ECLS Research seminar
We run a series of seminars intended to provide a forum for discussion of literary research projects underway both within and outside of the department. The programme timetable and schedule changes annually.
Lytle Shaw, 鈥淭he Eigner Sanction: Keeping Time from the American Century鈥�
Drawn from Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (Stanford, 2018), this talk relates Larry Eigner鈥檚 poetics of daily neighborhood sound and sight monitoring to surrounding infrastructures of Cold War defense and domestic media, from nearby surveillance planes to his his parents鈥� indiscriminate television and radio consumption. While military surveillance flights, commercial airline crashes, potential nuclear explosions, network TV, and mainstream radio all course through Einger鈥檚 airspace, their eventful urgency gets recast by the poet鈥檚 horizontal model of time. This talk draws out the implications of Eigner鈥檚 self-assigned task of turning himself into a kind of alternate broadcasting system by framing his poetics of ongoingness in relation to Luce media鈥檚 careful organization national time at the level of the week, month, year and even century.
Lytle Shaw is professor of English at New York University and a founding contributing editor for Cabinet magazine. His books include Frank O鈥橦ara: The Poetics of Coterie (2006), The Moir茅 Effect (2012), Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (2013), and Narrowcast: Poetry and Audio Research (2018).