Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers

The Poetry Society of America presents

Ben Mazer lecturing on Delmore Schwartz' previously unpublished poems

October 7 online

The New Yorker reviews The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz

The Poet Who Took It Personally Delmore Schwartz tried to change poetry, often by putting his own painful life on the page. The cost was that failure felt all the more acute.

This Sunday at 7pm at Unnamable Books in Brooklyn
Delmore Schwartz Double Book Launch

Today the New York Times reviews The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz.

Delmore Schwartz’s Poems Are Like Salt Flicked on the World A new omnibus compiles the poet’s books and unpublished work, including his two-part autobiographical masterpiece, “Genesis.”

Six years in the making, The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz is published today!

We're searching for a new editor for Literary Imagination! Many thanks to Archie Burnett for his many years at the helm. Rosanna Warren and I will help the new editor with the transition. The search committee consists of Rosanna, David Mikics, and Rebecca Rainof.

Feel free to share this ad!

Editor, Literary Imagination
Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW)

Location: U.S.
Open Date: April 1, 2024
Deadline: August 1, 2024
Start date: January 2025

Description: The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW) seeks a new editor, effective January 2025, of its flagship print publication, Literary Imagination. In consultation with the Associate Editors and our anticipated publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, the editor will plan, prepare, and finalize three issues of Literary Imagination annually. We seek candidates with wide intellectual range and connections to a number of fields, who embrace the journal’s purpose and can lead it effectively. After many years with Oxford University Press, as of January 2025 Literary Imagination anticipates switching to Johns Hopkins University Press as its publisher; thus the editor will have an opportunity to shape this new phase of the journal’s existence.

Literary Imagination is a forum for all those interested in the distinctive nature, uses, and pleasures of literature, from ancient to modern, in all languages. The journal publishes literary criticism and scholarship, fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, translation, and book reviews. We emphasize attention to ancient and modern foreign literature as well as to works in English.

Qualifications: Profound knowledge and appreciation of literature, demonstrated creative leadership potential, an understanding of the ALSCW and the history of the journal, and a combination of some of the following: a Ph.D. in literature or the humanities, or an MFA; editorial experience; connections with a range of writers; and a demonstrated ability to meet deadlines and carry out complex projects.

To Apply: Please send a letter of interest and a CV to Dr. Rebecca Rainof at [email protected]

The next annual conference of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers will held at The Catholic University of America, October 17-20. We will start circulating Call for Papers in February.

This year’s conference committee is:

Diana Senechal, ALSCW President
John Burt, Brandeis University
Mary Jo Salter, Johns Hopkins University
Ernest Suarez, Catholic University

Seminars and plenary sessions will be held in historic Caldwell Hall and the Saturday evening banquet will be in O’Connell Hall.

ALSCW

Diana Senechal has accepted the ALSCW Executive Committee's invitation to become our vice president (and president following this year's annual conference). Diana has been a very active and longtime member. She's served on Council for many years and has made great contributions to the organization.

Diana Senechal is the 2011 winner of the Hiett Prize in the Humanities and the author of Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (2011) and Mind over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (2018), as well as numerous stories, poems, essays, songs, and translations. Her translations of the Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova are featured in Winter Dialogue (Northwestern University Press, 1997) and The Junction (Bloodaxe, 2008); her translation of Gyula Jenei's poetry collection Always Different: Poems of Memory was published by Deep Vellum in 2022.

Senechal has written and spoken extensively about education and solitude. In 2012, she delivered the principal address at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Music; this was followed in 2013 and 2014 by appearances at the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Art and Design and the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Schools of Dance. In April 2014, she took part in a discussion of solitude on BBC World Service's program The Forum.

Senechal began teaching in New York City public schools in 2005. From 2011 to 2016 she led the philosophy program at Columbia Secondary School; as of November 2017, she has been teaching English and civilization at the Varga Katalin Gimnázium in Szolnok, Hungary. She has served on the ALSCW Council since 2013.

David Mikics, President
Ernest Suarez, Executive Director

Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers www.alscw.org

In Memoriam: Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023)

With sorrow, we report the death of the poet, scholar, editor, and professor Saskia Hamilton. Saskia was a long-time member of ALSCW, and worked with extraordinary energy and imagination to support the Association. In 2011-14, she co-edited Literary Imagination with Archie Burnett. She joined the faculty at Barnard College in 2002, and in 2018 was appointed Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum while continuing to teach her passionately attended courses in poetry and poetics. As Vice Provost, she often hosted local meetings of ALSCW for poetry readings and discussions, giving the Association a dignified home in New York City.

In her lifetime, Saskia published four volumes of astringent, delicate, intensely suggestive poetry, all with Graywolf Press, and her final collection, All Souls, will come out from Graywolf in October 2023. She edited The Letters of Robert Lowell for Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (2005); The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux 2019); and a new edition of Lowell’s The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972, 1973 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019. With Thomas Travisano she edited Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008). These editions drew renewed attention to Lowell’s poetry and were rewarded with significant prizes: the Pegasus Award for The Dolphin and The Dolphin Letters, and the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters from the MLA. Her poetry earned her fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ruth Lilly Foundation, the NEA, and an Arts & Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Saskia’s very being was a reward for all who knew her and cared about her. We have lost a singular intelligence, and a model of magnanimity and attentive friendship.

Rosanna Warren

Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers
Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference
October 12-15, 2023 at the University of Houston

CALL FOR PAPERS

Conference Committee for 2023:
David Mikics, University of Houston
Richard Russell, Baylor University
Mary Jo Salter, Johns Hopkins University
Ernest Suarez, Catholic University

SEMINARS
1) Echoes of Harmonium: 1923-2023
Moderator: Esther Schor, John J. F. Sherrerd ’52 University Professor, Princeton University

The centenary of Harmonium, Wallace Stevens’ remarkable debut volume, is upon us. This seminar attends to echoes of Harmonium and/or its music more generally: its “spontaneous cries,” “choirs of wind and wet and wing,” “droning of the surf,” and “odious chords.” Scholars, critics, and writers are invited to “quiz all sounds, all thoughts, all everything,” including the volume’s silences and obliquities; to broach diachronic echoes within the book, of earlier poems, prose or music; or synchronic resonance among the poems of the volume. How does Harmonium reecho in Stevens’s later works? Much of our attention will be on reverberations of Harmonium in poems of the century that followed, and in our reading and writing lives. Participants are invited to explore “The Harmonium and How it Works” and/or the instrument’s surprising transit from Western Europe to India. Finally: Is there a global Harmonium?

2) Art and Activism in the 956: The Texas Rio Grande Valley in a Multimedia Perspective
Moderator: Roberto Tejada, Hugh Roy and Lille Cranz Cullen Distinguished Professor, University of Houston

Though often neglected in the national imaginary, the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas has long been at the cutting-edge of multimedia art and literary practices. The region’s expressive culture points to the particulars of its past—native lifeways, settler society, U.S imperialist design—as well as to neo-colonial conditions of the present. Today, however, independent multimedia platforms and other challenges in artistic form (poetry, fiction, music, sound, cinema, visual art, and activism) are positioned to shape the future of the 956—the area code that serves as shorthand for the RGV’s distinctive and complex worldview. Topics may include but are not limited to the following:
—956 in fiction, poetry, and journalism
—migration studies and Chicanx-Latinx expressive forms
—sound studies in the speculative cross-cultural field
—dragtivism at the border wall
—resisting SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica
—Instagram RGV: art and activism
— South Texas film and performance as archive

3) Mystery and Secrecy: Ancient Origins, Modern Expressions
Moderator: Michelle Zerba, Maggie B. Martin Professor, Louisiana State University

This seminar invites papers on the manifestations, meanings, and purposes of mystery and secrecy. While the language of mystery evolved from ancient Greek religious rites known as mysteria and social practices of secrecy related to initiation and vows of silence, uses of the term expanded widely into the fields of literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and medicine. Concepts of mystery have shaped esoteric philosophy, Jewish apocalyptic literature, early Christianity, Renaissance science, Hermeticism, the rise of secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Illuminati, Romantic Naturphilosophie, and Theosophy. Today, mystery is deployed to sell everything from romance, exploration in strange places, and the enigmas of the cosmos to books in a best-selling genre and transformational festivals like Burning Man. Papers aimed at explicating the concept of mystery and theoretical approaches to it, or creative reflections on it, are especially welcome.

