Harry Harootunian, Professor Emeritus of East Asian Studies, New York University, and Max Palevsky Professor of History and Civilizations, Emeritus, University of Chicago, will give the 14th annual Edward Said Lecture. His talk is titled, “‘In the Zone of Occult Instability’: Some Reflections on Unevenness, Discordant Temporalities, and the Logic of History.” Harootunian is a world-renowned historian of early modern and modern Japan, as well as a major theorist of Marxism and the philosophy of history. He is the author of eleven books, including Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture, and Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton, 2000), History’s Disquiet: Modernity, Cultural Practice and the Question of the Everyday Life (Columbia, 2000), and, most recently, Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of Capitalism (Columbia, 2015)

David Farrier, University of Edinburgh, will lead a workshop on the anthropocene. Please email Jonathan Schroeder to sign up.

David Farrier will deliver a talk, "Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils." Farrier is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. His most recent books consider the new reality of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (Minnesota, 2019) is a study of contemporary environmental poetry, and Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils (4th Estate/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), written for a general readership, explores what traces of present societies will persist in the deep future. He is particularly interested in how literature, especially poetry, responds to the challenges of the Anthropocene. Farrier is also the author of Postcolonial Asylum (Liverpool, 2011), and Unsettled Narratives (Routledge, 2007), and has published widely in the fields of ecocriticism and postcolonial studies.  

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.

Auritro Majumber is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Houston, where he also holds a courtesy appointment in the India Studies Program and is a founding steering committee member in the Empire Studies collective. Current projects include two books: the first, a monograph tentatively titled Insurgent Imaginations, which describes the intersection of aesthetics, world literature, and politics in postcolonial India; the second is a co-edited anthology, on Cultures of the Cold War in South Asia. Majumder’s essays have appeared in journals such as Critical Asian Studies, Comparative Literature Studies, Interventions, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Mediations, and Research in African Literatures, and collections including History, Imperialism, Critique: New Essays in World Literature, Crossing Borders: Essays on Literature, Culture and Society in Honor of Amritjit Singh,Contentious Connections: Social Imagination in Globalizing South Asia, and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies.