Kurt Vonnegut’s Artistic Horology: The Problem of Time in Troubled Times

This panel for the 2019 Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), to be held in Washington, DC, from March 21-24, 2019, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of NeMLA, will focus on Kurt Vonnegut’s complex treatment of time in his work.

Throughout his career, Kurt Vonnegut’s unusual examination of time animated complex plot lines, added depth and layering to his characterization, fueled biting social commentary, and posed challenging philosophical questions on matters related to mortality, morality, and the purpose of life. Vonnegut’s fiction and non-fiction addresses the problem of time in troubled times. In this sense, Vonnegut’s art can be viewed as a form of artistic “horology.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines horology as “the study and measurement of time,” a concern integral to Vonnegut’s vision.

Across his fourteen novels, from his dystopian debut Player Piano (1952) to the so-called “stew” of his final novel Timequake (1997), time alterations and unusual chronologies are central. Vonnegut’s short stories and non-fiction works display a similar obsession with time. For instance, Vonnegut begins his last work of non-fiction published in his lifetime, the essay collection A Man Without a Country (2005), with a statement about how his own sense of humor was defined by coming of age in times of trouble: “I grew up at a time when comedy in this country was superb—it was the Great Depression.”

This panel seeks papers related to Vonnegut’s treatment of time in his fiction and non-fiction. Paper proposals may address this theme directly or tangentially. All approaches are welcome.

Paper proposals (250-300 words) must be posted through NeMLA’s online system by September 30, 2018, at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login.

The panel description and link to submit an abstract for this panel are available at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17527

Decision emails will be sent out after the submission deadline, no later than October 15, 2018.  NeMLA requires that accepted panelists pay their membership/registration fees by December 1, 2018, in order to present at the 2019 convention.  Please send any questions about this specific panel to Jeffrey Hotz at jhotz@esu.edu.

In Ancient rhetorical theory, ekphrasis refers to the use of language to make an audience imagine a scene. However, the deeper function of ekphrasis, implicit in its descriptive use, is its rhetorical ability to call attention to features of a subject that may be invisible to the physical sense of sight—thus using the visible as a means of subtly exposing or revealing the invisible. The NeMLA session, “To Render Visible: Ekphrastic Mirrors in American Literature,” invites papers that explore how the chiasmic reflections of an ekphrasis reveal the interior subjectivity, ideology and the desire of its author.Please submit proposals to the official NeMLA website no later than 09/30/2018.

In his influential book Disability Aesthetics, Tobin Siebers makes two interventions. The first is to argue that modern aesthetics has long relied on disability as one of its defining features, even while neglecting to acknowledge this dependence explicitly. The second is to advocate on behalf of a deliberate praxis of disability aesthetics, which “embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken,” yet shows it to be “not less beautiful, but more so, as a result.” Ask literary scholars who work in the nineteenth century to think of a poet who best exemplifies Siebers’s argument, and few would be likely to name Walt Whitman. Some of the best-known segments in Leaves of Grass indulge in a full-fledged endorsement of able-bodiedness. Indeed, a monotonous virility seems to characterize much of “Song of Myself,” “Children of Adam,”  “Calamus,” and his recently discovered essaysGuide to Manly Health and Training. Look closer, however, and Whitman’s championing of male “Physique” betrays a more complex orientation toward the body. Whitman’s corpus undermines imperatives to inhabit a fully normative physicality. His poems and prose linger in the experience of both physical and affective pain; dismantle the binary of bodily wholeness and partiality; unfold alternative mobilities; and face with unmitigated candor his own familiarity with illness, injury, mortality, and aging. From his Civil War writings to Specimen Days, and Collect, on through to the late clusters appended to Horace Traubel’s 1897 edition of Leaves, Whitman wrote increasingly from the vantage point and on behalf of a disability aesthetics.

Scholars have begun putting Whitman and disability studies in conversation in recent years. In the essay “How Dare a Sick Man or an Obedient Man Write Poems?” Robert Scholnick has demonstrated that while Whitman’s antebellum writing frequently exploits figures of disability to posit a “metonymic” relationship between national crisis and bodily impairment, Whitman’s later writing, especially the prose and poetry inspired by his work as a nurse during the Civil War, demonstrates a shift in his appreciation of individual suffering toward a national culture of empathy. Stephen Kuusisto has called Whitman’s Specimen Days the “progenitor” of the “disability memoir,” “a wholly conscious rendering of altered physicality in prose.” Turning to Whitman’s poetics of bereavement, Max Cavitch has explored the Lincoln elegies for their insistence on combining the debilitating experience of mourning with “the staggering pathos of erotic liberation.” In her recent book The Afterlives of Specimens, Lindsay Tuggle explores Whitman’s connection to theories of mortality, phantom limb syndrome, and practices of embalming to propose that one of the poet’s pivotal concepts is the relationship between flesh and spirit, which displaces the logic of the able body in favor of “ephemerality and spectrality.”

To continue building on this work, Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life will publish a special issue on Whitman, disability, and conceptions of illness, medicine, and health, in conjunction with the bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birthday in May 2019. We’re including a list of potential topics below, though we hope to receive submissions that also exceed these preliminary ideas. For scholars and writers interested in contributing to this issue, we are currently seeking abstract submissions of 350 to 500 words by September 30th, sent to donjamesphd@gmail.com and claremul@sas.upenn.edu. Proposed essays may range between 3500 and 6000 words. Acceptances will be made by October 15th, with the expectation of receiving the proposed contribution by January 15th. Please feel free to contact us by email if you have additional queries.

Possible topics might include:

• Whitman’s role in the Civil War hospitals, his role as caregiver, his proximity to illness
• Whitman’s biographical references to “war paralysis”
• Whitman and phrenology
• Sex and disability in Leaves of Grass
• Whitman and old age, his time in Camden, late poems, and deathbed edition of the Leaves of Grass
• Whitman and mortality/immortality; his extensive preparation for his own death

NeMLA Annual Convention – Washington D.C. – 21-24 March, 2019

Since Fight Club earned Chuck Palahniuk notoriety, critical praise and derision and a committed cult following on the heels of the 1996 novel publication and 1999’s David Fincher film adaptation starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, Helena Bonham-Carter and Jared Leto, the author and his work have struggled to find critical legitimacy. His reputation, especially at public readings, has been built upon accentuating all the ways grotesque horror can become comically absurd. As he continues to experiment with new forms that transgress not only literary traditions but expectations for his own work, Palahniuk seems to be acutely aware of both his artistic growth and the conflict over his legacy, suggesting that he should be taken more seriously as a 20th and 21st century American literary figure.

In NeMLA 49, the question that was raised was whether Palahniuk’s work was even worth studying. Following on from that discussion, and in light of the publication of his newest novel Adjustment Day, the question is: is Palahniuk worth teaching? What relevance does his work have to our times, if any? What can students learn about writing, literature, or society by reading and analyzing Palahniuk’s texts? How does the author engage with the political, the social, and/or the cultural, and does it even matter?

This panel welcomes submissions that seek to answer these questions. In particular, we are interested in submissions by those with personal experience in teaching Palahniuk’s work. Interested speakers should submit a 250-300 word abstract and short bio through the NeMLA portal by September 30th (decisions will be notified by October 15th): https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17711.