Call for Papers: Romantic Revolutionaries at Home and Abroad

Call for Papers

“Romantic Revolutionaries at Home and Abroad”
A seminar at the ACLA 2010 in New Orleans, April 1-4, 2010

Seminar Organizers: *Bilal Hashmi*, NYU; *Kevin Goldstein*, NYU; *Ozen Nergis Dolcerocca, *NYU
http://www.acla.org/acla2010/?p=396

Seminar Description: This panel will explore the relationship between commitment and cosmopolitanism in 20th century poetry. Modeled on the friendship between *Faiz Ahmed Faiz* (1911-1984), *Nazim Hikmet* (1902–1963), and *Pablo Neruda* (1904-1973), our seminar invites new comparative approaches to the theorization of postcolonial poetics, specifically within transnational, tricontinental, third world, and global south discourses.

How did poets situate themselves and engage with each other amid rapidly changing geopolitical circumstances during “the age of three worlds”? In what contexts were global networks of solidarity established — i.e., through correspondence, translation, publication, international writers’ conferences / symposia? How did poets from different national situations influence each other’s work? What was the role of the national poet during the convulsive post-revolutionary artistic renaissance? How might this period inform the notion of Weltliteratur (at a time when Moscow replaced Paris as literary capital)?

Topics may include, but are not limited to: “the national poet”; regionalism versus internationalism; the poetics of exile; the poet as diplomat and/or politician; the poet and the state; censorship; communist internationalism and the poetics of solidarity; la littérature engagée; the romantic revolutionary; the communist ideal as a romantic symbol; the poet as propagandist.

250-word proposals due November 13, 2009; all proposals must be submitted
through the conference website at http://www.acla.org/acla2010/ .