Elegy: New Approaches

Department of English Studies and the Centre for Poetry and Poetics

Durham University, September 14, 2018

Extended Deadline for Abstracts: 3 August 2018

Keynote Speaker: Professor Stephen Regan

Elegy, as Jahan Ramanzani observes, is the ‘mimesis of mourning’. It is the poetic form and distillation of our common response to loss, meeting the need for consolation and renewal in the face of death. It fulfils several cathartic requirements: the expression of grief, anger, and disbelief; the idealisation of what is lost; and the preservation of its memory. Elegy’s catalyst can emerge as the death of a loved one or exemplary figure (often a fellow poet, as in Alfred Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’), the loss of love itself, or the loss of values that have receded from the cultural consciousness.

Traditionally considered as a mode of consolation and reassurance, in modernity these tendencies have sometimes been questioned and rejected. How can the elegy function effectively, for example, in the era of police brutality and Black Lives Matter, or in the aftermath of the recent mass shootings at US high schools? Conversely, can elegy as a genre of response open up new ways of thinking about socio-political issues – can the homoerotics of certain Roman love elegies, for instance, help us explore the grief reaction to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s? For this conference, we seek papers that investigate new approaches to the elegy in its many forms, be it the elegies of the Civil Rights Movement, responses to political violence (such as the hauntingly beautiful poems of Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley), elegies of Diaspora, or the prominent elegies in the English tradition. We also welcome papers that consider the elegiac response as something that exceeds the poetic lyric: a diary entry of Woolf’s, for example, deliberates whether ‘elegy’ should supplant ‘novel’ when describing works such as To the Lighthouse, and traditions of ritual mourning such as keening can be approached as intersections of social and literary conventions. Our aim is to foreground these ‘texts’ as elegiac in their own right and to showcase recent research in this area.

This conference is envisioned as a forum for reflection on the current state of research on elegy and on potentially fruitful directions for future exploration. The organisers are especially keen to elicit proposals pertaining to new and emergent areas of interest, and/or which take an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. We also welcome proposals relating to elegies outside of the Anglophone tradition, although for the purpose of this conference all presentations must be delivered in English.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on the theme of elegy and the elegiac, broadly considered. Please send a 250 word abstract and a mini-biography (50-100 words) to Dr Laura McKenzie at elegy2018@gmail.com by 3 August 2018. For further details visit the conference website at https://bit.ly/2IMY5ya.

Contact Info: 

Dr Laura McKenzie

Department of English Studies

Durham University