4) War Movies
Moderator: David Mikics, Moores Distinguished Professor, University of Houston

War movies often imply that the experience they describe has something essential to tell us about human values, cosmic justice or politics. What lessons do we gather from such films? What do they show us, and what do they refuse to depict? How does the filmmaker’s art respond to the brutal subject matter? Papers are invited on documentary as well as fiction films. Movies under consideration may focus on combat and military planning or on the wartime experience of refugees, civilian victims and bystanders.

5) Conceiving Liberty and Equality in Antebellum America
Moderator: Dustin Gish, Associate Professor, Honors College, University of Houston

With the immortal words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, a national creed came into being: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." This proposition, to which the new nation - once conceived in Liberty - had been dedicated by the Founding generation, remained for decades a vow which could not be fulfilled. In drafting that Declaration, Jefferson himself condemned the American slave trade and, by implication, slavery, but the alliance for independence and the perpetuation of the union necessitated that the offensive stain of slavery continue untouched where it then existed. A scourge of Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Amendments XIII-XV, eventually scrubbed slavery from our national fabric (though the shadow of that stain still haunts us). In the antebellum period, though facing seemingly insuperable obstacles to the fulfillment of that proposition in reality, our national creed inspired the Literary Imagination of American orators, authors, and poets, who took up the task of vividly conceiving Liberty and Equality for an American audience that could not otherwise stand in the presence of those ideas in practice. This seminar invites both papers and presentations (visual as well as textual) that reveal unexpected examples of and-or novel approaches to conceiving Liberty and Equality in Antebellum America (from Stowe and Dickinson, Poe and Hawthorne, to Thoreau and Emerson, Douglass and Lincoln).

6) Rethinking Cold War Literary Culture
Moderators: Justin Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and Ernest Suarez, David M. O’Connell Professor of English, Catholic University

The collapse of the Soviet Union supposedly led to the end of not only the Cold War but also, as the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama famously declared, history itself. And yet recent events—the Obama and Trump Presidencies, the annexation of Crimea, Russiagate, the expansion of NATO, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine—have prompted some observers to suggest that the Cold War never really ended. To what extent, then, have we been sleepwalking through history?

The question is a momentous one for scholars of U.S. literary studies, which, over the course of the last decade, has seen the development of new and exciting fields, such as “post-45” and “the contemporary,” organized around the Cold War and its aftermath. This seminar invites papers that (re)consider the relationship between U.S. literature and the Cold War in light of twenty-first-century events and/or new research in the field.
We welcome papers on such topics as the institutionalization and legacy of “Cold War modernism” in university creative writing programs; the valences of American literature to public diplomacy; the relationship between literary “schools” (the Beats, Black Mountain Poets, the Black Arts Movement, the New Journalism) or genres (the campus novel, the systems novel, creative nonfiction, jazz poetry) and Cold War politics; how the Cold War shaped the transition between the literary cultures of the Old and New Lefts; and the persistence of Cold War paradigms in contemporary U.S. literature and criticism. We are open to papers on works in any literary genre, including the novel, graphic novel, short story, poetry, drama, and song verse.

7) Shakespeare and Moral Luck
Moderator: Lars Engle, Chapman Professor of English, University of Tulsa

This seminar will discuss Shakespeare's treatment of what Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel have taught us to see as the double problem of moral luck. I call it a double problem because its two aspects reinforce one another: the primary problem being the radically unequal distribution among human beings of conditions that permit or contribute to a morally satisfactory life, the secondary being the future contingencies that, beyond the actor's control, shape the moral meaning of a particular action. We will discuss whether early moderns had something approximating the idea that a satisfactory moral system would make a moral life available to everyone, regardless of social estate or intellectual or temperamental characteristics. Papers are invited on any feature of Shakespeare's plays and poems that rewards attention to moral luck.

