Subject: SPOON-ANN: Conference - The Future of Form: Reading On & Off the Page
Date: Mon, 27 Nov 2000 02:51:56 -0500


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THE FUTURE OF FORM: READING ON AND OFF THE PAGE

The University of Virginia's
English Graduate Conference 2001
Charlottesville, Virginia

Featuring keynote speakers John Hollander (Yale) and
Marjorie Perloff (Stanford)

As we enter a new century of literary study, we may find
ourselves asking what Gauguin asked 100 years ago:  "Where
do we come from?  What are we?  Where are we going?"
Shifts in literary methodology over the last thirty years
have been edifying and provocative, even as the pace of
these changes has been dizzying.  New historicism, cultural
studies, feminist studies, postcolonial theories, queer
studies, identity studies -- these and other movements have
vastly improved our understanding of literature in context.
While these movements sought to distinguish themselves from
New Critical assumptions and values, many of their
achievements came not through a denial of formalist
techniques, but through new and innovative ways of
"reading," both on and off the page -- ways of reading
which focused upon the critical relationship between the
literary object and its context.

The theme of the 2001 English Graduate Conference at the
University of Virginia is designed to provoke discussion of
these issues.  We are soliciting papers that will further a
productive dialogue on the future of form (and its complex
history) through discussions of literary, cultural, and
theoretical texts.

The conference will be held March 2 and 3, 2001.  We are
happy to announce two keynote speakers: John Hollander of
Yale, the well-known critic and poet who has written
authoritatively on the history of poetic form and its
20th-century transformations; and Marjorie Perloff of
Stanford, arguably our most important critic of modern and
postmodern poetry.  (The subtitle of our conference pays
homage to her _Poetry On and Off the Page_ [1998].)  Two
related events will be of interest: Mr. Hollander will read
his own poetry on the evening of Friday, March 2; and on
Saturday, March 3, Ms. Perloff and Mr. Hollander will join
in a panel discussion with UVA professors Stephen Cushman
and Michael Levenson.

Please send one-page abstracts by January 1 to both
djr4r-AT-virginia.edu and jfp3r-AT-virginia.edu.  We also welcome
panel proposals; these should include a cover sheet that
discusses the theme of the panel and abstracts for each of
the papers.  Possible topics include:

The Future of Form:  New Directions in Formal Practice
Poetics in a New Century
Emergent Genres and Form: Film, Video, Music, Performance
Subversive Forms: Race, Gender, Writing
Bodily Formations
Queer Forms
Close Reading in the Classroom
Reading Audience: Stage, Print, Beyond
Novel Forms
The Formation(s) of Modernity
Formal Self-Fashioning
Humanities Computing: Reforming the Text
The End(s) of Prosody



Damian Rollison
Department of English/
Institute for Advanced Technology
 in the Humanities
University of Virginia
djr4r-AT-virginia.edu