Anthony Reed, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
Georgina Colby, Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature, University of Westminster
View the programme (also listed below) and abstracts.
Register here.
This conference aims to focus on experimental writing in English from the second half of the twentieth century which is less well known, has been positioned outside of the literary mainstream or is simply deserving of more attention. It particularly invites proposals on experimental writing by women, queer authors, people of colour and working-class writers.
Much research in recent years has been concerned with nuancing accounts of post-WWII literature which either largely ignored experimental writing in the wake of the war and/or only paid attention to certain canonical postmodernist texts when experimentation was considered. In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989), Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs proposed that twentieth-century experimentation by women might be the missing link in the crucial intersection between feminism and modernity as literature and feminism share a “profound quarrel with established, patriarchal forms, but also a sense of identification with what has been muted by these forms” (xii). Since their groundbreaking work and especially in recent years, several anthologies and critical studies have contributed to the ongoing project of rectifying the critical neglect of women’s experimental writing of the second half of the twentieth century. The absence of contributions by writers of colour, queer authors and working-class writers to most conversations about experimental literature is similarly striking and problematic. Thus, Anthony Reed, in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014), has suggested that the “abstractness” of black experimental writing and its resistance to “preemptive understandings of black life” has resulted in the exclusion of experimental writing in standard genealogies of African American literature (7).
This conference then adopts the term “anti-canon” as a provocative invitation to reflect on the ways in which experimental literature in English in general - but writing by certain authors in particular – has regularly been neglected or sidelined in overviews of the literary landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. By adopting the term, we also acknowledge and invite reflections on Ellen Friedman’s suggestion that if canonical novels are strategic constructs to reinforce a society’s values, then works which undermine those values might be thought of as “anticanonical.” More recently, Tyler Bradway has connected the “affective agency” of formal innovation to a specifically queer tradition in literature in Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading, suggesting this agency reveals “literary form’s capacity to work on and through the bodies of readers, immanently restructuring our felt relations to the aesthetic object” (viii).
Following on from this recent research on the topic, this conference invites reflections on the following questions: To what extent can the notion of anti-canon represent a shared condition for the politics of experimentation? In what ways does it engage with, and perhaps suggest a move beyond, certain categories - such as that of “women’s writing” - as the “other side” of dominant literary form? How might anti-canonical works of literature subvert established ways of looking at the world and at society?
REGISTRATION FEES:
The registration fee for the conference is 80€ (40€ for one day). All participants (presenting and attending) who can claim back their expenses (e.g. doctoral candidates, postdocs, professors, employees of governments/organisations) are kindly asked to fill out the registration form and pay the fee using the online form.
The conference fee is waived for all presenting and non-presenting participants who cannot claim back their expenses (e.g. independent scholars, artists, interested BA- and MA-students). If you would like to register in this capacity, please email Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.be) and Tessel Veneboer (Tessel.Veneboer@ugent.be) and let us know of any dietary and/or access requirements you may have.
8.45 – 9.15 Registration & coffee
9.15 – 09.30 Opening remarks
9.30 – 11.10 Parallel sessions
Panel 1. (Im)material conditions and the everyday
Nonia Williams (University of East Anglia) - Ann Quin: Gender and Precarity
Laura Haynes (Glasgow School of Art) - I who want to run in one river and become great: The Maternal Reconciliation of Tillie Olsen
Matthew Rana (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis) - B W B R B B W R W R G W G B W G B R B: Analogical Representation and Sexual Difference in Bernadette Mayer's Studying Hunger Journals
Hilary White (University of Manchester) - Hypnagogic hallucinations: Bernadette Mayer and Wanda Coleman's dream poems
Panel 2. Re-forming identity
Florian Zappe (independent researcher, Berlin) - A most curious case: Kathy Acker vs. Identity Politics
Luna Chung (University of Arizona) - “Vietnamese American Literature: Watermark as 20th century experimental writing”
Tara Stubbs (Oxford University) – ‘Precarious words like rocks’: the contemporary (African) American Sonnet
Juliette Bouanani (Paris Nanterre) - "who is speaking?" Lyn Hejinian, feminist poetics and the Anti-Canon
11.10 – 11.40 Coffee break
11.40 – 13.00 Parallel sessions
Panel 3. The twists and turns of an African American anti-canon
Jesper Olsson (Linköping University) - Spirituality, Politics, Technology: A Reading of N. H. Pritchard’s Concrete Poetry
