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.