SoSe 23: Listening to water (and other voices)
Nancy Campbell
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Water is a topic of critical importance for the environment (from sea-level rise to river pollution and drought) but also, on a more intimate scale, fundamental to somatic experience. Campbell takes the “blue humanities” and the radical and ceaseless water cycle as an embarkation point for an examination of ecopoetics and book arts. How does the writer navigate the flow of deep time and the elements, in an era of global climate crisis? These sessions will treat the field of literature broadly, including non-Western, non-canonical poetries, from ancient and autochthonous cultures, and more-than-human voices (for example tides, ice cores, mycelia) with a robust focus on the polar regions. Continuing the theme of The Library of Ice, Campbell will examine how tensions between oral literatures and the history of the book might prompt pragmatic and provocative new approaches to deciphering other vices. Students will be encouraged to probe the limits of textual expression, by investigating linguistic anomalies, neologisms and disappearances—including endangered languages, asemic texts and aphasia—and the history of cultural records. This contemporary voyage of exploration through archives and libraries is one which will deliberately veer into the margins, pause abruptly at dead-ends and trudge through different textures of silence, to find the “free space of imaginal adventure”, which Anne Carson locates in the brackets of her translations from Sappho. The aim is to generate innovative approaches that stretch beyond the grief of solastalgia into a lively and generous discourse for the present moment.
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14 Class schedule
Regular appointments