Day Two

Day 2, July 25 – George Whalley, the Man and the Legend

George Whalley (1915-83) was an eminent Canadian man of letters: scholar, poet, naval officer and secret intelligence agent during World War II, leading expert on the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, CBC script-writer and broadcaster, musician, biographer, translator, and president of the Kingston symphony. He taught English at Queen’s University (1950-80), and was twice head of the department. He wrote five books, edited or co-edited eleven other books, and published over 120 essays and reviews. Informed by a life intersecting with important historical events and constant intellectual inquiry, Whalley’s remarkable range of work ranks him with other great Canadian thinkers such as George Grant and Northrop Frye.

We invite proposals for both academic and non-academic papers. Possible topics might include (but are not limited to) Whalley’s:

a) criticism, including his Coleridge scholarship and Poetic Process: an essay in poetics (1953)

b) poetry in Poems 1939-1944 (1946), No Man An Island (1948) and  The Collected Poems of George Whalley (1986)

c) The Legend of John Hornby (1962) and/or Death in the Barren Ground: The Diary of Edgar Christian (1980)

d) CBC Radio broadcasts

e) translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (1997)

Papers might also focus on:

a) Whalley as educator and mentor

b) his service in the Royal Navy, the Naval Intelligence Division, and the Royal Canadian Navy Volunteer Reserve

c) his influence on writers and scholars

d) his contributions to Queen’s University

e) public intellectualism after Whalley’s example

Proposals will be no more than 500 words, and include a brief biography of the presenter(s).

They can be sent to Alana Fletcher (alana.fletcher@queensu.ca) and Michael DiSanto (michael.disanto@algomau.ca).

The deadline for proposals is 15 January 2015.