&Now 2019 Conference

The concept of world-building, or the creation of imaginary environments, is often associated with the construction of gigantic narrative structures, whether in prose, film, games, or other media. This panel looks at world-building at the microlevel: we’ll consider how word choice in poetry and fiction can assemble constellations of connotation and implicit context, in effect conjuring worlds within the phrase or line. In particular, how can the deployment of seemingly discordant or dissonant diction open up imaginary spaces of novel social possibility? In the neighborhood of our topic are such recent theoretical interventions as Fred Moten’s invocation of vernacular collision and Daniel Tiffany’s secret history of kitsch.