Throughout its history, poetics has been characterized by a tension between the study of poetry and the study of poiesis. Applied to poetry, poetics is the theory of a specifically literary practice, attentive to its forms, its histories, its rhetorical tropes and critical categories. Applied to poiesis, poetics is the theory of making or production in general—a field of concern extending well beyond literature and potentially encompassing not only all the arts but also the products of nature and industry. A theory of expanded poetics would take this tension between the specific and general purview of the field as its explicit object of concern; it would foreground the scope of poetics as its constitutive problem, attending to the conceptual and disciplinary difficulties that arise as soon as poetics is extended (as it always has been) beyond the study of literature.

 

This lecture will articulate a modern history of expanded poetics, tracking its generative problems of boundary formation through discrepant romantic, modernist, and contemporary moments. Such a periodization of divergent approaches to the tension between poetry and poiesis will not only frame the intellectual history of poetics as a discipline, it may also help us to understand, contextualize, and delimit the appeal to “interdisciplinarity” as an institutional imperative of the contemporary university.

 

Nathan Brown is Associate Professor of English and the Canada Research Chair in Poetics at Concordia University, where he also directs the Centre for Expanded Poetics. The author of The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics (Fordham, 2017), Brown has also edited numerous volumes, including the collection, Poeisis. Many of these volumes have come out his collaboration with Peter Milat, with whom Brown coordinates an ongoing series of symposia in Zagreb and Dubrovnik, titled Conjunction–21^st Century Philosophy, Politics, and Aesthetics. His essays appear in venues like Radical Philosophy and Parrhesia, and he has recently completed a book manuscript titled Rationalist Empiricism: A Theory of Speculative Critique.