SoSe 23: Documental Poetry
David Wachter
Kommentar
Contemporary North American poetry is increasingly concerned with preexisting documents. Writers as diverse as Don Mee Choi, Layli Long Soldier, Mark Nowak, M. NourbeSe Philip, Claudia Rankine or Solmaz Sharif return to textual or visual material from newspapers, personal letters, court archives or the internet to address social and historical experiences of racism, displacement, industrial exploitation, terrorism or war. A wide range of fascinating texts recover marginalized experiences by citing, appropriating or challenging disparate sources. They subvert hegemonic constructions of history and give voice to victims of institutional power who have suffered from traumatic violence and were previously excluded from official memory. Documental poetry can thus be seen as inherently political. It fundamentally questions the relation between canon, archive and cultural memory and enables minority writers to challenge the literary tradition. In this course we focus on selected works by Muriel Rukeyser, M. NourbeSe Philip, Don Mee Choi and others. We explore their historical, social and political concerns and closely analyze their experimental techniques such as reproduction, erasure, re-arrangement and collage. In so doing we are interested in the ways in which poetry creatively re-writes preexisting sources (the term “documental”, rather than “documentary”, is supposed to indicate this imaginary dimension of literary texts). How are documents transformed by poetry? What is the relation between fact and imagination? How do textual experiments work? To what extent can lyrical subjectivity rely on archives? And how is cultural memory affected?
SchließenLiteraturhinweise
14 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung