Proposed Special Session: "Anarchism and Literature"
2004 M/MLA Annual Convention

November 4-7, St. Louis, Missouri

Studies of the complex historical relationship between the anarchist movement and literary avant-gardes have proliferated since the publication of Richard Sonn's Anarchism and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle France (1989) and David Weir's Anarchy and Culture (1995). What once might have seemed a curiosity now appears to have been central to the development of literary aesthetics: from the Pre-Raphaelites to the Symbolists, from the Expressionists to the Dadas, and from Pound's Vorticism to the Black Mountain poets, modernism is marked by anarchist struggles.This panel is an open invitation for papers that explore this conjunction between the aesthetic and the political. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

-- The influence of anarchism on specific authors or literary works

-- Literary works by anarchists and their political fellow-travellers (e.g., Ba Jin, Hugo Ball, Kenneth Rexroth, Louise Michel)

-- The symbolic role of "anarchist" characters in literary works

-- Anarchist critiques of representation and literary/cultural struggles

-- Literature that bears witness to moments in anarchist history -- e.g., the Spanish Civil War, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Lawrence strike

-- Anarchist aesthetics as part of labor culture (e.g., the Wobblies, the CNT)

-- Saint Louis's anarcho-literary connections (e.g., Magon's newspaper Regeneracion, Emma Goldman's speeches, the anarchic "Reign of the Rabble" in the 1877 Railroad Strike)

-- What makes a literary text "anarchist"?

-- Literary criticism by anarchists (e.g., Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Dora Marsden, Herbert Read, Paul Goodman): how does ideology inform interpretation?

-- What is anarchist literary theory?

-- What's next for anarchist studies in the discipline of English?

Send abstracts by April 15th, 2004 to:

Jesse Cohn

Dept. of English

Purdue University North Central

1401 South U.S. 421

Westville, Indiana 46391