Particularity, Nonnarrative, and Global Poetics: Critical Regions of Cultural Transmission
Description
This seminar will focus on recent, innovative poetic, hybrid, and nonnarrative literary works and other artistic forms in terms of their transmission across global regions. In so doing, it questions the privileging of the integrating, progressive, and universalizing genre of the Bildungsroman as global formal “dominant.” After Viktor Shklovsky’s remark that Tristram Shandy is the “most typical novel in world literature”—an anti-Bildungsroman in its refusal of narrative development and centering on language—this seminar will identify an open series of works that emphasizes particularities of form, interrogations of narrative, and differences between language and reference in works of art that are globally translated and disseminated. In poetry, the foregrounding of language and disruption of narrative is common to language-centered writing in numerous literatures, from Language writing and other experimental poetries to Russian conceptualism, meta-realism, phenomenological, and documentary forms to more lyrical and hybrid forms in European literatures. Radical particularity is also found in works of global conceptualism (for example, Ai Wei-wei) as nearly a global lingua franca. We are witnessing the emergence of exophonic forms of writing in which the gap between languages precludes any totalizing horizon (Yoko Tawada, Uljana Wolf, or Mia You, for example). Diasporic literatures frequently work between dominant and emergent languages, as when Edward Brathwaite revisioned his work in the “nation language” of Kamau Brathwaite, placing the colonizer’s language under erasure and inaugurating the globally transmissible idiom of dub poetry. Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, for political reasons, likewise foregrounds radical particularity in her global anti-Bildungsroman. Seminar presentations may take up the development of new literary and artistic forms that defer or critique formal completion or narrative teleology; and they may address the cultural motives for transmissibility across global regions. For example, a recent online reading organized by Russian poet Ivan Sokolov presented two dozen translations of Language writer Lyn Hejinian. How do motives for translating her anti-Bildungsroman My Life differ from the post-communist world (Poland, Russia, China) to the cosmopolitan West (Germany, France, Nordic countries)? What new genres of poetry or novel are being introduced into English translation, as with Korean and Japanese authors such as Kim Hyesoon, Han Kang, or Ito Hiromi? The cultural transmission between global regions will be as significant as the cultural work these works do in their original contexts. The overarching question is: Why are we witnessing such an increasing interest in translating global refusals of telos or totality?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Barrett Watten is Professor of English, Wayne State University. He is author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2004 Wellek Prize, ACLA) and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (2016), with volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971–1990), Bad History, Progress/Under Erasure, and, in 2025, Zone: correlations (1973 2021). His poetry was recently translated in Russian: Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты (Moscow: Polifem, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Carla Harryman’s most recent creative works include the Russian and English volume Various Devices: Selected Writings (1979-2023), edited by Vladimir Feschenko (2024) and a French and English edition of performance writing, Sue in Berlin and Sue à Berlin. Recent essays include “Influence: Two Takes” in Other Influences (MIT, 2024) and "The Obituary by Gail Scott,” in A Forest on Many Stems: On the Poets Novel (Nightboat, 2023). She is a professor of literature at Eastern Michigan University.
Speaker Bio
Lauri Scheyer is Professor Emeritus of English and founding director of the Center for Contemporary Poetry & Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles. She is the author or editor of books including A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge UP), Theatres of War (Bloomsbury), Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan), and Between the Night and Its Music: New and Selected Poems by A.B. Spellman, which won a 2025 American Book Award.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Elizaveta Kheresh is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures. She is a researcher of Soviet-era underground communities and institutions. She works in field of gender studies and intellectual history. In 2023, she was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize in the category of cultural projects. She is a poet and translator from Italian, German, Polish, Belarusian, and Yiddish. Her first poetry collection will be published in the fall of 2025 with Caesura.
Speaker Bio
Anna Hall-Taylor is a second-year PhD student at the University of Oregon. Working primarily in French and Korean, she is interested in contemporary Korean literature, translation theory, transpacific studies, and Blue Humanities. She holds an MA from the University of Auckland, where she completed a thesis titled Bae Suah and the Secret: The Unconscious, Shamanism, and Translation in Untold Night and Day (알려지지 않은 밤과 하루).
Speaker Bio
I graduated from Notre Dame in 2011 with a PhD in Modernist Poetry and Theory. I currently teach English in the Surrey School District in British Columbia.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Jean-Philippe Marcoux is a Professor of American Literature at Université Laval, in Quebec City, Canada. He is the author of Jazz Griots: Music and History in the 1960s African American Poem, the editor of Some Other Blues: New Perspectives on Amiri Baraka and Back Pages: New and Selected Poems of A.L. Nielsen. He is the co-editor of the upcoming two-volume The Umbra Galaxy (Wesleyan University Press). His current monograph project is titled 26 Ways of Looking at the Society of Umbra.
Speaker Bio
David Lau's poetry collections are Still Dirty from Commune Editions and Virgil and the Mountain Cat from UC Press. He is co-editor of the literary journal Lana Turner. His recent poems appear in Tripwire, SS African Mercury, and The Trial.