Solveig Daugaard (University of Copenhagen) - Why these blues come from us
Christa Holm Vogelius (University of Copenhagen) - Claudia Rankine’s Image-Text
Panel 4. Three anti-canonistic poetic events: undoing the canon in transreal time
Brent Cox (University at Buffalo) - Retaining Anti-Canonicity Against the Critical Final Word: N.H. Pritchard, Republication, and Infrastructuralist Video Poetic Criticism
Amanda Hurtado (University of Boulder) - Susan Howe: A Poetics of Motion and Measure, Material and Media
Simon Eales (University at Buffalo) - Making Anti-Canon Poetics Dance: Leslie Scalapino and Choreographic Poetics
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 16.00 Parallel sessions
Panel 5. Language, meaning and authority
Nora Fulton (Concordia University) - Objective Feeling - Laura Riding's Rational Meaning and the Stakes of Non-Correspondence
Wanda O'Connor (Open University Wales) – ‘Refusal of silence': Excess and new forms of writing in Fraser, Duplessis, and Howe
Gi Taek Ryoo (Chungbuk National University) - The textual ecospace of Lyn Hejinian's experimental poetry
Helena Van Praet (UC Louvain) - "Who are you?" Poetic Metalepsis in the Work of Anne Carson
Marija Cetinić (University of Amsterdam) - The economy did this to you. Penetrability in Lisa Robertson's Cinema of the Present
Panel 6. Affects, (un)readability and reception
Iris Pearson (University of Oxford) - Don't Read B.S. Johnson: Rebarbative Forms and Readerly Affect
Salomé Honório (CEComp/FLUL- Faculty of Arts, University of Lisbon) - An ethos of refusal: on the brutalist edge of Kathy Acker's poetics
Andrew Hodgson (EHESS Paris) - “Undo the Normative Conquest”: Cut-up, DIY and the Ergodic in the Experimental Novel
Chris Clarke (independent researcher, Southampton) – ‘A faded negative’: Photographs and other (dis)possessions in the work of Ann Quin
Kelly Krumrie (Western Colorado University) - The Mathematical Affect of Pamela Lu
16.00 – 16.30 Coffee break
16.30 – 17.30 Keynote
Anthony Reed (Vanderbilt University), ‘Between Subjects: Black Lyrical Voicing Against the Canon’
17.30 – 18.30 Reception
08.45 – 9.10 Registration & coffee
9.10 – 10.50 Parallel sessions
Panel 7. Crossing and remaking genres
Ali Chetwynd (American University of Iraq)- Carlene Hatcher Polite's The Flaggelants as an Experimental Road Not Taken
Sofie Verraest (Ghent University) - "The Supreme good is like water" (on Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands)
Melissa Tanti (University of Manchester) - Multilingual experiments as Anti-Canonical Practice in Queer Women's Writing from Québec
Susannah Thompson (Glasgow School of Art) - Maud Sulter: Poet as Heretic
Panel 8. Postmodernist and philosophical expressions
Steven Forbes (University of Edinburgh) - Cubistic Time and Phenomenology in William Demby's The Catacombs
Adam Guy (University of Oxford) - ‘Good for nothing craft’: John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, the Theatre of the Absurd, and Artistic Autonomy in Global View
Suhasini Vincent (University of Paris II – Panthéon Assas) - Exploring Suniti Namjoshi's Experimental Feminist Fables in the Light of Displaced Immigrant Experiences
Kerry-Jane Wallart (University of Orléans) - Tragic anomalies in a transnational context. The case of Cherrie Moraga
10.50 – 11.20: Coffee break
11.20 – 13.00: Parallel sessions
Panel 9. Forms of “outside” in art writing
Sam Buchan-Watts (Newcastle University) - Inside of the Outside: Skateboarding as Art Writing
Alice Butler (The Courtauld) - Writing Beside, Outside and Inside: The Reparative Desire of Cookie Mueller’s Crochet Gloves
Natalie Ferris (Durham University) - Radical Notations
Matthew Holman (UCL) - The Joy of Making Fine Distinctions: James Schuyler’s Outsider Art Writing
Panel 10. Writing the body
Jen Brodie (Paris 8) - The land as a male body: fear of fragmentation in an unpublished work of David Ireland
Joule Zheng Wang (University of Amsterdam) - (Dis)integrating into Fragments: The “Typewriter Writing” in David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives
Rosie Haward (independent researcher, Amsterdam) - No time like the past: trauma and lesbian fantasy in the writing of Camille Roy
Julie Dickson (Freie Universität Berlin) - Paradoxical Bodies, Ambiguous Books: The Representation of Marginalized Subjectivities, Communality, and Embodiment in Late 20th-Century Short Story Cycles
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 15.00 Keynote
Georgina Colby (Westminster University), ‘Forms of Solidarity: Contemporary Feminist Avant-Garde Writing’
15.00 – 15.30 Coffee
15.30 – 17.30 Parallel sessions
Panel 11. Disorientations, contradictions, queer desires
Alice Hill-Woods (Glasgow School of Art) - “Which piece fits in precisely where?”: Disorientation as Queer Strategy in Ann Quin’s Three (1969)
Kaye Mitchell (University of Manchester) - Queer experiments
Carole Sweeney (Goldsmiths University) - ‘Things irreconcilable’: Reading Brigid Brophy’s baroque.
Michael Kindellan (University of Sheffield) – Graphic Wieners
Sophie Corser (University College Cork) – ‘Her little deviations': queer reading and form in the novels of Barbara Trapido
Panel 12. Procedure & form
Victoria Miguel (University of Glasgow) - Palimpsest and Process: John Cage's Mesostic poetry
Anne-Grit Becker (Humboldt Universität Berlin) - "Go to Work on a Poem": Reflections on David Medalla's Writings
Miriam Ould Aroussi (Université de Paris Cité) - Against "absolute regularities": David Antin's Poetics and the Subversion of Writing
Paisley Conrad (Concordia University) - " What an associative way to live this is”: Materials of Distraction in Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day
17.30 – 17.45 Closing remarks