Poetic Voice in the Expanded Field
Virtual Session
Description
The poet’s voice has long been an elusive object in literary studies. It has been understood as both a biographical substrate and a commodity the poet has to manufacture or develop over time. It can be a metonymy for embodiment and identity, a means for “giving voice” to a collective or a genre of experience, or a way of figuring the swerve that signals the emergence of the individual within language. Voice across poems is both amalgamating and individuating: it distinguishes one poet’s poems from another’s, and the voice of the poet from that of a speaker, while also being something certain poems may have in common. And it can reappear in other contexts, mediums, and genres, linking things that are formally and generically diverse.
Recording technologies have allowed the transient qualities of the voice to solidify and repeat, opening up more literal and textured ways of understanding voice in poems. And these more sensuous and analytic approaches to voice may inflect, in turn, the way we approach the figure of voice in other media, opening up new understandings of prosody, personality, and style. At the same time, the voice can still serve as a way of projecting personhood on an alienated medium, and of connecting objects and mediums through an intuition of personhood. In the moment of generative AI, voice has become newly important in fathoming the social work of writing, as the last boundary that might distinguish the human from the merely algorithmic, or as a literary goal that algorithmic writing might still obtain.
This panel asks what we can learn about voice in this expanded field of cultural production, and how our ideas about voice might be augmented or challenged by the contemporary mediated moment and the history that precedes it. We are interested in how the personable intuition of the voice is stretched or expanded beyond the boundaries of the individual: voices that are plural, collective, hybrid, or nonhuman. But we also wonder about the uses of an individual voice within a moment of digital circulation—of remediation, appropriation, and delegated labor—in which the assertion of personhood might still be an antidote to abstraction and forgetting.
Among others, this panel hopes to address some of the following questions:
How have poets used various technologies to theorize new ontologies of voice or create sonic personae as their poetry shifts from object to event and back again?
What tensions, assemblages, materialities, sensualities, or ideologies are sustained by asynchronous, algorithmic, or archival forms of communication between a speaking subject and audience?
How do poets negotiate the imagination or utterance of so-called raced and/or gendered voices as both textual and sonic phenomena?
What risks or rewards come with reflexively foregrounding the relationship between media and the voice?
What does a digitally discursive voice look, feel, sound, or act like?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Kentucky. He teaches and researches poetry and poetics, minority writing, and hemispheric literature.
Speaker Bio
Jay Ritchie is a PhD Candidate in English at McGill University in Montreal. A Wolfe Fellow in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Faculty of Arts, his research has also been funded by a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and a Graduate Excellence Fellowship. He has published work in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and is the author of the poetry collection Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing, 2024), shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry.
Speaker Bio
Shikha Jhingan is an Associate Professor at the Department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research work focuses on voice, music and sound in cinema. Her work brings a sound studies perspective to Bollywood films and their intermedial footprints. She has published articles in journals like Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies, Feminist Media Histories, South Asian History and Culture, Studies in South Asian Film and Media, and several book anthologies. Wayne University Press is bringing out her book manuscript on the female voice of Bombay film songs.
Speaker Bio
Ramiro Caces (1993). Bachelor in Arts and Humanities with Major in Literature and Minor in Arts and Culture Criticism (PUC), Bachelor in Aesthetics (PUC), Master in Theory and History of Art (UCHILE) and PhD student in Literature (UMD). A specialist in the field of visual arts and Latin American contemporary literature working on interdisciplinary approaches to the texts.
Speaker Bio
Steven Maye teaches at Capilano University, on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Esther Sánchez-Pardo teaches English and Critical Theory at Universidad Complutense in Madrid. She is the author of Cultures of the Death Drive. Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (2003), and co-author of Ophelia's Legacy (2001). She has recently coedited the volumes: L'Écriture Désirante: Marguerite Duras (2016) Women Poets and Myth in the 20th and 21st centuries. On Sappho's Website (2018), Poéticas Comparadas de Mujeres (2021), and Myth and Environmentalism: Arts of Resilience for A Damaged Planet (2023).
Speaker Bio
Alex Braslavsky is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is a doctoral student in the Slavic
Department at Harvard University, where she writes scholarship on Russian, Polish, and Czech
poetry through a comparative poetics lens. Her translations of poems by Zuzanna Ginczanka
were released with World Poetry Books in 2023. Her poems appear and are forthcoming in The
Indianapolis Review, Rhino, and Colorado Review, among other journals.
Speaker Bio
Jonathan Atkins is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford, working on poetry and poetics from the nineteenth century to the present. His current research focuses on the phenomenology of and epistemologies associated with verse and verse form. He is also interested in the potential purchase of ideas from performance studies, music, and the natural sciences for how we might read poems, and in the intersections of law and poetics.
Speaker Bio
Maria Dikcis is an American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellow. Her writing can be found in ASAP/Journal, Public Books, and The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics Since 1900, among other venues. She holds a PhD in English from Northwestern University.