Calls for Papers
The Wallace Stevens Society – International Conference: “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” (Singapore, June 2025)
Recent work on Stevens’s transnational aesthetic sensibility has explored how Stevens’s poetry, prose, and philosophy opens a dialogue with Noh Theatre, Eastern intellectual thought, and non-Western poetic practices. The partiality of Stevens’s references to “othered” spaces and places is increasingly understood to invite the textual and cultural mechanisms of reception and translation as they unfold beyond Stevens’s own time and place. Participants are encouraged to reflect on what Gül Bilge Han calls the “border-crossing capacities of the poetic imagination” (“Transnationalism” 74) in Stevens as part of the global circuitry of Stevens as poet-figure of world stature.
The Wallace Stevens Society is organizing an international conference around the theme of “Transnational Conversations, Partial Perspectives” in Singapore from June 26 to June 28, 2025. Welcome topics include but are not limited to:
- Responses to Stevens from international poets
- Stevens’s representation of nations and cultures beyond the United States
- The relationship between Stevens’s poetic philosophy and the poetic practices of authors from other cultures
- Stevens in translation (how fungible are his coinages?)
- Teaching Stevens in the multicultural classroom
- World literature and the cultural reception of Stevens
- The indigenous and exotic in Stevens
- Stevensian climates and ecologies
The conference will take place at The Arts House, a multidisciplinary venue and cultural hub in downtown Singapore. The event will include a dinner for all participants as well as a tour of the historical districts of central Singapore.
If interested, please submit an abstract of 150 words and a brief bio to Dr. Ian Tan at ian.tan@nie.edu.sg by November 30, 2024.
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ALA Annual Conference (May 21-24, 2025, Boston, MA) — Wallace Stevens’s Essays
Writing in 2003 with Wallace Stevens in mind, John Ashbery observed that “We expect poets to give a first-hand account of what poetry is. But some poets, when they write criticism, produce a kind of prose that is itself on the verge of being poetry.” Stevens’s essays, though a relatively overlooked part of his oeuvre, constitute in this vein a remarkable performance of the role of poet-critic, which had assumed a new importance following the institutionalization of modernism within the university. Departing from the textual hermeticism and technical vocabulary pioneered by his contemporaries the New Critics, the prose collected in The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination (1951), as its subtitle hints, aims at a more expansive understanding of poetry and employs a wide variety of stylistic means to direct us there, incorporating invocatory myth, ekphrasis, invective, anecdotes, and even illustrative poems. In this light, the essays’ magpie willingness to combine genres and cross disciplinary borders places them in a distinctly American tradition of discursive yet poetic writing, running back to Emerson and Thoreau, through to Ashbery, and on to later poet-theorists including Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Fred Moten.
Organized by the Wallace Stevens Society, this panel invites 300-to-500-word abstracts for presentations that address Stevens’s essays as a contribution to his “theory of poetry,” as an experiment in criticism, and/or in terms of their subsequent legacy. So-called uncollected prose works that were not included in The Necessary Angel (e.g., “The Irrational Element in Poetry,” “Two or Three Ideas”) or composed after its publication (e.g., “A Collect of Philosophy”) are also welcome objects of consideration.
Please direct all inquiries and submissions (including a brief bio) to William Burns at william.burns.15@ucl.ac.uk and Andrew Osborn at aosborn@udallas.edu (subject heading: ALA25 Stevens) by Monday, January 13, 2025.