Organised by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti and Laura Scuriatti. In cooperation with ICI Berlin, Bard College Berlin and EXC 2020. With the support of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership.

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, in fact, 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 of poetry’s roots in orality and performance in reader-response criticism, as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies. This workshop aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and 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.

Part I (Oxford Session), 23 June 2022: Christ Church Research Centre

Part II (Berlin Session), 5 July 2022, ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry

Programme, 23 June 2022

Workshop 14:00-19:00 local time (hybrid)

14:00-14:10 | Introduction by Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti and Laura Scuriatti

I

14:10-14:25 | Derek Attridge (York): Poetry in Kaaps, Readership, and Community

14:25-14:40 | Peter D. McDonald (Oxford): Tagore's Resistant Communities of Song

14:40-14:55 | Jahan Ramazani (Virginia): Community of the Bereaved: Elegy across Borders

14:55-15:25 | Q&A

II

15:25-15:40 | Philip Ross Bullock (Oxford): The Transnational Lyrics Community of Soviet Underground Music under Late Socialism

15:40-15:55 | Karen Leeder (Oxford): 'We were here': Forms of Lyric Community

15:55-16:10 | Emily McLaughlin (Oxford): At the Limits of the Lyric: Towards a Community of the Human and the Nonhuman?

16:10-16:40 | Q&A

16:40-17:00 | Coffee break

17:00-18:00 | Discussion, coordinated by Anita Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin)

18:00-19:00 | Conversation with Vahni Anthony Capildeo