Event Registration
Toward A Lyric Commons, a 5-session Reading Group with Wendy Lotterman
Admission
- $150.00
Location
Summary
Saturdays, October 18- Nov 22 (Skip Nov 1st)
Noon - 2pm
Virtual
This reading group will study how to read and write the group. An earlier iteration was called “The Lyric After Liberalism,” which meant a few things: it established the historical influence of liberal political philosophy on post-Romantic lyric poetry through the shared premise of individuation; it suggested there was a before-time, when the lyric was choral and amenable to the group; and finally, rather than nostalgically teach to that before-time, it tried to posit a way of reading contemporary lyric poetry that replaces personhood and privacy with sociality and intimacy. This time, I want to lean deeper into the third definition, asking: what are the formal and political continuities/interruptions that create this new lyric commons? How do we get there? We will look briefly at the Romantics, at Whitman, to understand the (racial, economic, and aesthetic) investments that have sustained the reproduction of an essentially liberal subject in Western lyric: i.e., one that speaks by turning away rather than toward the social. But more importantly, we will find our way out of this attachment by following the lessons of black studies—disavowing the “burdened individuality of freedom”(Hartman)—and reading poetry that maintains the affective surplus of lyric while making room for this “different social subject”(Spillers) in which “the minor figure yields to the chorus” (Hartman again). We’ll read: Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Fred Moten, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Sol Cabrini, Danny Hayward, Édouard Glissant, Nora Treatbaby, kari edwards, Amiri Baraka, Robert Glück and others. The instructor’s proceeds will be donated to the Sameer Project.
Event Registration is closed.
Noon - 2pm
Virtual
This reading group will study how to read and write the group. An earlier iteration was called “The Lyric After Liberalism,” which meant a few things: it established the historical influence of liberal political philosophy on post-Romantic lyric poetry through the shared premise of individuation; it suggested there was a before-time, when the lyric was choral and amenable to the group; and finally, rather than nostalgically teach to that before-time, it tried to posit a way of reading contemporary lyric poetry that replaces personhood and privacy with sociality and intimacy. This time, I want to lean deeper into the third definition, asking: what are the formal and political continuities/interruptions that create this new lyric commons? How do we get there? We will look briefly at the Romantics, at Whitman, to understand the (racial, economic, and aesthetic) investments that have sustained the reproduction of an essentially liberal subject in Western lyric: i.e., one that speaks by turning away rather than toward the social. But more importantly, we will find our way out of this attachment by following the lessons of black studies—disavowing the “burdened individuality of freedom”(Hartman)—and reading poetry that maintains the affective surplus of lyric while making room for this “different social subject”(Spillers) in which “the minor figure yields to the chorus” (Hartman again). We’ll read: Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Fred Moten, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Sol Cabrini, Danny Hayward, Édouard Glissant, Nora Treatbaby, kari edwards, Amiri Baraka, Robert Glück and others. The instructor’s proceeds will be donated to the Sameer Project.