CALL FOR PAPERS

Refunctioning Poetics

The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture After 1900
University of Louisville, February 20–22, 2020
Organizer: Barrett Watten / contact by September 16

This is a call for one or two participants for a session on the “refunctioning” of literature (focusing on poetry and poetics in terms of “the making of the work” but including other genre possibilities). Recent texts suggesting such a “refunctioned” poetics include Lyn Hejinian’s Positions of the Sun; Kevin Killian’s amazon.com writings; Eugene Lim’s cyber-novels; and others proposed by panel participants. The concept of “Refunctioning” (Umfunktionierung) comes from Walter Benjamin, via Bertolt Brecht, in his keystone essay “The Author as Producer” (1934). How can new forms and genres of poetics be seen as “refunctioning” the aesthetic as political, given that Benjamin’s world has been “refunctioned” in the “new presentism” we live and suffer? Returning to Benjamin’s 1934 essay, in the context of the struggles against fascism but also in contestation with socialist realism, the panel asks, what does “refunctioning” authorship, and the literary and cultural work, mean in the present? Participants may approach this question by rethinking the status of the author; theorizing poetic making from a gendered perspective; seeing material production and digital reproduction as central for rethinking poetics as “the making of the work”; and reading new genres of experimental writing, after the Millennium, that incorporate its precarious presentism.

Benjamin’s crucial point of departure was to insist that political and literary “tendency” be brought together, that there is no preexisting determination of what kind of art or writing counts as political. Attention must be paid to “the concept of technique” as providing “the dialectical starting point from which the unfruitful synthesis of form and content can be surpassed.” Political agency and literary form must be considered together: “We have to rethink our conceptions of literary forms or genres, in view of the technical factors affecting our present situation.” The kind of agency Benjamin saw in literary form would be neither aesthetically pleasing innovation nor abstract moral valuation; rather, the “mighty recasting of forms” to come would involve the incorporation of emerging forms of technology and thus new, mass audiences into new forms of art that are “refunctioned” to “eliminate the antithesis . . . between performers and listeners . . . and between technique and content.” For Benjamin, this would mean the Soviet “literature of fact” or Brecht’s epic theater in Germany. What does it mean for poetics to “refunction” the concept of “refunctioning” in a precarious global, digital, material, raced/gendered present? It may turn out that “refunctioning” itself offers a key perspective on the discourse and possibilities of poetics in the present.

Seeking one or two panel members
Deadline: Monday, September 16
For the Louisville Conference: click here
Contact b.watten@wayne.edu or barrett.watten@gmail.com