The 2027 biennial conference of Association for the Study of Literature and Environment is scheduled for June 22-24 at the University of Maryland in College Park. The conference theme is: “Territory: Terra, Terroir, Terror.” Members of the Emily Dickinson International Society plan to propose the following panel, to which SSAWW members may be interested in contributing. Please send paper proposals of 300 words or fewer describing 15-minute presentations. Submissions from scholars, creative writers, artists, scientists, and activists – or other non-Dickinson-specialists –  are welcome. Please send those by December 1 to Gerard Holmes at gholmes@umd.edu.  

Emily Dickinson’s Wonderful / Magical / Terrible / Miraculous / Exquisite / Tenderest Extents

While Emily Dickinson’s writings show her deep connection to her rural Massachusetts landscape, or terroir, she also knew the terrors of her place and time: illness; deaths of friends and family; political violence, including the Civil War; anti-immigrant sentiment; climate catastrophe and species die-offs; and increasingly centralized wealth and power. 

In an 1870 manuscript (Fr 1174a), Dickinson wrote, “Contained in this short Life / Were wonderful extents,” including five variant words for “wonderful”: magical, terrible, miraculous, exquisite, and tenderest. Dickinson, of course, often included variants in her preserved manuscripts. Typically not synonyms, Dickinson’s variants instead comprise a set of playful possibilities for reframing, imagining new valences when sending poems to friends experiencing grief, surprise, or joy. Six variants is a lot even for Dickinson, but might offer us options, 175 years later. 

This panel proposes to use these words as Dickinson did, as variant ways of viewing “extents,” or viewpoints across time and distance. Can Dickinson help us expand our own extents, prompting us to play with, reimagine, and even have fun with our own seemingly-intractable set of social and political terrors? Can we, like Dickinson, choose when and where to employ wonder or magic, feel terror or the terrible (a word that, in French, can signal a pleasurable intensity), foster the miraculous, seek the exquisite, and act with tenderness, in response to the occasion? Might we bring them together creatively – wonderful / terrible, or magical / exquisite – letting them stand side-by-side? Can we be ridiculous, absurd, sublime; foster laughter, fun, pleasure, joy; inhabiting Dickinson’s sense of “possibility” in response to the serious challenges we face?