Extreme texts in new locales: 'At the Dusk of Literature?'

We at J2 are pleased to share a call for papers for the upcoming conference At the Dusk of Literature? — Twenty-First-Century North American Writing in Extremis. Editor Divya Victor will appear as the conference’s keynote speaker and draws from her recent J2 feature, “Extreme Texts.” 

From the CFP:

One notable example of present-day poetic writing’s renegotiation of extremity has been recently offered by the American conceptual poet, scholar, and editor Divya Victor, curator of the special feature “Extreme Texts” published in Jacket2. For Victor, writing the call for papers in 2017 only several months into Trump’s presidency meant taking into account the reality in which “a majority of Americans had acquiesced to live, normally, under extreme conditions, with denuded civil rights, attenuated freedoms of press, increasing inequality of wages, and diminishing access to medical care, and under misogynist, transphobic, and supremacist policies.” “Extreme Texts” offers an impressive range of modes of thinking about the notion of extremity in contemporary experimental poetry and poetics, reclaiming the term’s complexity visible in the ways the contributors investigated the condition of texts in terms of their own limit(s) and excess(es), evident in their material or affective extremity, as well as manifested in their radical philosophical and conceptual stakes, which, as Victor had certainly hoped, successfully accounts for the complexity of the term “extremity,” freeing it from the current association with “extremism.”

The conference will take place September 28–30, 2020, at the University of Łódź, Poland, and is organized by Dr. Małgorzata Myk and Mark Tardi. For more information, visit the call for papers.