cfp.english.upenn.edu

“Poiesis and Techne”

Seventh Annual Graduate Student Comparative Poetics Colloquium
Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University

Saturday, May 5, 2012

Deadline for Proposals: April 9, 2012

On Saturday, May 5, 2012, the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University will host a colloquium in comparative poetics titled “Poiesis and Techne.” We invite graduate students at any stage in their work to submit proposals for a twenty-minute paper presentation.

The keynote lecture will be given by Charles Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania), founder of the Language poetry movement, prolific critic, and co-founder of both the PennSound archive and The Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo. In addition to the keynote and panels of graduate student papers, the colloquium will also feature a lunchtime roundtable discussion with members of the Princeton faculty, and conclude with a poetry reading.

“Poiesis and Techne” proposes a multidisciplinary discussion of techne and poiesis. As contemporary poets turn to mixed genres and mixed forms in their poetic practice, often exploiting new technological possibilities, the complex and historically fraught relation between poiesis and techne demands reconsideration. Are poiesis and techne necessarily antithetical forces, the technical encroaching on the poetic, as Heidegger would have it? Is there poetry that is not, in some sense, the product of a techne? Or is techne essentially linked to writing, and especially the writing and making of poetry? How do technologies enable or thwart attempts at poetic invention, or re-invention? How has poetic making been conceived in different time periods and national literatures? How have poets, as individuals or in coteries, transformed our understanding of poiesis and techne?

We welcome papers that offer questions, challenges, elaborations, and interpretations of this year’s theme. Papers may focus on any poetic tradition, language, or period. We are especially interested in proposals that take a comparative or interdisciplinary approach.

Topics may include but are not confined to the following:

Poetry as “craft,” poetry as “art”
Theories of the relationship between techne and poiesis and their impact on poetic practice
How technological innovations (manuscript, print, mass print, digitization) shape poetic making, circulation, and reception
Oral, literate, post-literate technologies of poiesis
Technology and alienation from material text
Technological innovation, literary history, literary canons
Genre and techne
Constraint and making: Creative freedom and structural determination
Avant-garde/ Experimental use of technologies
Technologies of re-appropriation from the cento to flarf
Uncreative Writing
Poetic projects that exceed traditional bounds of the page or even print media
Word art or poem? Poetics of the visual, poetics of the concrete
Form as techne, form as poiesis
Levers, cranks, springs, and torque: the techne and mnemotechnics of prosody
The “nature” and function of poetry: debating definitions of poiesis
The role of coteries in transforming ideas of poiesis and poetic practice
The relation of poetry to other arts
Poiesis as a sensual act
Poiesis and praxis
Poetry and the mechanic
Poetry, technology, and the uncanny
Poetry and knowledge
Techne of persuasion: Poetry and rhetoric

Paper proposals should include a title, 250-word abstract, brief bio (including department affiliation and areas of interest) and contact information. Papers should include at least one close reading. Audio-visual equipment is available upon request.

Please send proposals via email attachment, as well as any questions, to poiesistechne@gmail.com.

Thank you for your interest.

Ella Brians (Comparative Literature), Roy Scranton (English), Kathryn Stergiopoulos (Comparative Literature), Elise Wang (Comparative Literature)