Veranstaltungen an diesem Ort

What is the relationship between naming and touching? This symposium explores the haptic effects of names as well as the attempt to name haptic experience through the lens of anthropology, performance studies, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

The experience of language, specifically of names, shapes subjectivity by impacting one’s relationship to one’s body and the bodies of others. Designators indexing race, class, gender, religion, and status configure haptic relations. How do given names affect the ways one is touched from infancy onwards? How are other names received throughout one’s life — such as nicknames, slurs, or praises — inscribed upon the skin? How do these names open up or constrain the kinds of haptic experiences one can have with other subjects or collectives?

Naming touch can bring visibility to different kinds of haptic experiences, presumably allowing for greater protection, knowledge, communication, and heightened sensations and emotions. Yet naming touch can also stigmatize, normalize, and suppress haptic desires and experiences. What is the effect of naming touch? Are there kinds of touch that evade being named, such as those related to violence, trauma, or intense pleasure? What does the attempt to translate these haptic experiences do to language itself?

With

Maria José de Abreu
Rachel Aumiller
Emma Bigè
Iracema Dulley
Ashwak Hauter
Lea Kieffer
Bara Kolenc
Rosalind Morris
Stefania Pandolfo
Aaron Schuster

How to Attend

• At the venue (registration required)

From the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, through the envisioning of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in contemporary episodes of political resistance and its dissemination on social media, lyric poetry seems to be a privileged site for an inquiry into community formation and its politics. Various theoretical approaches cast poetry in this peculiar role, from French and French-oriented political philosophy, (exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s), to the reevaluations — in reader-response criticism as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies — of poetry’s roots in orality and performance.

This workshop aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. While discussing a variety of poetic phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désœuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime —, the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation.

This symposium consists of three parts: an Oxford session at the Christ Church Research Centre, on 23 June 2022, a Berlin session at the ICI Berlin, on 5 July, and a poetry event, also on 5 July, at the ICI Berlin with Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey, and Daniel Tiffany, who will read a selection of their poetry and offer their reflections on poetry, community and translation.

In English

Program

14:00 Welcome

14:05 Introduction by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti and Laura Scuriatti

Part I

14:10 Jonathan Culler (Cornell): Lyric Address and the Problem of Community

14:25 Daniel Tiffany (University of Southern California): Logophobe

14:40 Francesco Giusti (Oxford): Gestural Communities: Lyric and the Suspension of Action

14:55-15:25 Q&A

Part II

15:25 Laura Scuriatti (Bard College Berlin): Mina Loy’s Elusive Communities

15:40 Roberto Binetti (Oxford): Ecology of the Self and Lyric Communities in Italy’s ‘gruppi di autocoscienza’

15:55 Adele Bardazzi (Trinity College Dublin): Lyric and Weaving Communities

16:10-16:40 Q&A

16:40-17:00 Coffee break

17:00-18:00 Discussion, coordinated by Manuele Gragnolati (Sorbonne Universitè/ICI Berlin)

How to Attend

• At the venue (registration required): Please register using the form.
• Online (via Zoom): Please register using the form.
• To attend the event “Poetry, Community, Translation” at 19:00, please register here.

Poetry can unite and estrange us. In this event, poets and translators Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey and Daniel Tiffany, will read a selection of their poetry and offer their reflections on the proximity and alienation of other people’s voices or even one’s own; on the sense of never quite being at home in language; and on the potential of poetry to open up not only habitable and shareable spaces but also haunted and unbridgeable distances.

Vahni (Anthony Ezekiel) Capildeo FRSL is Writer in Residence and Professor at the University of York, an Honorary Student of Christ Church, Oxford, and Charles Causley Trust Poet in Residence (2022). A Trinidadian Scottish writer of poetry and non-fiction, Capildeo’s interests include traditional masquerade, silence, plurilingualism, and the poetics of place. The most recent of their eight books and nine pamphlets are Like a Tree, Walking (2021), which was a Poetry Book Society choice, and Gentle Housework of the Sacrifice(forthcoming). Capildeo is a contributing editor at PN Reviewand a contributing adviser for Blackbox Manifold. Current research (also facilitated by Pembroke College, Cambridge, 2021) centres on silence.

Christian Hawkey has written several full-length poetry collections: The Book of Funnels, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, Citizen Of (Wave Books), and most recently: Sift (2021). He’s published numerous chapbooks, as well as the widely reviewed and celebrated cross-genre book Ventrakl (2010). A collaborative bi-lingual erasure made with the German poet Uljana Wolf, Sonne from Ort (2013). A selection of Ilse Aichinger’s short prose, Bad Words, translated with Uljana Wolf, appeared in 2019 (Seagull Books). His own work has been translated into over a dozen languages. He is currently at work on a co-translation (with Marouane Zakhir) of two books by the Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali.

Daniel Tiffany is the author of six collections of poetry, published variously by Wesleyan, Omnidawn, Noemi, and Action Books. In addition, five volumes of his literary criticism, including Toy Medium (2000) and Infidel Poetics (2009), have appeared over the last two decades, from presses such as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Chicago. His translations from French, Greek, and Italian have appeared in various journals, and he is a recipient of the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, as well as the author of the entry on ‘Lyric Poetry’ in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory.

Moderated by Irene Fantappiè

Organized by

Organized by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti and Laura Scuriatti

In cooperation with ICI Berlin and Bard College Berlin, and the EXC Temporal Communities

With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership

How to Attend

• At the venue (registration required): Please register using the form.
• Public livestream on this page with the possibility to ask questions via chat. No prior registration required.
• To attend the workshop “Rethinking Lyric Communities” at 14:00, please register here.