Dr Natalie Pollard, the department’s new British Academy Research Fellow, will be giving a research paper on:
Wednesday 23 May
2.30 pm
HumSS 144, Whiteknights Campus
ON RUDENESS:
Contemporary Poetry and the Tongue’s Territory
All welcome!
Do come along for a talk about rudeness in different kinds of writing on the contemporary British poetry scene. I’ll home in on some heated debates and grudging stalemates over poetic style and commerce. Focusing on some very different poets, I’ll also attend to the politics of rudeness in literary relationships.
The paper considers some savageries of the literary editing and publishing industry, and explores how they can be – and have been – tapped as sources of lyric creativity. It also offers a series of close readings of poems, attending to poets’ strategic representations of hostile relations with readers, fellow writers, publishers, and editors. There’ll also be some focus on poets’ roles as academics, editors and publishers: how might networks of social, economic and rude relations help give rise to the lyric work? in what ways do concerns about reader- and public- relations offer prompts, or creative sources for the poet, and in what ways (if any) might they be seen to restrict literary expression?
Meanwhile, what, exactly, is “rudeness”?
