Announcements

EDIS Annual Meeting

In collaboration with the Emily Dickinson Museum, the Emily Dickinson International Society will hold its 2017 Annual Meeting August 11-12 in our favorite spot, Amherst. "Edenic Possibilities: Reading and Writing about Emily Dickinson" will feature exciting new scholarship by alums of the EDIS Critical Institutes, reading groups facilitated by well-known scholars meeting in the environs of Emily Dickinson's home and gardens, musical performances, tours of the Dickinson houses, literary walks, and the pleasure of picnicking on the grounds of those homes. Jazz soprano saxophonist and composer Jane Ira Bloom's Wild Lines performance of Dickinson's poetry will be featured Friday evening, and our Saturday late afternoon / evening picnic on the lawns of Dickinson's Homestead will be accompanied by Red Skies' performance, The Animated Homestead. This is a fantastic opportunity for meeting new friends and reuniting with old friends, all fellow travelers in reading Dickinson's writings, learning about her cultural, natural, and familial surroundings. Please join us! For more information about the program and lodging, see htp://www.emilydickinsoninternationalsociety.org/node/504.

EDIS MLA 2018

"Of Strangers is the Earth the Inn": Still life, Scale, and Deep Time in Emily Dickinson

This year's EDIS session at MLA, "Of Strangers is the Earth the Inn," will feature a cluster of papers sounding the intertwining motifs of still life, deep time, and scale for reading Dickinson in the shadow of the anthropocene. Chair: Marta L. Werner, Professor of English, D'Youville College

Presenters:

Isabel Sobral Campos, Assistant Professor of Literature, Dept. of Liberal Studies, Montana Tech

Zachary Tavlin, PhD candidate, Dept. of English, University of Washington

Amy R. Nestor, Assistant Professor of Literature, Dept. of English, Georgetown University—Qatar

Respondent:

Keith M. Mikos, Lecturer, Dept. of English, DePaul University

For questions about this panel, please contact Marta Werner @ wernerm@dyc.edu

"just a Life I left": Still Life Painting, Emily Dickinson, and the Anthropocene

Isabel Sobral Campos, Assistant Professor of Literature, Dept. of Liberal Studies, Montana Tech
icampos@mtech.edu

Looking at objects has been the purview of still-life painting, an interest which has relegated the genre to a relatively marginal status within the field of art history. This marginality is connected to the humility of the subject matter and to the decidedly gendered nature of many scenes represented in such painting (the domestic being overwhelmingly the territory of the genre). I will examine Emily Dickinson's poetry through the lens of still life. By this comparison, I seek to show the relevance of both the genre and Dickinson's poetry to environmental thinking in the era of the Anthropocene. My intention is not to graft onto Dickinson's poems twenty-first century environmental discourse but rather to show her poetry's potential for a new ecological awareness so urgently needed. On the other hand, by assuming that still-life painting is a genre that reveals the environmental and ontological conundrums that characterize modernity and that still plague our epoch, I am suggesting that a comparison of Dickinson's poems with this genre will distill these preoccupations further.

There are two ways in which still life may inform us about Dickinson's poems. Firstly, her poetry shares with still-life paintings commonly found topoi. In this sense, the content of the poems—their conceptual focus—corresponds to concerns found in the paintings, particular in those belonging to the vanitas subgenre. Secondly, approached as compositions of images, Dickinson's poems relate to the tableaux of still life for they reflect similar intimate domestic scenes: the interior, decontextualized spaces filled with things and without people. Although Dickinson's multiple poems about flowers rarely, if ever, depict them cut off from their natural environment to be placed on a vase, many flower poems replicate the "close up" detailed-oriented form of the still life. Without a doubt, many other poems concerned with flowers and broadly with nature approach the wide breath of landscape painting, rather than the humbleness of the detail. St. Armand, Farr, and others have examined this connection. The noteworthy link between the intimacy of still life and many of her poems remains unexamined, however. As...