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Decreations: A Graduate Symposium on the Work of Anne Carson

April 3, 2015 @ 8:00 am - April 4, 2015 @ 5:00 pm

free

A Graduate Symposium on the Work of Anne Carson
April 3–4, 2015
Princeton University

Schedule and Locations

Keynote Address by Simon Critchley (Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy, New School)
Visual Presentation by Bianca Stone (Illustrator of Antigonick)
Dance Presentation by Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell

The range of Anne Carson’s work includes original poems, rigorous scholarly essays, novels in verse, operas, and translations; it resists persistent boundaries between the creative and the critical, the ancient and the contemporary, the visual and the verbal, and the literary and the academic, in an approach to cultural production that has attracted a diverse and international readership. This conference will invite participants to consider the work of Anne Carson as a locus for interdisciplinary engagement and intellectual collaboration, seeking to bring together scholars from fields including Comparative Literature, Classics, English, Canadian Studies, Linguistics, Film Studies, the Visual Arts and Art History to discuss the many facets of literary production to which Carson’s corpus gives form and the respect she has garnered through her facility in speaking to various fields of inquiry on their own terms. Bringing together faculty and students, we particularly intend to provide a forum for discussions of aspects of Carson’s literary production that might be elided by scholarship relying on a single methodology or literary tradition.

The title of Carson’s 2005 collection Decreation is a coinage of Simone Weil, for whom the word represented a “program for getting the self out of the way”; the “paradox” that “to tell is a function of self” is the concern of that book’s title essay, which places its author in a genealogy of women writers as diverse as Sappho and Marguerite Porete. Carson’s collages of imagistic, textual and theatric material are juxtaposed against a stark and dissatisfied lyrical subject; her frank identifications with the writers she reveres complement a confessional intimacy that speaks to everyday sublimity. If criticism and analysis are usually understood to break down the works they confront, “Decreations” addresses the readerly possibilities of texts that claim already to generate their own dissolution. In line with such questioning, this symposium will consider Carson’s deferrals to the texts she cites and translates alongside the coherence of her distinct perspective and style. We aim to interrogate and play on traditional ideas of reception and translation, influence and inheritance, allusion and displacement, in the context of a gathering of scholars as eclectic and complex as the work they seek to understand.

The following list of possible thematic interests is not all-inclusive:

  • Classical philology in contemporary poetics
  • The politics and philosophy of translation
  • Hybridity, multimedia, visuality
  • Queer erotics and women’s writing
  • “Genre” in scholarly writing
  • The imagistic and the textual
  • Psychoanalysis and subjectivity
  • Fragments – of texts and in post-modernity
  • Ancient identity, modern identity
  • Translation vs. adaptation
  • Interpolation
  • Reception and intellectual history
  • The role of the creative philologist in the academy
  • The poetic appropriation of academic genres (textual commentary, scholarly essay)

Event sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, Postclassicisms, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund, the Lewis Center for the Arts, IHUM, the Fund for Canadian Studies, the Department of English, Program in Translation Studies, and the Graduate School.

Details

Start:
April 3, 2015 @ 8:00 am
End:
April 4, 2015 @ 5:00 pm
Cost:
free
Website:
http://www.decreations2015.com/index.php

Organizer

Decreations is sponsored by the Department of Classics, the Department of Comparative Literature, Postclassicisms, Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, with the support of the Stanley J. Seeger Hellenic Fund, the Lewis Center for the Arts, IHUM, the Fund for Canadian Studies, the Department of English, Program in Translation Studies, the Program in Media and Modernity, and the Graduate School.