CFP: “Mourning Arcadia: Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World” (UPJV – 13-14 mars 2025)
Mourning Arcadia:
Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World
CORPUS – UR UPJV 4295
CERCLL – UR UPJV 4283
SAIT (Société Angliciste : Arts, Images, Textes)
Université de Picardie – Jules Verne, Amiens
13-14 March 2025
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Caroline Bertonèche, Université Grenoble Alpes
Prof. David Scourfield, Maynooth University
This conference aims to trace the recent evolution of the pastoral elegy and look at new readings of canonical works within a genre inherited from classical antiquity, such as Milton’s “Lycidas”, Shelley’s “Adonais”, Tennyson’s In Memoriam or Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”. In “‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy” (1999), Sandra Gilbert famously contends that the First World War caused the mutations—even the disintegration—of the genre and permanently compromised its consolatory function. An unbridgeable gulf came to separate two modes of affect, Milton’s, Shelley’s and Tennyson’s expression of sorrow and the new “defiant poetics of grief” conveyed in the “monstrous” pastoral elegies of modernity (198). Has the genre really disintegrated in the mud of No Man’s Land, or has it taken new forms? In Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2012), Iain Twiddy suggests that the pastoral elegy has not died out but rather that it has evolved and ramified into new shapes in the wake of the traumatic historical events of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and of the current environmental crisis.
As Terry Gifford points out in the afterword to New Versions of Pastoral (2009), the ecological crisis has dramatically altered our perception of the genre, by making the retreat to a bucolic setting impossible: “We could retreat to Arcadia. Now Arcadia has its revenge on us” (246). No longer does Arcadia help the poet to mourn. Worse, it now befalls the poet to mourn for Arcadia, as no corner of the world may provide a pastoral retreat for the grieving soul. Now that nature itself has been depleted of its potential for regeneration, can the genre still provide consolation? According to Deborah Lilley in The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing (2020), “the correlation between human wishes and the natural world, established in Theocritus’s first Idyll by the corresponding reaction of flora and fauna to the death of the herdsman Daphnis, is at once upset and reinstated in new, and newly verifiable, contexts, by problems such as pollution and climate change” (119). The terminology recently adopted by critics, such as Gifford’s “post-pastoral”, Farrier’s “toxic pastoral”, Sullivan’s “dark pastoral”, McSweeney’s “necropastoral”, tries to account for these radical shifts in the relations between humanity and nature.
What happens to the genre when traditional binary divides collapse, such as the divide between the human and the non-human, the pastoral and the urban, the past and the future, the living and the dead (McSweeney, The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults)? Is the time gone when nature held a mirror to the poet’s soul? How have fertility rites mutated, now that nature’s potential for regeneration has been altered by anthropogenic activities? In what ways is temporality affected by the awareness that the greatest loss is yet to come? What textual forms can this mourning in advance take? How have the conventional tropes of the pastoral elegy evolved? Have elevation, apotheosis, deification and catasterism been replaced by more subterranean becomings? How has this traditionally masculine genre been reclaimed by women artists? How do postcolonial readings revisit canonical pastoral elegies? How do BAME artists wrestle with the problematic history of the genre?
Lastly, the metamorphoses of the pastoral elegy invite us to revise generic boundaries by looking at its new forms in fiction and drama. They also lead us to rethink intermedial relations and to consider the visual and musical transpositions of a poetic mode historically linked to other art forms. How are the tropes associated with the pastoral elegy translated or reconfigured into music and image? How is the classic literary and visual topos of the “Tomb in Arcadia”—the “Et in Arcadia Ego” commented on by Erwin Panofsky in his famous analysis of Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1637-1638)—re-invented and transposed? How is the pastoral elegy re-mediated in musical adaptations, such as Ralph Vaughan Williams’s An Oxford Elegy (1947-1949), based on Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”? How are the landscapes of mourning, or inscription poetry (a post-pastoral intermedial mode), revisited from an ecocentric perspective by twentieth and twenty-first-century artists, such as Derek Jarman in his garden at Dungeness, or Ian Hamilton Finlay at Little Sparta? How may the “affective turn” apply to the visual and musical transpositions of the mode? How are the senses appealed to in the (post-)pastoral elegies (re-)mediated in music and image?
We invite contributors to reconsider the pastoral elegy through diverse critical paradigms, such as ecocriticism, ecofeminism, queer studies, postcolonial studies, material studies, sensory studies, affect studies, ethics, trauma studies, post-humanism.
Paper proposals are invited to explore some of the following topics:
– Mutations of the pastoral elegy in various genres: poetry, fiction, drama, essay, life writing
– New readings of canonical pastoral elegies
– Revision of traditional tropes: pathetic fallacy, ekphrasis, hypotyposis
– Revision of traditional topoi: vegetal/mineral metamorphoses
– New modes of affect connecting the human and the non-human
– Local/regional/national/racial identities as questioned by post-pastoral elegies
– Ecofeminist reclaimings of the post-pastoral elegy
– Post-pastoral elegies in art: music, the visual arts, landscape gardening
– “Et in Arcadia Ego”: Death in Arcadia
– Landscapes of mourning/Landscape and trauma: from death in the pastoral elegy to the death of the pastoral elegy
– Environmental elegy, scientific discourse and the post-human
– The impact of anthropogenic activities on the mutations of the genre: toxicity, the “dark fecundity” of nature (McSweeney)
– Urban elegies as post-pastoral elegies, textual or visual explorations of urban spaces colonised by nature (Urbex)
– The impact of pandemics on nature conceived as a space for consolation
Abstracts of 250 words, written in English, together with a short biographical notice, should be sent to Xavier Giudicelli (xavier.giudicelli@univ-reims.fr), Bastien Goursaud (bastien.goursaud@u-picardie.fr), Marie Laniel (marie.laniel@u-picardie.fr) and Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans (aurelie.thiria-meulemans@u-picardie.fr) by 15 September 2024.
Farrier, David, “Toxic Pastoral: Comic Failure and Ironic Nostalgia in Contemporary British Environmental Theatre”. Journal of Ecocriticism 6 (2): 1-15. Retrieved from https://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/joe/article/view/559
Gifford, Terry. Pastoral. London: Routledge, 1999.
Gilbert, Sandra. “‘Rats’ Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti) Pastoral Elegy”. New Literary History 30.1 (Winter, 1999): 179-201.
James, David, and Philip Tew (ed.). New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and Contemporary Responses to the Tradition. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.
Lambert, Ellen Zetzel. Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976.
Lassen, Christian. Camp Comforts: Reparative Gay Literature in Times of AIDS. Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript: Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2011.
Letissier, Georges. « Entre éclipse des voix et réticence de l’aveu : les “Petites Chambres d’échos” de la poésie d’A.E. Housman ». Résonances d’Écho. Polysèmes 20 (2018). Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/polysemes/4242
Lilley, Deborah. The New Pastoral in Contemporary British Writing. London: Routledge, 2020.
Marin, Louis. « Panofsky et Poussin en Arcadie ». Sublime Poussin. Paris : Seuil, 1995.
McSweeney, Joyelle. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Panofsky, Erwin. « Et in Arcadia Ego : Poussin et la tradition élégiaque ». L’Œuvre d’art et ses significations. Paris : Gallimard, 1969.
Potts, Donna L. Contemporary Irish Poetry and the Pastoral Tradition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Sacks, Peter M. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985.
Schenck, Celeste M. Mourning and Panegyric: The Poetics of Pastoral Ceremony. University Park and London: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
Scourfield, J.H.D. “Classical in/stabilities: Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, and the Great War”. Classical Receptions Journal 10.4 (2018): 435-457.
Scourfield, J.H.D. “Towards a Genre of Consolation”. Greek and Roman Consolations: Eight Studies of a Tradition and Its Afterlife. Han Baltussen (ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing: 2013, 1-36.
Sullivan, Heather I. “The Dark Pastoral: Material Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene”. Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities 1.2 (2020): 19-31.
Twiddy, Iain. Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. London: Continnum, 2012.
Weisman, Karen (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.–
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OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Bénédicte Meillon (8 juillet 2024). CFP: “Mourning Arcadia: Afterlives of the Pastoral Elegy in the Literature and the Arts of the English-Speaking World” (UPJV – 13-14 mars 2025). Écopoétique. Consulté le 19 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/11yn4