ALA 2023 (Boston) The Great American Novel at 100

How do we understand its mixed composition, its challenge to novelistic chronology, and its shifts of voice from persona to persona? What do we make of the fact that much of it is stolen? Is the dialogue between the urbane interrogator and the one he calls “mon vieux coco” central? What does the text teach us about the canonical idea of a “great American novel”?

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Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape

In Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape (Viking 2021), a sort of world tour guide to wastelands that have reverted to a sort of wildness, Cal Flyn devotes a chapter to Paterson, NJ, that recalls her visit with the editor of Weird New Jersey to the ruins below the Falls where they encounter a lone inhabitant.

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MLA 2021 William Carlos Williams Thinking

A session dedicated to exploring William Carlos Williams’s thinking about the nature, function and operation of the mind. What would it mean to read Williams without privileging familiar terms and categories like imagism, objectivism or, more provocatively, the ordinary things which have so often anchored critical treatments of his work?

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