Contemporary British Poetry and the long 1980s: From Deregulation to Self-Regulation
International conference organized by Bastien Goursaud (UPEC), Juliette Utard (SU), Claire Hélie (U. Lille) and Elise Brault-Dreux (UPHF) with financial support from Université Paris-Est Créteil (Laboratoire IMAGER), Sorbonne Université (Laboratoire VALE and Fonds d'Intervention pour la Recherche), Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France (Laboratoire LARSH) and Université de Lille (Laboratoire CECILLE).
This lecture is in part a response to Sean O'Brien's hypothesis - formulated in 1995 - about the deregulation of British poetry since the 1980s. While Margaret Thatcher proclaimed that there was no alternative (TINA) to economic liberalism and economic deregulation, British poetry seems to have produced only alternatives, a growing range of aesthetic alternatives. Are we still living in the wake of this aesthetic watershed of the 1980s? Where have new poetics emerged since then? What significant formal innovations - in terms of diction, prosody or rhythm - have been produced by this "deregulation" of British poetry? Has the questioning of all forms of poetic authority and centrality led to self-regulation by the various players on the poetry scene? Has it led to greater innovation and poetic freedom or, on the contrary, has it created greater pressure for poets to confine themselves to their corner of the poetry market? This two-day conference will attempt to answer some of these questions.
