Call For Papers
𐫱𐫱𐫱𐫱𐫱
New Lights on the Poem: Looking Back, Looking Forward
Fifth Biennial Conference, Université du Québec à Montréal, June 3-5, 2025
Languages : French, English
Established with the aim of fostering international exchanges and sharing critical perspectives, conceptual frameworks and recent theories of lyric, INSL will celebrate its tenth anniversary in 2025. Following meetings aimed at situating the lyric, invigorating conceptual and theoretical approaches, and bridging forms, corpora and disciplines (Situating Lyric, Boston, 2017; The Between-ness of Lyric, Lausanne 2019), INSL has explored poetry as an experience, as well as the implications of such an experience (Poetry. Experience. Attention, Oslo, 2023). This fifth congress proposes to deepen an inquiry initiated in 2021 (“Between criticism and creative writing”, Open Windows on Lyric, Leuven, 2021) by positioning itself at the crossroads of theories and practices.
The poem is current in that it establishes a novel relationship each time, challenging our relationship to time, the world, language, and meaning. By New Lights, we mean the various ways in which the poem inscribes itself in history and interrogates it in the present. The avenues necessary to develop a theory of lyric capable of understanding its various manifestations, especially outside the book, certainly call for innovation. What conceptual tools and forms need to be reinvested or revisited to grasp its incessant reactualizations? What role can these tools play, not only in renewing practices but also in how we share poetry between forms and languages, or transmit its knowledge, particularly in our teaching? Given its heuristic nature, what does the poem, both yesterday and today, tell us about contemporary times? What kind of “distribution of the sensible,” to use Jacques Rancière’s words, does it propose?
The International Network for the Study of Lyric (INSL), in collaboration with the Department of Literary Studies and the Faculty of Arts at UQAM, invites researchers, teachers, students, poets, critics, translators and publishers to submit proposals. This conference, aiming to both take stock of recent developments in lyric theories and strengthen the links between criticism and creation, will feature activities different from traditional conferences. In addition to proposals for papers, we solicit proposals for lecture-performances, round tables, or workshops, which will explore, from a broad perspective, the conference theme, and which will fall into one or more of the following fields:
- Corpus study
- Theoretical proposal
- Interdisciplinary or intermedial approach
- Research-creation
- Translation
- Publishing
- Teaching poetry
Please submit your proposal (250 to 300 words) by August 31, 2024, to insl_montreal_2025@uqam.ca, along with the following information:
- Name, institutional affiliation (if applicable)
- Postal and email contacts
- Title of the proposal, its abstract, and bibliographical references
- Field in which the proposal falls
- A short bio-bibliographical notice.
Contact the organizers: Denise Brassard, UQAM: brassard.denise@uqam.ca; Marc André Brouillette, UQAM: brouillette.marc-andre@uqam.ca; Nathalie Watteyne, Université de Sherbrooke: nathalie.watteyne@usherbrooke.ca.
Scientific Committee : Denise Brassard (University of Quebec in Montreal); Marc André Brouillette (University of Quebec in Montreal); Jan Baetens (Leuven University); Gustavo Guerrero (Cergy Paris University); Laure Michel (University Lumière – Lyon 2); Nathalie Watteyne (Sherbrooke University)