A Ponderous Hush: the Poetics and Politics of Silence
Our seminar “A Ponderous Hush: the Poetics and Politics of Silence” approaches silence in a way that can synthesize and deconstruct the overlaps between silence as a concept and as an act, aiming to confront silence's poetics and politics. In an attempt to disengage the topic from views which forefront silence's negativity (as in the "unsayable" or semantic contents which lie outside the sufficient operations of language), we want to interrogate silence as "tacere"/"Schweigen" (the voluntary act of remaining quiet) and "silere"/"Stille" (the absence of sound).