Eberhard Karls Universitaet Tuebingen
Freudenstadt
Zollernblick-Lauterbad
July 31 – August 4, 2011

“Poetic Economy: Ellipsis and Redundancy in Literature” is about a seemingly contradictory topic: how can literature be both, elliptic on the one hand and excessive and redundant of words and other elements of language on the other? One way of resolving these apparent contradictions would be to consider the question of “too little” or “too much” not in absolute but in relative terms. An aphorism may have too many words and a Victorian novel may lack the very words needed for a reader to regard it as a success. But this leaves us with the tricky question of decorum: what is the idea or purpose to which a particular number of words is appropriate and by which we measure the verbal economy of a literary work of art?

The venue was be a beautifully situated hotel in the Black Forest (near Freudenstadt), which is partly owned by Tuebingen University (see http://www.zollernblick-lauterbad.de).

As the emphasis of the Connotations symposia is on critical debate, talks were be 30 minutes, leaving another 30 minutes for discussion.

A photo gallery of this symposium can be found here

Programme

A PDF-file of the programme can be found here.

Monday, August 1
9:00 Matthias Bauer (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen): Welcome and Introduction

9:30 Rajeev S. Patke (National University of Singapore): ‘Elegance’ and Poetic Economy in John Crowe Ransom and F. T. Prince

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 Frank J. Kearful (Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn): A Field of Forces: Robert Lowell’s “The March 1” and “The March 2”

12:00-13:30 Lunch

13:30 Judith Saunders (Marist College, Poughkeepsie, NY): Poetic Analogy: Its Simultaneously Replicating and Generative Function. Billy Collins’s “Albany” as Illustrative Example

14:30 Edward Lobb (Queen’s University, Ontario): Aposiopesis and Ellipsis in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00 Neil Browne (Oregon State University): The Economy of Loss and Abundance in Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl

17:00 Raymond−Jean Frontain (University of Central Arkansas): Emily Dickinson and the Delay of Ecstasy

19:00 Dinner

Tuesday, August 2
8:30 Carmen Dörge and Angelika Zirker (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen): Ellipsis and Redundancy in John Donne’s Poetry

9:30 Inge Leimberg (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster): “Thy words do finde me out.” Reading the last line of “Affliction (I)”

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 Robert Crosman (University of Alaska, Anchorage): Shakespeare & Poetic Economy: The Example of The Sonnets

12:00 Arthur Kinney (Renaissance Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst): John Lyly’s Poetic Economy

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:00 Sven Wagner (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): The Case for Figurativity in English-Language Haiku

15:00 Aida Suleymenova (Far Eastern Federal University, Vladivostok, Russia): Ellipsis or jitarazu in the Japanese poetry tanka and haiku (the poetic calculation and the image contextualization)

16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30 Teresa Brus (University of Wrocław, Poland): “AND” as Terminus Technicus in Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal

19:00 Dinner

Wednesday, August 3
8:30 Hannes Bergthaller (National Chung-Hsing University, Taiwan): “Self-destruction from Excess of Self”: Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”

9:30 Elena Anastasaki (The Open University of Greece): ‘Leaps and Bounds’: Hawthorne’s Strategies of Poetic Economy

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00 Maurice Charney (Rutgers University, NJ): Pinter’s Fractured Discourse in The Homecoming

12:00 David Fishelov (Hebrew University, Jerusalem): The Economy of Literary Interpretation

13:00-14:00 Lunch

14:30 Excursion to Mummelsee; afterwards Dinner at Zollernblick

Thursday, August 4
9:00 Margit Peterfy (Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz): Pictorial Imagination as Poetic Economy: Flannery O’Connor’s Use of Geometry and Color in Selected Short Stories

10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30 William Harmon (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill): “Mistah Kurtz—he dead” in Company: Redundancy and Ellipsis

11:30 Maik Goth (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): Verbal and Narrative Economy in Richard Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica

12:30-14:00 Lunch

14:00 Andrew James (Chikushi Jogakuen University, Japan): Using Simple Words to Do Extraordinary Things: Graham Swift’s Experimental Use of Cliché in The Light of Day

15:00 Lesley D. Clement (Lakehead University, Ontario): Interstitial Spaces: Turning the Pages of David Wiesner’s and Roberto Innocenti’s Hyperrealistic Picturebooks Click here if you want to learn more about former Symposia.