The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium is proud to present a discussion led by scholar and poet Chris Nealon. Professor Nealon’s paper will be pre-circulated (see below) and the discussion will be held Thursday, January 29th, at 5:30pm in the Hagstrum Room (University Hall 201). Light refreshments will be served.
Professor Nealon’s paper, “Poetry and the Price of Value,” will draw on two poems from a wide historical range—Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (ca. 524) and Jasper Bernes’s We Are Nothing and So Can You (2012)—to trace the long poetic history of thinking about materiality through the prosimetrum form. Nealon’s work will use the large historical distance between his examples both to identify some enduring continuities and to reflect on what it might mean for scholars of poetry to do more sustainedly cross-period work.
Christopher Nealon, teaches American literature, the history and theory of poetry, and the history of sexuality at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (Duke, 2001), and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (Harvard, 2011), as well as three books of poems, The Joyous Age (Black Square Editions, 2004) Plummet (Edge Books, 2009), and Heteronomy (Edge, 2014). He is currently at work on a book about the limits of academic anti-humanism.
Contact Todd Nordgren (Todd G Nordgren <ToddNordgren2018@u.northwestern.edu>) For a copy of the paper.
Jasper Berne’s We Are Nothing and So Can You
Jasper Bernes – we are nothing