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  • EDIS Calls for Papers, Announcements, and Awards

Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting

The Emily Dickinson International Society will hold its annual meeting, cosponsored by the Emily Dickinson Museum, on August 8-10, 2014, in Amherst, MA. Elizabeth Petrino and Alexandra Socarides will host an Institute on the theme of the program, “Emily Dickinson and New England Writers.” For attendees who are not participants in the Institute, there will be discussion workshops on Dickinson poems and short writings by other New England writers as well as [End Page 130] exhibitions at the Frost and Jones libraries. Karen Kilcup, Jane Wald, and Paul Crumbley will be featured speakers during the weekend. EDIS’s annual Members’ Meeting will take place on August 9. More information about the program and registration are available on the EDIS website.

International Symposium: “Emily Dickinson Dwells in China—Possibilities of Translation and Transcultural Perspectives”

Hosted by the Literary Translation Research Center of Fudan University Co-organized by The Emily Dickinson International Society

On November 22-24, 2014, the Literary Translation Research Center of Fudan University will host an international symposium on Emily Dickinson in Shanghai, China. Focused on transcultural rewriting and interpretation of Dickinson in China, this symposium invites such topics as comparative poetics, influences on Dickinson, the reception and translation of Dickinson, transcultural canon formation, and new topics in Dickinson studies. It will also launch a cooperative translation project, which aims to select, translate, and publish a group of Dickinson poems with annotations and commentary.

In the months before the conference, the organizers will put together small translation groups, consisting of Chinese translators and Dickinson scholars who are native speakers of English. Each Chinese translator will select, translate, and annotate a number of poems, in at least occasional electronic collaboration with other members of her or his group. During the conference, these translation groups will work more intensively on discussing and revising their translations and commentary. On the last day of the symposium, there will be a poetry reading in both English and Chinese, which will feature the translated work.

To present a paper at this conference, submit an outline or abstract (150-250 words) to ccmiller@buffalo.edu, mnsmith@umd.edu, or bhwang_fudan@163.com before May 15, 2014. We hope that all native-English-speaking scholars presenting papers will also participate in the translation project. [End Page 131]

Whitman/Dickinson Conference

Hosted by the Université François-Rabelais, Tours, France

Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson appear alongside each other in histories of American literature, in anthologies of American verse, and are often taught in the same U.S. literature or poetry courses. Rarely, however, since Agnieszka Salska’s seminal book Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson: Poetry of the Central Consciousness, have scholars or poets written about them in relation to each other. Received wisdom has it that these poets started separate traditions within American poetry that have run parallel to each other for well over a century: the stereotype contrasts Whitman’s expansive and aggressively “masculine” free verse with Dickinson’s more aphoristic, sometimes coy and “feminine” metered poetry. While these ideas have already been challenged, old myths linger. New considerations of their writing might uncover significant similarities as well as differences in their attitudes toward and practice of their chosen artistic medium.

This conference, to be held on March 12–13, 2015, seeks to bring together scholars and writers with a strong interest in both poets who will engage both their works in their presentations. Among many other possible topics and approaches, we would encourage papers on the concept of authority, textual strategies, variations on voice, the poetic I, gender roles, and on topics of paramount importance to people living and writing in the mid-nineteenth century, including politics, the Civil War, and religion. Investigations may also bear on Whitman’s and Dickinson’s appropriation and/or subversion of past and contemporary cultural and literary codes and practices, or on their Americanization both of English-language poetry and the English language. A roundtable will be devoted to these poets’ relation to language, and scholars and poets are invited to submit contributions for this roundtable.

250-word abstracts should be sent by June 1...

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