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Call for Papers

one fatal faded(pinkish or
yellowish maybe)piece
of pitiful paper--

(CP 697)

Members and friends of the E. E. Cummings Society meet to exchange thoughts and insights at two scholarly conferences each year:

  1. the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, held in late February at the University of Louisville and
  2. the American Literature Association conference, held every year in May on the weekend before Memorial Day. In odd years, the conference is held in Boston; in even years, it is usually held on the west coast.

Calls for papers for these and other conferences of interest to society members are posted below.

CFP: E. E. Cummings Sessions at the American Literature Association's 33rd annual conference, Chicago, IL, May 26-29, 2022

The E. E. Cummings Society invites proposals for two panels at the American Literature Association conference, to be held at the Palmer House Hilton, Chicago on May 26-29, 2022.

Panel 1: Cummings and Transcendence
In 1960, Norman Friedman declared that Cummings' "philosophy of life" was "transcendental, romantic, prelapsarian, organicist, and individualistic. The same is publicly available in the writings of many others, such as Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson" (Art 66). We seek papers examining, critiquing, clarifying, or complicating these assertions through a close reading of any Cummings work(s).

Panel 2: Open Topic
We invite proposals for papers on any aspect of Cummings' life or work. Proposals that touch upon the following topics will be especially welcome:

  • Readings of little-studied Cummings poems
  • Re-readings of much-studied Cummings poems
  • Cummings the modernist poet
  • Cummings' art during the "Crucial Decade between 1917 and 1927" [Friedman, (Re) Valuing 48] (Camp Devens, the flu pandemic, The Enormous Room, Him
  • Cummings and the contradictions of the now
  • Cummings and Re-Vision [For some drafts of poems, see the Cummings Archive: http://cummingsarchive.org/ ]

Submit 250-400 word abstracts to Michael Webster () by January 15, 2022.

For further information, consult the web page of the American Literature Association conference.

Michael Webster
Professor of English
235 Lake Huron Hall
Grand Valley State University
Allendale, MI 49401
e-mail