ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This session’s papers cover a wide range of topics, all of which deal with aspects of poetry that at first sight may appear to be “in the margins” of this genre: There is what seems to be conventional ‘courtly poetry’, in the case of Shota Rustaveli’s The Man in the Panther Skin, an epic written around 1200 A.D. in Georgia. Suddenly, the convention is undercut by an encounter between a lion and a leopard which begins as a courtship but ends in mortal combat—predicting that love will eventually disappear into mortal hate. Covering a somewhat later period yet retaining the animal image, the second paper presents a comparison of European Renaissance emblem books and Taoist Chinese poetry. Both genres explore ways in which animals were used as symbolic tools to focus the readers’ minds on the ineffable and to bring them into contact with divinity. The third paper focuses on poetry from the modern period: Baudelaire’s and Gertrude Stein’s prose poems can be seen as their authors’ attempts at addressing the increasing isolation of the two poets in their world. They critique thoughtless consumption and link questions of artistic production to self-production and material culture. By choosing the genre of prose poem and refusing a generic identity, both authors can traverse realms, high art and newspaper culture, aesthetic and social phenomena, and negotiate these realms critically.

Friday, March 24

Bert Beynan, The Katharine Gibbs School
“The Lion-Leopard Fight in Shota Rustaveli’s ‘The Man in the Panther Skin.’”
Thomas Kealy, Colby-Sawyer College
“Speaking Through Animals: Encounters with Emblems of Divinity”
Carrie Matthews, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“An Economics of Critique/Critique of Economics: Prose Poems by Charles Baudelaire and Gertrude Stein”