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January 19, 2026
“Avant-Garde Poetics of the Zone:
Interchange, Transposition, Translation”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY JANUARY 30 (CONFERENCE DEADLINE FEBRUARY 1)
European Network for Avant-Garde
and Modernism Studies (EAM)
10th Annual Conference, Stockholm, Sweden
2–4 September 2026 /flyer here … More
June 9, 2025
In 2013, I took the stage at a session of the Modern Language Association in Boston, on a panel hosted by the Marxist scholar Jason Baskin on “Marxism and Modernist Studies.” My hope was to extend an argument I raised about Language writing and neoliberalism at the 2008 Orono Conference to an account of modernist poetics—expatriate poet Eugene Jolas’s editing of transition magazine in the 20s and 30s. But I also wanted to start a dialogue, even a polemic, with the new school of Marxist poet-critics I had encountered there: Joshua Clover, Christopher Nealon, and Ruth Jennison. With Clover’s recent, untimely death, various tributes and memories have circulated, for example this Orono photo by Patrick Pritchett. I had some memories of Clover too, some of them benign and some less so, which when I mentioned them led to a considerable reaction and disclosure of an antagonistic post mentioning me, linked here. The link to Clover’s writing online led to the “blog” published in 2019 (see here for full discussion). It turns out Clover had published an anonymous hit piece on the “blog,” which up until then I could not place or interpret. The scene he describes, it turns out, was the session at MLA Boston in 2013. The main argument of my paper has since been published (see here), but without the opening polemic with Clover, Nealon, and Jennison. To understand, and refute, Clover’s anonymous “blog” post as participating in the larger group take-down of my work and person, it is necessary to return to the traumatic scene itself, which Clover describes in these terms: … More
May 19, 2025
For its pedagogical interest, I want to document the 23 seminars and 1 proto-seminar that I taught at Wayne State University since 1995. The seminars build on a series of dialectical faultlines, from the first offerings on the avant-garde and social modernity; literary subjectivity and language; cultural studies and poetics; social form and literary agency; to the crisis of modernity and the subject. The arrival of the New Modernist Studies offered a disciplinary framework for this sequence, followed by twin historical critiques of the avant-garde and postmodernism. As the series developed, I tried to construct spaces that would unite critical thinking and poetry. The series provisionally concluded in 2018 after three seminars that pushed toward new approaches at a moment of increasing crisis in the university: “The Poetics of Value”; “After the End of History”; and “Questions of Unreason.” While it was not a foregone conclusion that this level of ambition could not continue, it is now now time to look back and imagine what the prospects of this pedagogical endeavor may have been, what they were as they unfolded, and what they still might be.
1. ENG 7004 / Fall 2018 / Theoretical Issues in Cultural Studies: “Questions of Unreason in Modern Cultures” (https://bit.ly/2vgHFYL)
This seminar will bring together several interrelated areas of inquiry: 1) critical and psychoanalytic theories that address the genesis and form of “unreason” in modern culture and public art, including Critical Theory after Dialectic of Enlightenment and The Authoritarian Personality and psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Žižek; 2) theories of language and the public sphere from Habermas to ideology criticism; 3) theories of populism, racism, xenophobia, fascism, and gender and class antagonism; 4) popular movements that are relevant to these theoretical approaches, from hyper-nationalism to fascism, populism, and authoritarianism; and 5) works of modernism and the avant-garde that reflect on, diagnose, or exemplify questions of public unreason, from surrealism to the present. [See https://bit.ly/2vgHFYL]
2. ENG 8004 / Winter 2018 / Seminar in Literature and Culture after 1870: “2049: Historicizing the Present After the End of History”
The release of Blade Runner 2049 offers a chilling register of the global present and its dark futurity. This seminar will take the questions explored by the film, in relation to its postmodern progenitor Blade Runner (1982/1992), and explore the historical present through a series of dystopian registers. These will include global capitalism, democracy, and authoritarianism; climate change and ecocide in the anthropocene; the man/machine interface in ever advancing forms of digital technology; new class formations and urbanization; gender, sexuality, and the decline of patriarchy; war and the fragmented body; and new forms literary and artistic representation and response, both mimetic and antimimetic.
