AAU Guest lecture ~ Monday Feb. 7/05 ~ 12.15-14.00 Room 4.128




Expropriated Titles in Lynn Emanuel's Poetry of Impropriety / Camelia Elias

My paper explores the hermeneutics of reading titled texts vs. reading untitled ones. To title involves the reader in a hermeneutics of desire: when we see a title we want to interpret it. Seeing the title, “Untitled”, modifies our ex­pecta­tions and involves us in a hermeneutics of suspicion. I shall discuss the questions of agency involved in tit­ling, and the reinstatement of authorial subjectivity in works which engage with the titled/untitled dichotomy. My examples are from the American poet Lynn Emanuel’s collection of prose poems in the volume Then Suddenly-.


Titular Tilting in John Ashbery: How to (Un)title a Poem
/ Søren Hattesen Balle

My paper is a close reading of three poems by the postmodern American poet John Ashbery. A common feature of all three poems is that they foreground their titles and the question of their entitlement. My first claim is that the poems have no proper titles, because their main concern is the quest for one and what it means to give a title to what has not got one yet. My second claim is that the poems are better characterized as meta-titles than as real poems. My third and final claim proposes that in this way the poems lose their title to poetry in the more conven­tional sense of that word and become generically untitled, so as to suggest an extension of the poetic genre itself.

Tales, Titles, Tails: Negotiations of Genre in the Short Fiction of Alasdair Gray / Bent Sørensen [view slides]

This paper examines the play between text and paratext in three collections of short fiction and one novel by Alasdair Gray. Gray is well known for his lavish use of illustrations, which normally feature his own artwork, helping to add a rich dialogism to his text. However, his whole use of paratext such as prefaces, marginalia, foot- and endnotes, titles and subtitles, epigraphs etc. indicates an acute awareness on his part of how such paratext helps construct genre. Following Gerard Genette’s cataloguing of the forms and functions of paratextuality, I propose to sketch out elements of Gray’s ludic practice.