December 12-14, 2019
Yeats and Eros invite reappraisals of Yeats’s manifold and often unconventional explorations of the erotic in all its guises. The conference address the ways in which he toys with and renews the conventions of love poetry the embodied representations of desire on the stage, in speech, song or dance the space Yeats makes throughout his oeuvre for the visibility and audibility of unorthodox desires the erotics of delay and frustration on page and stage. Equally of interest are biographically-oriented papers investigating, for instance, the erotics of collaboration in the writing of A Vision, or indeed in all of Yeats’s collaborative ventures with fellow artists, writers, and performers of both genders.
Papers are also invited on the topic of Yeats and Paris. These can deal with any topic related to Yeats’ many visits to the city, including his formative stays in the 1890s. Papers can address his relationship to Symbolism or the life and/or works of French writers such as Paul Verlaine, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam or Stéphane Mallarmé. Also later movements and writers associated with France—including for instance fellow Irishmen such as Synge and Beckett, or Francophone writers responding to Yeats—may be a theme for papers. Another possibility is to look at references and allusions to Paris or France in Yeats’ poems or prose, or how his writings can be more generally contextualized in relation to Paris’s role as a geographical centre of literary modernism.
Organising committee: Inès Bigot (Sorbonne nouvelle), Carle Bonafous-Murat (Sorbonne nouvelle), Claire Davison (Sorbonne nouvelle),Pierre Longuenesse (Université d’Artois), Clíona Ní Ríordáin (Sorbonne nouvelle), Alexandra Poulain (Sorbonne nouvelle) et Kerry-Jane Wallart (Paris-Sorbonne)
Keynote speakers: Prof. Elizabeth Cullingford, University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Matthew Creasy, University of Glasgow