIQUES (CAS, Axe 5) les 16 et 17 janvier à l’UTM.

Responsable scientifique : Clément OUDART
 

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON 20TH CENTURY U.S. POETRY

Modernist Revolutions :
Paradigms of the New and Circulations of the Word in American Poetry

16-17 January 2014
UNIVERSITÉ TOULOUSE II-LE MIRAIL
Maison de la Recherche, Salle D 29
 

The purpose of this conference is to revisit poetic modernism and its vicissitudes throughout a century of writing. Indeed from the New York Armory Show and the publication, arranged from London by Ezra Pound, of the first Imagist poems in Chicago’s Poetry magazine in 1913 to Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s “surge into twenty-first century poetry and poetics,” her latest installment in an open-ended 26-year project in 2013 (Surge : Drafts 96-114), the writing of innovative verse has gone through a bewildering sequence of movements, breaks, manifestoes and revolutions. To such an extent that one may wonder if the word revolution should not be understood literally, thus pointing to a global poetics spinning on itself at an angle, its inherent obliquity failing to prevent the perpetual return of the same, and the paradoxical establishment of a tradition of the new. Such debate about radical change is unavoidably haunted by Eugene Jolas and his “Revolution of the Word” transition issue of 1929, with his much-quoted essay fostering the literary craftsman’s use of a dismantled syntax, along with his disintegration of pre-existing words and fashioning of a new, multilingual tongue—the literary means, in his view, for an intercontinental revolution. The participants will tackle the double bind of innovative writing, the transnational circulations of revolutionary claims, and the migratory forms of the new in American poetry from H.D. to DuPlessis.

Keynotes :
Rachel BLAU DUPLESSIS
Cristanne MILLER

Bilingual Poetry Reading (DICKINSON COLLEGE, 16 January at 7 PM) :
Rachel BLAU DUPLESSIS
Abigail LANG
Elizabeth WILLIS

To see the full program of the conference, click on the document below:
PROGRAMME