The Victorian Studies Program Presents Cornelia Pearsall, March 30-31 2023
Cornelia Pearsall is Professor of English at Smith College. She is the author of Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformation in the Victorian Dramatic Monologue (2008). Pearsall is currently completing two book projects. Firing Lines: War Poetry and the Force of Form from Tennyson to Plath, studies intersections of measure and the martial from the Crimean War to the Cold War. Imperial Tennyson works closely with a network of poems and political documents in relation to acts of imperial aggression, situating them within a sequence of pivotal events, including debates over Irish Home Rule, the death of General Gordon in Khartoum, and the annexation of Upper Burma.
Thursday March 30 4:00-5:30 p.m.
Nuclear Tennyson: Poetics and Technologies of War Scare
This paper addresses what I am calling war scare poems: works best forgotten about wars that never happened, bellicose poems waging an imagined war, panicking peacetime into crisis. I focus on mid-Victorian poems of Alfred Tennyson, exploring the recently-crowned Poet Laureate’s startlingly aggressive investment in rifle technology and proliferation, which I read in light of ongoing interconnections of armaments and lyric accountability, violence and verse.
Location: Social Science Research Commons (Woodburn 200)
Friday March 31 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Graduate Professionalization Workshop: Poetry & Pedagogy
In this informal and interactive workshop, we’ll engage with a handful of poems (majority but not necessarily exclusively Victorian; possible authors include Alfred Tennyson and Lucille Clifton), experimenting with several different pedagogical approaches. The idea is to share and broaden skills that can help to support or expand field expertise for job interviews, course development, future projects, etc. -- for those who tend not to teach/write about poetry, and for those who do.
The College of Arts