Boston, 25-28 May 2017
American Literature Association (ALA) annual convention
The Wallace Stevens Society Call for Papers
“When the book lay turned in the dust of his table:” Stevens in and beyond the book
This panel proposes to look at Stevens’ poetry in and beyond the book, casting a backward glance on the age of print from the perspective of the digital age. It will welcome contributions that address either representations of the book within Stevens’ œuvre, or the way that Stevens’ poetry books, in their various formats and editions, have shaped our reception of his work. How did Stevens’ relationship to the book-as-object inform his poetry and poetics? What place does the book hold in Stevens’ poems? Why and how is the poetry book staged in Stevens’ play Bowl, Cat and Broomstick? In a 2011 article from The Wallace Stevens Journal, Chris Beyers suggested that to “consider especially Harmonium and Ideas of Order as individual books instead of subsections of The Collected Poems” had “the potential to change the reader’s experience of the poems” (Beyers, 79). How can we approach the multiple versions of Harmonium today in the classroom? To what extent did the Library of America edition affect Stevens studies, and how might a digital Stevens project modify our understanding of Stevens’ work?
Please submit your 300-500 word abstract along with a short bio by December 1, 2016 to: