1994 research outputs found
Sort by
Lyric Address and the Problem of Community
Full text linkInvestigation of the contribution of address to a wide variety of lyric communities begins with songs sung at sporting events, before moving to lyric poems from Petrarch to Ashbery. Direct address to readers is one possibility, but the ambiguous you in many poems may be more effective. We, by contrast, seems either presumptuous or merely wishful. Finally, the assumption that the formation of lyric communities is necessarily a good thing is challenged
Millay Repairs Baudelaire
Full text linkI present a contrastive reading of Charles Baudelaire’s ‘L’Invitation au voyage’ and Edna St Vincent Millay’s 1936 retranslation, ‘Invitation to the Voyage’. Baudelaire’s poem is prefigurative and metapoetic: it models and theorizes gendered mechanisms for controlling its readership. Millay translates the poem both from French into English, and from Baudelaire’s misogynist poetics of control into a self-reflexive and open one. Millay repairs Baudelaire’s poem. The divergence between the two is paradigmatic for a deep rift in Western literary and cultural spacetimes, separating two starkly different poetics and two very different subject positions, one assimilated and scripted, one self-reflexive and unrepresentable. A brief look at approaches in retranslation theory that land on different sides of that rift frames the essay
Lyric Poetry and Community Good:Kaaps and the Cape Flats
Full text linkRecent years have seen a campaign to advance the status of Kaaps, the language spoken by the coloured community of the Cape Flats but long considered a dialect of Afrikaans. An important element in this endeavour has been the publication of lyric poetry in Kaaps, which is read both by members of the community, who can identify with it as a form of protest but also as a source of pride, and by middle-class white readers, who may gain from it an enhanced appreciation of the culture of this community
The Scale of Texts:On Literature and Its Compression
Full text linkThe issue of scaling and rescaling texts has gained new relevance today due to profound technological transformations. Artificial intelligence tools can now summarize long texts at the push of a button. Yet the desire for shorter versions of complex works is ancient: literary summaries were already being produced and valued in antiquity, especially in education. This practice has always been controversial, however, with critics accusing summaries of distorting, simplifying, and robbing works of their essence. This talk will try to shed light on the genre of the summary, examining its diverse forms and using current examples to show why it has a right to exist despite all the criticism. Furthermore, engaging with summaries can also help to address more general problems of cultural practices of scaling and rescaling. Carlos Spoerhase holds the Chair of Modern German Literature at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He studied German literature, philosophy, and political theory, before completing graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University and the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, where he received his doctorate in 2006. He completed his Habilitation at the same institution in 2016. Spoerhase has held visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University, among others, and was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In the spring of 2025, he will be lecturing as a visiting professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris
Invitation, To Exi(s)t
Full text linkThis joint piece aspires to be a dialogue. In a dialogue, people speak and, most importantly, listen, from their respective positions. Drawing from Trinh T. Minh-ha’s notion of speaking nearby, Dulley and Streva reflect on the relationship between authorship, authority, and authoritarianism; the parallel between listening and reading, on the one hand, and speaking and writing, on the other hand; the entanglement between disciplinary systems of knowledge and colonial structures of power; the opacity of others and the imperialistic drive to reduce them to transparency; the supposed subject of knowledge and the void. As they converse on these matters, they speak nearby authors from both the so-called Global South and the so-called Global North who are thus juxtaposed, further developed, and displaced towards a politics and ethics of fugitivity. What follows is an invitation to exi(s)t
Shifting Natures
Full text linkThe very concept of nature has been the subject of thorough critique for quite a while. From a Western deconstructive perspective, nature is a signifier standing for naive immediacy or reactionary normativity. Poststructuralist and queer paradigms have shifted from an idea of nature as a being and of the natural as a given to a conception of them as the effects of discursive, performative practices. These critiques marked a turning point in the centuries-long debate on the concept of nature, pluralizing and de-essentializing it — hence, shifting natures. While these advancements are paramount, such a deconstructive frame has also meant overemphasizing the discursive element at the expense of the materiality of power relations and embodied experiences. As Stacy Alaimo argues, ‘one of the most unfortunate legacies of poststructuralist and postmodern feminism has been the accelerated “flight from nature” fueled by rigid commitments to social constructionism.’ Within the semantic constellation of nature, which terms and concepts facilitate a connection with the material dimension, without replicating essentialist, normative, ultimately reactionary positions? What can be the epistemological, political, and affective investment in retrieving references to nature, after its deconstruction? The symposium Shifting Natures addresses these questions in three interlocked areas: Environment; Artificial Intelligence; and Gender
The Sensorium of the Drone and the Modeling of Communities
Full text linkAs sensorial machine-human assemblages, drones are involved with cultural affects, technological materialities, and political discourses. Hence drones are not just technical instruments; they are interconnected with discourse. This talk will trace the world-making powers of drone technology in order to address how the sensorium of the drone can work as a model for imagining communities. The military drone is often characterized as shaping communities based on exclusion. This lecture, however, focuses on the civilian drone. Although the boundaries between the war drone and the ‘good drone’ are always blurred, artistic negotiations with the civilian drone can unleash the creative and speculative potential of this surveillance technology. By disrupting the predictive and networked operations of the drone, artworks about drones can break, reuse, and recycle the drone’s community-modelling powers in the contexts of social activism, eco-criticism, and post-humanism. Examples of contemporary aesthetic drone imaginaries that are connected with planetary, pandemic, and swarm-like communities will be discussed. Kathrin Maurer (PhD; Dr. Phil.) is Professor of Humanities and Technology at the University of Southern Denmark (Odense, DK). Her research focuses on bio-machines, surveillance technology, drones, and visual culture. She is the PI of the projects ‘The Aesthetics of Bio-Machines and the Question of Life’ (The Velux Foundation, 2023–2027) and ‘Drone Imaginaries and Communities’ (Independent Research Foundation Denmark, 2020–2023) as well as the leader of the University of Southern Denmark’s Center for Culture and Technology. She is the author of the monograph The Sensorium of the Drone and Communities (MIT Press, 2023) and she co-edited the collected volumes Drone Imaginaries: The Power of Remote Vision (Manchester University Press, 2020) and Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities (Routledge, 2018). She has a background in German Studies and has published on nineteenth-century visual culture, historical prose, and travel literature
Capitalism as Battles over Vital Forces
No full textCapitalism is not only based on labour exploitation, but it has also “seized the vital forces of the people at their very roots” (Karl Marx). Adopting the Chinese concept shengminli or vital force (self-managed capacity to act, including responding to the environment and adjusting the self), Xiang will explore how feeling, attention, and human energy in general are exploited, and why love and care can be revolutionary. Born and raised in China, Xiang Biao is a Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany. He was Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford before he joined MPI in 2021. He has worked on migration and social changes in China, India, and other parts of Asia and is currently exploring a “common concerns” approach in social research