Friday, April 19, 2013

Speaking on Self-naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography at the SAES conference in MAY

I am very excited to be speaking at the SAES conference in MAY 2013 as part of the Poetry and Poetics workshop. Seems nicely timed as they have invited Lisa Robertson as the guest of honor this year. Here is the complete info + my abstract below. Hope to see you there! 

SAES 17-19 May 2013 :  

 http://saes2013.u-bourgogne.fr/programme.html

Theme "naming"

ATELIER 14 - POETES ET POESIE

Attention, ouverture dans une nouvelle fenêtre.Chaired by Penelope Galey (Valenciennes), Hélène Goethals (Toulouse 2)

Vendredi le 17 mai 2013 : 14.30-16.30



14.30-15.15. Penelope GALEY-SACKS (Valenciennes): "The Sounding of the Sonnet: between Cratylus and de Saussure"

15.15-16.00. Taïna TUKHUNEN (Versailles St. Quentin): "'In the picture I have of you': Sylvia Plath's poetic project to name 'Daddy'"

16.00-16.30. Pause.

16.30-17.15. Jennifer K DICK (Université de Haute Alsace): "Self-Naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography"

17.15-18.00. Françoise BARBE-PETIT (Paris):  "Emily Dickinson: entre nommer et  re-nommée, l'espace d'une vie"



Samedi le 18 mai 2013 : 09.00-12.15



09.00-09.45. Sara GREAVES (Aix-Marseille): "Names and addresses in Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis Mac Neice"

09.45-10.30. Yvonne REDDICK (Warwick): "Appellations dans Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve d’Yves Bonnefoy, traduit par Ted Hughes"

10.30-10.45. Pause.

10.45-11.30. David TEN EYCK (Nancy): "Word and world in contemporary British poetry" 

11.30-12.15. Helen GOETHALS (Toulouse 2): "Not naming but shaming: poetry and politics in Cyprus 1953-55"

Here below is the abstract of my talk. I was seriously optimistic about what I could accomplish in my presentation in proposing this: This will be a nice start of a critical focus for me on these works I have spent so long reading and in some cases teaching:

Self-Naming in Postmodern Poetic Autobiography

Jennifer K Dick

MdC, Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse

Labo de recherche : ILLE, membre de SAES


For this 2013 edition of the SAES conference (in the Friday 17 May at 14h30 session in Dijon, France) I propose to explore the way the limits of the name “poetry” are stretched and fragmented as relates to genre in the currently very fashionable ‘postmodern poetic autobiography’. Evident late 20th and early 21st century practitioners of this mode will be discussed in brief based on a more in-depth processed look at their theoretic and poetic predecessors--Lyn Hejinian, Kathleen Fraser, Wallace Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Frank O'Hara, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim and Carla Harryman-- so as to hear echos in works including those by Joan Retallack (ie: Memnoir), Laura Mullen (After I was Dead, or Murmur), Bhanu Kapil (Incubation: A Space for Monsters, and Schizophrene), Eleni Sikelianos (Body Clock, and The Book of Jon) or Anne Carson (Anthropology of Water, or Nox and also Autobiograhy of Red). How these fragmented and collaged practices of writing the self (and personal past) have changed from their precursors will require comparisons and contrasts with techniques originating in My Life by Lyn Hejinian as well as her reflections in her essays in "The Language of Inquiry", and the writings of Kathleen Fraser in translating the unspeakable: Poetry and Innovative Necessity. Much of the theoretical and practical poetic debates about writing of the self hit their peak during the confessionalist movement, thus brief contrasts to Lowell, Rich, Sexton, Plath, and late confessionalist Louise Gluck will be mentioned. What will be seen is that these "autobiographies" or "memoirs" are looking to flatten the binary space between self and other, poetry and prose, personal history and History itself. I will conclude with a visual glimpse of the combinatory history and autobiography work by Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim in extracts from their works, and ask the question--so, where are we going to now? If the I is (not) the I?
To see the many other SAES ATELIERS that are presenting at this conference: http://saes2013.u-bourgogne.fr/ateliers.html to read info also on special keynote event with LISA ROBERTSON, go to:  http://saes2013.u-bourgogne.fr/toute-lactualite/actualites-internes/58-keynote-speaker-lisa-robertson.html

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