Organised by Laura Banella (University of Notre Dame), Francesco Giusti (University of Oxford) and Nicolas Longinotti (Freie Universität Berlin).

Venue: Freie Universität Berlin

Thursday: Seminarzentrum L115-L116, Otto-von-Simson-Str. 26

Friday: EXC 2020 "Temporal Communities", Room 00.05, Otto-von-Simson-Str. 15

Sociological research has demonstrated how communities enact mechanisms to claim internal coherence and distinguish themselves from the outside. Lyric poetry can act as a privileged community-building mechanism in different respects: it can entail forms of protest within the same Gesellschaft, the creation of new languages within and beyond the national, the conquest of gendered spaces within traditions, the agonistic claim involved in imitation. Through lyric poetry, various forms of community formation can not only claim their coherence and consistency, but also powerfully demarcate boundaries and establish differences. The recent scholarly debate on lyric poetry has proposed transhistorical approaches based on the lyric genre’s unique performative features, potential of circulation, re-use and re-enactment of models and gestures. The workshop sets out to explore the potential of lyric poetry in imagining and enabling communities when representing conflict, enacting moments of tension, and creating outsiders, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era from a global perspective.

The workshop Rethinking Lyric Communities in the Early Modern, held at Christ Church (Oxford) in 2023, discussed transhistorical and transnational communities addressing questions of exegesis, the circulation of manuscripts and printed editions, and forms of collective writing and performance. This workshop aims to focus on the double-edged dimension of community formations, arguing that enabling communities involves internal and external conflicts to circumscribe and exclude other collective formations. The complex dynamics between conflict and assent will be explored through the transnational re-creation or epigonal re-use of traditional forms, the emergence of minorities in the public sphere and in national literary traditions, the transcription and publication of oral performances, and the emergence of queer identities.

In cooperation with: Center for Italian Studies - University of Notre Dame; Dahlem Humanities Center; EXC 2020 Temporal Communities; Italienzentrum – Freie Universität Berlin; Oxford Berlin Research Partnership.

For those who would like to attend virtually, please contact n.longinotti@fu-berlin.de by Tuesday 25 June 2024.

Programme:

Thursday, 27 June

10:30-10:45 Arrival and coffee

10:45-11:00 Introduction

11:00-12:30 Panel 1: Anita Traninger (FU Berlin) Chair

Ardis Butterfield (Yale University): Superficial strife: the banality of violence in the medieval pastourelle

Laura Banella (Notre Dame): Transhistorical Lyric Communities and the Death of Dante-the-Author

Bernhard Huss (FU Berlin): Does a chameleon ever dissent? On literary masquerade, authorial self-fashioning and cultural community-building in Alberti's Rime

Corinna Dziudzia (Universität Erfurt): Practices of community among female poet laureates of the Early German Enlightenment

12:30-14:00 Lunch break

14:00-15:30 Panel 2: Maren Jäger (FU Berlin) Chair

Brigitte Rath (Universität Innsbruck): Poetic Address and Lyric Communities: Sonnets addressing sonnets

Suchismito Khatua (Stanford University): Towards an Aesthetics of Pain: The Lyric Poetry of the Dalit Panther Poets

Jana Weiß (FU Berlin): Conflict/Community 1959. Lyric Alliances in the Light of Antisemitism

15:30-16:00 Coffee break

16:00-18:00 Panel 3: Brigitte Rath (Universität Innsbruck) Chair

Karen Leeder (University of Oxford): ‘When will I say mine again and mean of all?’: Forms of resistance and community in post-socialist German poetry

Jacopo Galavotti (FU Berlin/Universitá di Verona): The imaginary court. Biography and poetry in Cosimo Ortesta

Hal Coase (Sapienza Università di Roma): ‘Which of the “yous” are “you.”’: lyric indifference in James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem

Alexander Kappe (Halle-Wittenberg): Technical languages in 20th-century and contemporary German poetry as ‚Communities of style‘ (Celan, Grünbein, Stolterfoht, Popp)

19:00 Dinner

Friday, 28 June

10:30-11:00 Arrival and coffee

11:00-13:00 Panel 4: Irene Fantappiè (Università di Cassino ) Chair

Elisa Bisson (Notre Dame): Tempering Filelfo’s Milanese exegesis on Petrarch’s Fragmenta in Vat. Lat. 4786: a Florentine reading of the Commentary?

Andreas Mahler (FU Berlin): Performing Community in Non-petrarchist English Renaissance Love Poetry

Nicolas Longinotti (FU Berlin): Expanding communities: Misceláneas and lyric poetry in the Virreinato de Perú

Nikolina Hatton (Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität München): Violence, Sympathy, and Militant Puritanism in Anne Bradstreet’s “A Dialogue Between Old England and New”

13:00-15:00 Lunch break

15:00-17:00 Panel 5: Karen Leeder (University of Oxford) Chair

Francesco Giusti (University Oxford): Shareable Language: Lyric Gestures and Poetic Code 

Maren Jäger (FU Berlin): “Zaum is my national language”. Translingual lyric communities in times of conflict and war

Ana Rocío Jouli (FU Berlin/EXC 2020): Lyric Transgression and Archival Politics in the Documentary Poetry of Carlos Soto Román

Chiara Liso (FU Berlin/EXC 2020): ‘The writhing ist not Meister aus Germany’: Alliances and Ruptures in Uljana Wolf’s Translational Poetry

17:00-17:30 Conclusive remarks

17:30 Reception

Wednesday, 3 July

18:00-20:00, Seminarraum JK 33/121, Habelschwerdter Allee 45

Open seminar - Reading group Lyriktheorien (Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule)