Last updated by kprzemek on 2016-11-17. Originally submitted by tomski on 2015-03-27.
WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series features internationally renowned scholars visiting the Faculty of English to share their research and professional expertise with WA faculty and students.
Robert Lowell and the History of Poetic Self-Revelation
by
Prof. Thomas Austenfeld
Friday, March 27, 13.15, room 601 A
Everyone more than welcome to attend!
This talk attempts to bring together the confessional mode of American poetry, pioneered by Lowell and Sexton, with the sociologically rooted changes in the American canon since the nineteen-sixties. Together, these two events inaugurated fundamental modifications in lyrical expression in which self-revelation became normative. The lyric poets of our day who have inherited this practice have turned disclosure into declamatory identitarian proclamation. An age of identitarian poetry has resulted.
THOMAS AUSTENFELD is Professor of American Literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds MA and Ph.D. degrees in English and American Literature from the University of Virginia and taught at American universities for twenty years before returning to Europe. Thomas Austenfeld is the author of American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman (2001) and the editor of Kay Boyle for the Twenty-First Century (2008) as well as co-editor of Writing American Women (2009, SPELL 23) and Terrorism and Narrative Practice (2011). His edited volume Critical Insights: Barbara Kingsolver appeared in 2010. He has published scholarly articles on authors as diverse as Lord Byron, Wallace Stevens, Katherine Anne Porter, Peter, Taylor, Thomas Wolfe, Josef Pieper, Derek Walcott, Louise Erdrich, Philip Roth, Frank Norris, Flannery O'Connor, and Robert Lowell, as well as bibliographic essays in the annual American Literary Scholarship. His edited volume Katherine Anne Porter's Ship of Fools: New Interpretations and Transatlantic Contexts is forthcoming from the University of North Texas Press in April 2015. He is currently at work on a book about Robert Lowell.
