How
to Read. What to Do: The Future of Poetry Criticism
Friday, March 3 - Saturday, March 4, 2006
Is there such a thing as poetry criticism?
Successive waves of theory have worn the sharp edges from most attempts
to delineate the genre of lyric, to distinguish poetic from ordinary
language, or to describe poetry as a special place where the structure
and operation of language reveal themselves. At present, literary
criticism tends to regard “poetry” less as a singular practice, and
more as a name for a changeable set of desires and cultural ambitions.
But despite the particularizing tendencies of our historicist
criticism, there remain critics of poetry who continue to read and to
write about poems as though they were part of a single tradition. How
to Read. What to Do: The Future of Poetry Criticism
gathers together critics to make conscious sense of our common-sense
practices of reading. Working closely with poems across
traditions, periods and languages, we will examine the practical
intuition that “poetry is a whole” and imagine ways in which it
might be considered so.
PARTICIPANTS:
Jennifer Ashton, University of
Illinois at Chicago
Brett Bourbon, Stanford University
Steve Burt, Macalester College
Jeff Dolven, Princeton University
Oren Izenberg, University of Chicago
Maureen McLane, Harvard University
Mark Payne, University of Chicago
Jennifer Scappettone, University of
Chicago
Gabrielle Starr, New York University
SCHEDULE:
Friday, March 3, 2006
Smart Museum of Art
5550 S. Greenwood Avenue
Map
5:00pm Poetry Reading:
Steve Burt, Jeff Dolven, Maureen
McLane, Jennifer Scappettone
6:00pm Reception
Saturday, March 4, 2006
The Franke Institute
for the Humanities
Joseph Regenstein Library
1100 East 57th
Street, JRL S-118
Map
9:00am Breakfast
10:00am Panel 1:
Brett Bourbon, Stanford University
"The Accident and Substance in
Reading Modern Poetry: a preface for reading the poetry of Wallace
Stevens"
Gabrielle Starr, New York University
“Poetic Subjects: Close Reading,
Subjective Response, and the Tools of Cognitive Science”
Mark Payne, University of Chicago
“Ideas
in Lyric Communication:
Pindar and Celan”
12:00pm Lunch
1:00pm Panel 2:
Jeff Dolven, Princeton University
“Communities
of Style”
Oren Izenberg, University of Chicago
“We Are Reading: Collective
Intentions Toward Poetry”
Maureen McLane, Harvard University
“Romanticism, or, Now: Learning
to Read in Postmodern”
3:00pm Break
3:30pm Panel 3:
Jennifer Ashton, University of Illinois at Chicago
“Bodily Inventions: Gender,
Sincerity and the "Innovative Necessity" in Women's Experimental
Poetry”
Jennifer Scappettone, University of Chicago
“ ‘Più mOndo i: /
tUtti!’: Traffics of Historicism in Contemporary Lyric”
Steve Burt, Macalester College
“Sestina! Or, the Fate of the
Idea of Form”
5:30pm Reception
Electronic copies of the
conference papers, to be read in advance, can be downloaded by clicking
on the titles above. Paper copies can also be picked up from
Walker 411, 1115 E. 58th Street. All materials will be available no later
than February 20.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information
or persons with a
disability who believe they may need assistance, please call
773-834-8524 or email jnklein@uchicago.edu in advance.
Sponsored at the University of Chicago by the Program in Poetry and
Poetics, the Franke Institute for the Humanities, the Department of
English Language and Literature, the Department of Comparative
Literature, The Department of Classics, Chicago Review, the Smart
Museum of Art, and the
Division of the Humanities.
Convener: Oren Izenberg, Department of English, Program in Poetry and
Poetics
GO TO: PROGRAM IN POETRY AND POETICS EVENTS PAGE