ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

How can figures of form, rhyme schemes, repetitions, rhythmic elements which pervade literary works - often in so far as they are literary – be distinguished from the formulaic? When does a metaphor become a dead metaphor? When does repetition turn from a literary / stylistic device into cliche, into the hackneyed or everyday? More broadly speaking, how do all of these questions contribute to our (human) ability to recognize repetition as such in its difference from what is being repeated? Papers addressing all aspects of figures which oscillate between the heights of form and the abysses of the formulaic welcome. Topics might include but are not limited to: lists, “received ideas”, rhetorical questions (how can they be distinguished as rhetorical), dead as opposed to living metaphors, and other figures of repetition.

Friday, March 24

Mary Hong, Johns Hopkins University
“A Great Talker upon Little Matters”: Trivializing the Everyday in Emma”
Stefan Hoesel-Uhlig, King’s College, University of Cambridge
“Wordsworth’s Litotes”
Hannah Freed-Thall, UC Berkeley
” ‘Cette Voix Etrange’: Haunting Language in Poe and Mallarmé”
Jakob Norberg, Princeton University
“The Black Book: Karl Kraus among the Philistines”

Saturday, March 25

Renee Tursi, Quinnipiac University
“The Poetics of Habit”
Jeroen Mettes, Leiden University
“The Composition of the New: Form and Singularity”
Carolyn Alifair Skebe, SUNY, University at Albany
“Punning Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time”
Brigitte Rath, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat, Munich
“Repetition in Narrative”