3. ENG 7033 / Winter 2017 / Postmodernism and Postmodernity: “The Poetics of Value: Modernity, Crisis, and the Work of Art”
We are constantly reminded in public discourse that our “values” have deteriorated and that we are living in a state of “valuelessness” that requires drastic measures. This seminar will take up the relation of values as represented in works of art to underlying forms of value and valuation they depend on—from aesthetic to moral to political to economic. Putting the question of value to works of art and cultural production, we will read a wide range of genres and text—literary, visual, and cinematic—with major theorists of value from Kant to contemporary Marxism. The seminar will begin with questions of aesthetic and moral values and valuation but will look forward to the turn to political economy and critique of modernity that emerged after the financial crisis of 2008, broadening it to include the “making” of value in an economic sense as a question of poetics and the valuation of the work of art.
March 16, 2025
Launch of Barrett Watten,
Not This: Selected Writings
Voznesensky Center, Moscow
46 Bolshaya Ordynka Street
January 24, 2025
The meeting focuses on how American literature experienced a “turn to language” in the 1970s, what the hybrid genres of contemporary poetry are, and the challenges faced by translators working with the “language trend” in literature. (Voznesensky Center announcement)
On the given date, at about 11:30 A.M. from a Detroit suburb, I was transported behind the lines of antagonistic states for a literary evening that, I hoped, would have long-term cultural and political meaning. It was not the first time had I stepped over this line, as I did for our “Summer School” in then-Leningrad, 1989, about which much has been written (including the multi-authored text published in 1991; here). Twenty-seven years later, with Carla Harryman, I traveled to now-St. Petersburg to participate in the Dragomoshchenko Prize awards in 2016. The consequences of these transpositions, as they may be called, between literary and cultural/political realities, continue to expand and be productive as sites of meaning. The turn to language turns out to be more than one thought. … More
March 1, 2025
“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions
in Time of War”
Ekaterina Derisheva, University of Pennsylvania
Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
Jamie Olson, St. Martin’s University
The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture
University of Louisville, February 22, 2025
“Dispersed Poetics: Signifying Non-Solutions in Time of War” introduces the work of experimental poets writing in Russian and Ukrainian, from positions of opposition, emigration, and displacement, from the late Soviet period to the present conditions of war and exile. The notion that “the non-solution must signify” is a formulation by critic Terry Eagleton that seems apt to the present moment, where poetry can best address a situation of profound indeterminacy.
November 16, 2024
Surrealism in Paris
October 2024
Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years, should not be considered as extant except in the a priori nonspecialization of its effort. I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on. —André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932; English trans. 1990)
In the spirit of a thought experiment, I offer my time spent in Paris attending the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference on Surrealism, one week before the American election, as charged with the co-presence of dream and reality. The first reality was Paris itself as elective site of a transformative moment—the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Being in Paris at that time, as it condenses all time passing between that moment and the present, had the feeling of co-presence of many moments all aware of each other and on the same level though not directly in contact. The crowds going about their business under a gray sky, during a school holiday where there was some release of tension and many children and families on the street, were not in direct contact with us streaming in cab or Uber to specific destinations, for instance the conference venue at American University Paris (AUP). Those presenting in multiple rooms, with visual aids and in three languages, were not aware of the cabs or Ubers picking passengers up and dropping them off. Just so, the meticulously curated book display of surrealism was not aware of the content delivered above. The array of editions, including many facsimiles of original texts, had a remote and uncanny feeling, as with the difference between books being opened and closed. The conference, as site for special knowledge (of “specialists in revolt”), was removed from the “nonspecialization” of lifeworld unaware of it outside. … More
August 11, 2024
The photo registers the scene: it is Ron Silliman reading, Krishna Evans following the text. Or perhaps Krishna is reading and Ron is following the text, as will be the case in a minute or two, as soon as Ron finishes his passage. The vantage point is from where I am sitting, having read my part some time ago and now listening as it continues. To the side are Eliot D’Silva next to Ivan Sokolov; then to the right are Jen Hofer, leaning against the garage; Claire Marie Stancek is just behind the forked trunk of a tree; Jennifer Scappettone between the branches of the tree, and Jane Gregory, the host of the event, is to the far right. Continuing out of the picture one would encounter Lytle Shaw, whose elbow is just visible, and then next Syd Staiti on the stairs. Everyone is not especially solemn but bent to the task, reading Lyn Hejinian’s just published Fall Creek (Litmus Press), copies and xeroxes of which are out on the table. All of them have taken their turn. There are thirty-three sections, with Ron and Krishna reading the next-to-final two, before the group takes up the last section in unison. This was my proposal to the group at the break, recalling the pleasure of cacophony in our Grand Piano reading of “A”–24, whose plurivocality Lyn internalized and, some decades later, realized in one of her last works. … More
March 3, 2024
“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”
CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET
“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here … More
