Posted on Friday, December 5, 2008
Dr. Bethany Hicok, Westminster College associate professor of English, presented "Dreams of Inaccessible Utopia' in Wallace Stevens" at the Modernist Studies Association conference Nov. 13-16 in Nashville.
Hicok's paper was one of three that dealt with 20th-century poets and ideas of utopia presented on the panel "Utopia and Modernity," which she organized.
"In my paper I focused on how the American poet Wallace Stevens deals with the concept of utopia in his poetry of the 1930s," Hicok said. "Stevens warned against a utopian thinking that could easily become fixed and dangerous, as in the inflexible totalitarian regimes of Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini, but his warnings did not mean that he entirely abandoned the idea of 'the good society.'"
"In many ways, Stevens saw the role of the poet in a democratic society as an important clarion of hope in a time of war and crisis," she added. "In his poetry of this period, he reasserts the principles of democracy as underpinning the good society."
Hicok, who has been with Westminster since 2001, earned an undergraduate degree from Russell Sage College and master's and Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.
Contact Hicok at (724) 946-6349 or e-mail hicokbf@westminster.edu for more information.
