b) the American
Literature Association conference, held every year in May on the
weekend before Memorial Day. In odd years, the conference is held in
Boston; in even years, it is usually held on the west coast.
Calls for papers
for these and other conferences of interest to society members are
posted below.
CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature
Association's 33rd annual conference, Chicago, IL, May 26-29, 2022
Deadline extended to January 28th
The E. E. Cummings Society invites proposals for two panels at the American
Literature Association conference, to be held at the Palmer House Hilton,
Chicago on May 26-29, 2022.
Panel 1: Cummings and Transcendence
In 1960, Norman Friedman declared that Cummings’ “philosophy of life” was
“transcendental, romantic, prelapsarian, organicist, and individualistic.
The same is publicly available in the writings of many others, such as Emerson,
Whitman, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson” (Art 66). We seek papers examining,
critiquing, clarifying, or complicating these assertions through a close reading
of any Cummings work(s).
Panel 2: Open Topic
We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings’ life or work.
Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome:
• Readings of little-studied Cummings poems
• Re-readings of much-studied Cummings poems
• Cummings the modernist poet
• Cummings’ art during the “Crucial Decade between 1917
and 1927” [Friedman, (Re) Valuing 48] (Camp Devens, the flu pandemic,
The Enormous Room, Him)
• Cummings and the contradictions of the now
• Cummings and Re-Vision [For some drafts of poems, see
the Cummings Archive: http://cummingsarchive.org/ ]
Submit 250-400 word abstracts to Michael Webster (websterm@gvsu.edu) by
January 28, 2022.