糖心TV

Light in Darkness: The mystical philosophy of Jacob B枚hme

Free special guided tours of the exhibition.

Prof. Catharine Edwards (Birkbeck, University of London)

"The epistolographic self in Seneca's letters"

Prof. Catharine Edwards is Professor of Classics and Ancient Histiory at Birkbeck. She is the author, among other works, of Death in Ancient Rome (Yale 2007) and Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (CUP 1996). Her research focuses on Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature (particularly the younger Seneca), as well as Reception of Classical Antiquity in later periods.

Chair: Martina Russo

Topic: tbc

Throughout its history, poetics has been characterized by a tension between the study of poetry and the study of poiesis. Applied to poetry, poetics is the theory of a specifically literary practice, attentive to its forms, its histories, its rhetorical tropes and critical categories. Applied to poiesis, poetics is the theory of making or production in general—a field of concern extending well beyond literature and potentially encompassing not only all the arts but also the products of nature and industry. A theory of expanded poetics would take this tension between the specific and general purview of the field as its explicit object of concern; it would foreground the scope of poetics as its constitutive problem, attending to the conceptual and disciplinary difficulties that arise as soon as poetics is extended (as it always has been) beyond the study of literature.

This lecture will articulate a modern history of expanded poetics, tracking its generative problems of boundary formation through discrepant romantic, modernist, and contemporary moments. Such a periodization of divergent approaches to the tension between poetry and poiesis will not only frame the intellectual history of poetics as a discipline, it may also help us to understand, contextualize, and delimit the appeal to 鈥渋nterdisciplinarity鈥� as an institutional imperative of the contemporary university.