"Wordsworths Narrative Mediations"
Organizer: Chuck Rzepka (Boston University)Narrative in Wordsworth's poetry has traditionally been a major focus of critical attention and, often, of ideological critique. This CFP solicits new approaches to, and readings of, Wordsworth’s use of narrative as means, measure, and mask. Narrative is here conceived quite malleably: as a tool or device mediating the poet’s agency and his poetry’s affect, as conduit or recursus, as speech act or index of intention, as flow or overflow, as (of course) portrait or frame, and, in general, as a means of negotiation, prevarication, temporization, and temporalization. Subtopics of interest include any and all things conceivably related to poetry as a genre of narrative (as distinct from strictly descriptive or explanatory or expostulatory) mediation: meter as ameliorator (of passion) or as ornament (of prose) or as measure (musical or otherwise) of speech; diction as a way of mediating “real language”; the impact of narrative continuities and discontinuities, narrative genres and questions of gender, narrative as telling and "telling" (numbering), and "telling" (discerning).
