Welcome to SAAS

Call For Papers for Our Next Conference

"A Return to (What Never Was) Normal: Discourses of (Ab)Normalcy in US Culture, Literature, Arts, and Politics; Past, Present, and Futures"

PANEL 15

15) "Does Normalcy Exist in Poetry?"
Panel Chair: Viorica Patea, Universidad de Salamanca
E-mail: "vioricap@usal.es  

Poetic discourse and poetic effects are, by definition, a twisting and displacing of normal language. The Romantics introduced the quest for the "new" which became an obsession for the Modernists and almost a neurosis for the Postmodernists. Yet paradoxically, as often as not, American poets have taken on as their subjects the ordinary, quotidian, and intimate matters of "normal" life, from domestic relations to the cycles of nature, from the minutiae of familial, sexual, and social relations to the rituals of food, commerce, love, aging, disease, and faith. Nonetheless, poets persistently seek a perpetual deviation and distortion of the ordinary in the quest for a new language. As William Carlos Williams said, "Verse to be alive must have infused into it something of the same order, some tincture of disestablishment, something in the nature of an impalpable revolution, an ethereal reversal" since "Nothing is good save the new." Even when writing about these ordinary human experiences and subject matter, poets invent new languages and perspectives. The history of poetry is measured by a succession of new languages invented by different generations, movements, and schools who have continuously distorted ordinary expressions, emotions, and languages in quest of the new or the inexpressible, often as insubordinate to prevailing conventions. Any papers on this precarious relationship in American poetry between poetic idiom and subject matter from any perspective (aesthetic, gender, minority, ethnicity, etc.) are welcome.

GUIDELINES FOR PARTICIPANTS

Abstracts of Proposals are to be e-mailed directly to the chair of the selected panel using this form. The deadline for submitting abstracts is October 15, 2022. Panel chairs are expected to accept/reject proposals and have panels set up by November 7.

Non-members of SAAS (of all nationalities) are welcome to participate in the conference, but will be required to pay membership dues for one year as well as the conference registration fee. Members of ASA (American Studies Association), AISNA (Associazione Italiana di Studi Nor-Americani), APEAA (Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies) and HELAAS (Hellenic Association for American Studies) need only pay the conference registration fee.

Further guideliness for participants can be found here.