😎 Seeing Things: Irish Literature and Faith
Moderator: Richard Russell, Professor of English, Baylor University
Irish literature has often been concerned with depictions of faith, yet critics have often been reluctant to chart such engagements outside of their sociological and political resonances. Irish writing, however, has grappled with and imagined worlds and beliefs beyond our ken that animate our daily lives. This seminar will feature papers examining the role of faith in Irish literature throughout history, north and south of the present border.

9) The Forms of Contemporary Poetry
Moderator: David Caplan, Daisy Deane Frensley Chair in English Literature, Southern Methodist University

How do we understand the forms that contemporary poetry takes? How should we?

This call for papers invites a broad range of approaches and interests. Participants might consider particular forms, their development, current uses, and histories. Alternatively, they might examine the work of noteworthy poets or, more broadly, the opportunities that the present moment offers. By sharing our perspectives and insights, we hope to clarify how contemporary poetry looks different when we pay attention to form.

10) Liberal Learning in the Literature Classroom
Moderators: Claudia MacMillan, Executive Director of The MacMillan Institute, and Taryn Okuma, Director of the Cornerstone Program at The Catholic University of America

Liberal learning is learning for learning’s sake. However, the devotee of liberal learning need not learn or teach without a desired end in mind, that is to enhance the personhood of the learner. Do you believe that the literature you teach should not only increase knowledge but should also help you and your students become better human beings, better able to be in community and better able to become full-bodied individuals? If so, join us for a conversation informed by practical applications, a discussion and exchange of the ways in which we teach literature in high schools, community colleges, and universities.

Building on David Bromwich and Ernest Suarez’s seminar “General Education and the Idea of a Common Culture” from the 2022 conference at Yale University, we are interested in papers that describe specific pedagogical practices that are oriented towards creating “a common culture,” both in the form of assignments and syllabus construction, as well as activities and methods that foster a classroom environment that allows for respectful and productive dissent, dialogue, a more active and committed engagement with the class material, etc. We are also interested in larger programming at the department, school, or university level that also aims to create “a common culture.” Central to our discussion is praxis - how is literature being taught in order to encourage students’ love of literature and learning, as well as their engagement with the communities in which they live?

11) Essayists Under the Radar
Moderator: David Lazar, Professor of Creative Writing, Columbia College Chicago

Now that talk of a new “golden age of the essay” seems to have faded, the panel will discuss both the state of the contemporary essay and present the work of essayists whose work has seemed to slip through the cracks or been insufficiently valued. As a form whose boundaries have continually escaped clear definition, the essay’s status and the work of its practitioners continues to be both elusive and a source of (re)discovery. Proposals are invited on the subjects of: the contemporary essay as well as individual American and international essayists who have been less noticed in the literary canon.

12) Jane Austen
Moderators: Maria DiBattista, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, Princeton University, and Rebecca Rainof, Research Scholar, Princeton University

Papers welcome on any aspect of Jane Austen’s work, reception, contemporary adaptations of her writing, or on teaching Austen at the high school or university level.

13) Chaucer
Moderator: Megan Murton, Associate Professor of English, The Catholic University of America

Chaucer’s writings resist the familiar distinction between creative writing and literary criticism, because they are often animated by a critical response to earlier literature: Troilus and Criseyde, for instance, is at once a romance narrative and an incisive critical interpretation of prior works such as Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. This intertwining of literary criticism and literary creation also characterizes many later responses to Chaucer’s writings, from Henryson and Shakespeare to contemporary poets like Lavinia Greenlaw and Patience Agbabi.
This seminar invites papers that address this long tradition of Chaucerian reinvention and adaptation. In addition to papers on Chaucer’s own response to his ancient and medieval sources and on later writers’ responses to Chaucer, we welcome contributions from current creative writers who are engaging with Chaucer’s works in their own prose and poetry

