Sensual Imagistics, Sensual Dialectics Session

Eighteenth-Century Speculations (NEASECSAtSECS 2001 Conference)

Sensual Imagistics, Sensual Dialectics Session
Experimental Writing Styles of the 18th Century


The written word in its purest form fuses the mutability of thought with the tonality of voice. It establishes a constancy that thought cannot maintain. It also evokes feeling from its readers on a continual basis similar to the oral story-telling process. The written word immerses us into the suds of our minds and the pool of our internal dialect. It evokes within us the feelings we dare not speak and the emotions that we dare not think. The subtle sensuality poured into each nuanced word and reified in each carnal verse destabilizes our belief in an internal,mental order and reveals our own fragmented,somaticintellect. Only the most daring of novels and most brilliant of writers can capture the fleeting fervor of the human mind and the ensuing ecstasy of the human heart exactly as it is felt in hyperbolic verse through a coarse, yet stylized dialect.

With the coming of the twenty-first century, it is imperative to uncover in the eighteenth-century those that experimented with the novelistic structure through uncertain phrases, tenuous verses and sensatory dialogue. However, aesthetic yet ascetic experimentalism remains secondary to sensual yet corporeal writing. While many writers of the eighteenth-century focused on refining and re-finishing the modulating structure of the incumbent novel, others similar to Addison, Sterne and even Eliza Haywood went above stylistic refinements to sensual alignment. They not only played with verse, dialogue and
composition, but incorporated their innovations into an epicurean style to destabilize, fragment and denormalize contemporary society. This session proposes to investigate the novels of the 'long' eighteenth-Century that not only warped society through a new permutation of expression but that also delved into the chaotic, sensorial inner being of the human mind to express sentiments typically obfuscated or denied. By uncovering the sensual yet desultory past we may then push into the millenium to uncover our future.

Any papers focusing on linguistic or experimental writing style of 18th Century writers is greatly appreciated:

Proposals should include a title, abstract, a mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, and credentials,etc.