PAMLA 2026 - Wonder, Joy, and Astonishment in Recent Poetry, Fiction, and Art (PAMLA 2026)
Seattle, WA
Event: PAMLA 2026
This roundtable seeks to explore moments when time seems to slow down, when our thinking minds blur into our feeling bodies, when some combination of words, phrases, colors, lines, figures, etc. in a poem, story, or artwork stuns us simply by the fact of its being there. These moments are not quite epiphanies (Joyce) nor instances of defamiliarization (Shklovsky). Our worlds are not shattered, but nevertheless we wonder: What just happened? How did the work or the poet or the artist do that? Why in this moment and not some other?
Moments like these have been theorized in various ways: Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” Stein’s “beginning again and again and again,” Paul Ricoeur’s “surplus of meaning,” and, more recently, José Esteban Muñoz’s “queer gestures” and Ross Gay’s “incitements” to joy. Whatever they are, and however they work, let’s join Gay in considering them as “ember[s] for or precursor[s] to wild and unpredictable and transgressive and unboundaried solidarity” amid political and institutional contexts that seem to be growing ever more hostile.
The roundtable welcomes proposals that narrow in, as closely as possible, on moments like these in encounters with recent poetry, fiction, or artworks (in any mode or genre); that identify, describe, or theorize the specific mechanisms at work (or play); and that argue for how and why small moments of literary and aesthetic wonder, joy, and astonishment can matter right now.
Submit an abstract at https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20117
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/20117
Nate Mickelson