14) Reading the Bible as Literature
Moderator: Hannibal Hamlin, Professor of English, The Ohio State University

What does it mean to read the Bible as literature? C.S. Lewis stated provocatively that “those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible.” Robert Alter and Frank Kermode, on the other hand, editors of The Literary Guide to the Bible, see the Bible as “a work of great literary force and authority, a work of which it is entirely credible that it should have shaped the minds and lives of intelligent men and women for two millennia and more.” Of that familiar notion of the “Bible as Literature,” Alter elsewhere writes that it is “needlessly concessive and condescending toward literature in any language.” Why do we assume that to read the Bible “as literature” is a peculiar, modern, and secular activity? Jesus scarcely speaks without metaphors, similes and parables, following the earlier practice of other Hebrew prophets. Moses and Miriam, Deborah and David, Mary and Simeon are singers of songs. The Song of Songs, according to Jewish and Christian tradition, is an extended allegory. The narratives of Joseph, Saul, and David are among the most sophisticated in ancient or any literature. Given the recent expansion of literary categories and genres, is there anything in the Bible—genealogies, prayers, laws, prophecies—that cannot be considered and read as literature?

This seminar will explore the reading of the Bible as literature in theory and practice. Can the Bible be both literature and Scripture or does conceiving it as the one preclude the other? Is literary criticism, or are certain critical approaches, incompatible with religious faith? What does a scriptural text have to offer to nonreligious readers? If God is, as John Donne claimed, a metaphorical God, does this mean that his creation (the most performative of verbal acts) and revelation—the two books, of nature and scripture—are also metaphorical?

Papers are invited on particular books, episodes, or passages, on features or topics common to multiple books, or on matters theoretical or methodological.

15) The (Shared) Burden of Southern Identity
Moderator: Charles Richard, Flora Levy/BORSF Professor of English, University of Louisiana--Lafayette

In 1960, historian C. Vann Woodward published a collection of essays entitled The Burden of Southern History, contending that the defining element of Southern identity is the peculiar historical experience of this region of the United States, distinguishing it from the rest of the nation. More than four decades later, Charles Reagan Wilson argued for a broader, more interdisciplinary approach with his essay, “The Burden of Southern Culture.” This seminar invites presentations, both creative and critical, that examine how the “burdens” of Southern identity are born by the characters that populate Southern literature and other forms of cultural expression. Especially welcome are presentations concerning how these burdens are shared, both within and across different communities in the South.

16) The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies
Moderator: Robert S. Levine, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland

This seminar will take stock of developments in the field of nineteenth-century American literary studies over the past two decades. It has been pre-populated by invitation, but there is room for 1-2 additional panelists. We invite proposals that both address "the new nineteenth-century American literary studies" and are examples of the new. In other words, we are looking for papers that are not simply bibliographic essays.

PLENARY PANELS (by invitation only):
1) Reading Close and Slow: Arts of Attention in Renaissance Poetry
Moderator: Sarah Beckwith, Katherine Everett Gilbert Distinguished Professor of English, Duke University

2) Faulkner, After
Moderator: Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English, Smith College

3) Auden Fifty Years Later
Moderator: Mary Jo Salter, Professor Emerita, Johns Hopkins University

4) Inventing French Modernism
Moderator: Rosanna Warren, Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago

Events:
1. Poetry Reading
Ange Mlinko, Professor of English, University of Florida

2. Fiction Reading
Susan Choi, Professor, Writing Seminars, Johns Hopkins University

3. Literary Matters Reading
Ryan Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Literary Matters, presiding

4. Presentation of Meringoff Writing Awards
Ryan Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Literary Matters, presiding

5. Banquet, October 14th
Remarks: David Mikics, President, ALSCW

ALSCW Mission Statement:
The Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers seeks to promote excellence in literary criticism and scholarship, and works to ensure that literature thrives in both scholarly and creative environments. We encourage the reading and writing of literature, criticism, and scholarship, as well as wide-ranging discussions among those committed to the reading and study of literary works.

