Saturday, January 9, 2027: 5:15 PM-6:30 PM
409B (LACC)
The conference year, 2027, marks the centenary of two momentous events in T. S. Eliot’s life: his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism and his naturalization as a citizen of the United Kingdom. Accordingly, this panel, sponsored by the International T. S. Eliot Society, focuses on the broad theme of Eliot’s transitions: his engagements with or contributions to ideas, narratives, and metaphors of conversion, transformation, identity, migration, and pilgrimage; his place in the many transitions of twentieth-century literary and intellectual history; and, of course, these two major transitions in Eliot’s biography, how they shaped his work, and what new archival sources including the Emily Hale letters might have to say about them. Our three speakers will be asked to keep their presentations to 15-20 minutes maximum including introductions, leaving at least 15 minutes (and quite possibly more) for open discussion at the end of the session. In the course of that session, Jennifer Cranfill will present a new reading of Eliot's Four Quartets as a stylistic and philosophical transition from (but, crucically, not a repudiation of) The Waste Land occasioned by the necessities of making "a response to global catastrophe"; Sanghoon Oh will read the late Eliot's thought as reflecting a transition towards cultural pluralism brought about by the poet's experiences representing the British state in various international cultural endeavors during and after World War II; and Bita Takrimi will recontextualize Eliot's career amid the larger transitions of a transnational and translinguistic modernism, putting Eliot's own work and evolutions in conversation with those of the Czech poet Jiří Kolář This panel, composed entirely of graduate students and early-career scholars from universities across the US, reflects a diverse range of backgrounds and areas of interest, even as its component papers unite in seeking to read Eliot's work in ways that challenge and reach beyond national, cultural, linguistic, and other boundaries.
Organizer:
Harrison Glaze