Lyric Thinking
Description
This seminar (a sequel to a well-attended seminar at ACLA 2024) is interested in how lyric poetry has been conceptualized and practiced as a distinctive form of thinking. The inquiry it proposes intersects with familiar questions about poetry’s epistemological capacities: e.g., how do poems think in ways that are different from the “ordinary” operations of reason? But it also aspires to a more expansive treatment of the question—an expansion that seems especially urgent in a contemporary moment in which the understanding of thinking (cognition, intelligence, sensation) is again under dizzying revision.
What kinds of thinking have been understood to be specific to lyric at particular historical moments? How have poets conceived of lyric poetry’s contributions to political, historical, or ethical thought? What roles have rhyme, meter, and rhythm played in conceptualizing poetic thinking? How might lyric’s distinctively figurative language conceive forms of thought inaccessible by other means? What connections exist between the history of cognition and the history of poetic practice?
The seminar is again open to the widest possible variety of methodological and historical approaches. We welcome papers that pursue critical, historical, linguistic, cognitive psychological, and historically- or culturally-comparative accounts of lyric cognition. What do computational literary studies reveal about lyric thinking? How might advances in the development of generative AI engender or inform new approaches to the study of lyric? What does lyric thinking look like outside the Anglo-American tradition or before the “lyricization of poetry”? How might comparative approaches illuminate the kinds of thinking in which lyric is engaged?
We invite papers on these topics or any other aspect of lyric thinking.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Chelsea Christine Hill is a doctoral student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include post-WWII American poetics, philosophy by other means, literary depictions of thought, and the history of poetry criticism. She is also a poet and poetry critic, with recent work appearing in Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, Poetry London, Colorado Review, West Branch, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Matthew Robinson is a Ph.D. Candidate at Indiana University, where he studies American poetry of the long twentieth century, with interests in cultural studies and queer studies. His dissertation examines literary collaboration and its affordances for experimentation in queer poetics and queer life, as the very act of creating together troubles the logics of the closet and imagines new forms for desire, intimacy, and connection.
Speaker Bio
Daniel Stout is Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Andrew Franta is Professor of English at the University of Utah.
Speaker Bio
Trevin Corsiglia is a PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His dissertation focuses on lyric poetry. In the summer of 2024, he presented a paper on Petrarch and Whitman at Oxford University for the BCLA conference. He also presented at the Emily Dickinson International Society Conference for the summer of 2022. He has an article published in The Conversation that underscores Whitman’s attempt to curate an image through poetry as well as photography.
Speaker Bio
Jacob McGuinn is assistant professor in English at Northeastern University London. He works on issues in poetry and poetics, as well as on translation and the French Revolution (with the Radical Translations project). His book, Reading at the Limits of Poetic Form: Dematerialization in Adorno, Blanchot, and Celan (Northwestern, 2024), addresses material indeterminacy in literary objecthood. He has published in MLN, Textual Practice, Twentieth Century Literature, and elsewhere.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel O’Quinn is a Professor in the School of Theatre, English, and Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. He is the author of Corrosive Solace: Affect, Biopolitics and the Re-Alignment of the Repertoire 1780-1800 (Penn 2022) and Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations 1690-1815 (Penn, 2018). He is currently working on a project called Topical Mediations: The Raveling and Unraveling of Wartime.
Speaker Bio
Frank Cahill is a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, working on poetics, queer history, and pedagogy in nineteenth and twentieth-century Anglophone and Japanese literatures.
Speaker Bio
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, specializing in nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature in its relation to philosophy and music. His books on lyric poetry and thinking include Baudelaire's Objects (forthcoming 2026), Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset (2024), Reading Baudelaire with Adorno (2023), Poetry's Knowing Ignorance (2020), and the edited volume Thinking Poetry (2013).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Taymaz Pour Mohammad is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He is currently completing a dissertation on the rise of Anglophone Persian studies during British colonial rule in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taymaz has taught, as a lecturer, at the University of Michigan, in the departments of Comparative Literature, English, and Middle East Studies.
Speaker Bio
Manan Kapoor is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Harvard University. A Map of Longings: The Life and Works of Agha Shahid Ali (Yale University Press, 2023) is his latest work. His dissertation, “Poetic Routing: The English Ghazal and its Others”, foregrounds the tension between formal fixity and poetic innovation, charting the ghazal’s historical routing across languages and its significance in shaping global lyric sensibilities.
Speaker Bio
Cristina Caracchini, (MA Firenze; Ph.D., U. Montréal), Associate Prof. of Italian and Comp. Literature
Is the author of:
-Cognizione e discorso poetico. A dialogo con Dante, Caproni, Ashbery and Guillén [Knowledge and Poetic Discourse] (Cadmo 2009)
- Alice a Bruxelles, Le scuole della Montesca e di Rovigliano all’Esposizione Universale del 1910: dalle origini a Maria Montessori (Florence UP 2023).
Is the co-editor with E. Minardi of
Il pensiero della poesia [Poetry’s Thinking], Florence UP 2017