The ALSCW offers Literary Matters at no cost to readers. Generous donations make this possible. The journal, under the expert editorship of Ryan Wilson, publishes many of the best writers in the world—including Pulitzer prize, National Book Award, and Booker prize winners—and we pay them modestly. We’re grateful they want to be in our pages and support our mission to keep literature and literary study alive in our culture. Check out our website (alscw.org), if you haven’t already, and click the link below to read our new issue.

http://www.literarymatters.org/issue-15-1/

Issue 15.1 - Literary Matters On Literary Matters

25th Annual Conference
Yale University, October 20-23

Conference Committee:
David Bromwich, Yale University
Diana Senechal, Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok, Hungary
Ernest Suarez, The Catholic University of America
Rosanna Warren, University of Chicago

Featured Events:

10/20: Vivian Gornick, The New School, "The Situation and The Story: The Art of Personal Narrative"

10/21: READING HOSTED BY LITERARY MATTERS
Presiding: Ryan Wilson, Editor-in-Chief, Literary Matters
Featuring: Grace Schulman, Baruch College, CUNY; Christian Wiman, Yale University; David Yezzi, Johns Hopkins University

10/22: Banquet
Rosanna Warren, University of Chicago
Ishion Hutchinson, Cornell University

PLENARY SESSIONS
1) Reading The Waste Land at 100
Moderator: Frances Dickey, Associate Professor of English, University of Missouri-Columbia

2) The Lives of the (American) Poets
Moderator: Willard Spiegelman, Duwain E. Hughes Jr. Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, Southern Methodist University

3) Shakespeare’s Verse: Thinking on the Line
Moderator: Lee Oser, Professor of English, The College of the Holy Cross

4) Translating Form and Aesthetics in Japanese Literature
Moderator: Dennis Washburn, Burlington Northern Foundation Professor in Asian Studies, Dartmouth University

SEMINARS

1) Proust
Moderator: Herbert Marks, Professor of Comparative Literature, Indiana University

2) Setting Poetry to Music
Moderator: Diana Senechal, Varga Katalin Gimnázium, Szolnok, Hungary

3) Ulysses at 100
Moderator: Gregory Baker, Associate Professor, Catholic University

4) Imagining the Modern Self: Literary Portraiture from Austen to the Present
Moderators: Maria DiBattista, Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English, Princeton University, and Rebecca Rainof, Associate Research Scholar, Princeton University

5) General Education and the Idea of a Common Culture
Moderators: David Bromwich, Sterling Professor of English, Yale University, and Ernest Suarez, David M. O’Connell Professor of English, Catholic University

6) Literature and Science
Moderator: Steven Meyer, Associate Professor of English, Washington University in St. Louis

7) Resurrected Genres I
Moderator: Walt Hunter, Associate Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University

8) The Jameses
Moderator: John Burt, Paul E. Prosswimmer Professor of American Literature, Brandeis University

9) Muriel Spark: Show and Tell, Surface and Depth
Moderator: Maria J. Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing, University of Minnesota

10) Life Writing
Moderator: Elizabeth D. Samet, Professor of English, U.S. Military Academy, West Point

11) Democracy and American Literature
Moderator: Robert S. Levine, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland

12) , Milton
Moderator: Tobias Gregory, Associate Professor of English, Catholic University

13) Ralph Ellison
Moderators: Paul Devlin, Associate Professor, United States Merchant Marine Academy; Kevin C. Moore, Lecturer, Stanford University

14) Periodization, the Present, and Literary Form
Moderator: Kenneth W. Warren, Fairfax M. Cone Distinguished Service Professor, Department of English, University of Chicago

15) The Art of Confession
Moderator: Gregory Pardlo, Co-Director, Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers University--Camden Branch; Visiting Associate Professor of Practice in Literature and Creative Writing, NYU Abu Dhabi

16) Figures of Civil War
Moderator: Michèle Lowrie, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago