Brooklyn College Graduate English Conference
Saturday 3 May, 2008
Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn, New York

The vernal, the new and the imagination all evoke human experience of, and human potential for, creation in the world. Spring is the time of organic bloomage, of youthfulness and the bucolic, when Nature’s growth is sudden and often praised; Chaucer famously writes:
Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.

Beyond the myriad of literary allusions to the matter and spirit of spring, we may find broader topics and issues at stake; how the concepts of fecundity and creation, the earth and the artist, correspond to the history of literature in English and its criticism. We hope to gather papers that suggest a correlation between the vernal, the imagination, and the new.

Paper topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Ecology and the Body
The Peasant and the Harvest in the Novel
Making New: Form and Poetic Space
Youth, Juvenilia, and the Emergence of the Literary Work
The Romantic Imagination and the Possibility of Change
Alchemical and Religious Transformations in Medieval Literature
Autochthonism and Postcolonial Literature
Metamorphoses and the Fantastic
Representations of Landscape
The Political Imagination and Literature
Weather and Temperament
Origins of a Genre
Inspiration and Imagination
Desire and the Avant-Garde
Revolution and the Crises of Modernism
Ending: Prophecy and the Rhetoric of Closure
Authenticity and Value in Modern Poetry
Industry and the Pastoral
(New) Imperialism and the Politics of the Environment
Spring as Place and Literary Concept
The Youthful: Nostalgia and Exuberance
New Criticism

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to: bcvernality@gmail.com
(Presentations will be allotted 15 minutes)
Deadline: 20 March 2008