演讲人：Dr A. J. Carruthers

时间：下午3:00-5:00

日期：2018年4月28日

地点：北京外国语大学英语学院115会议室

讲座摘要：

What’s the use of poetry? Under the vocational metrics of the modern university, it would seem poetry is of no ‘general use.’ Yet globally, the stocks are up for the study of poetry and poetics. With the recent flourishing of creative writing programs, the place of poetics within the world-system of literary studies is making ground, and maintaining it. Dialogues across literary cultures continue and strengthen. But the question of ‘use’ remains: What cultural value does poetics have? What place does it have in the Humanities? What even is poetry, this far into the twenty-first century? Can the study of poetry tell us about what will happen tomorrow? Can it forge a better future for humanity? Can it confront the pressing needs of our species, the need to better understand ecology, for instance? In this lecture I claim the study of poetry is of value because poetry can imagine an outright ‘alterity,’ examine the world from an Archimedean point outside itself. ‘Poetics,’ which, coming from the word ‘poesis,’ means ‘making,’ goes right to the heart of creativity and the desire to experiment. What is especially important however, I’ll stress, is not so much the ‘sentimental’ or ‘decorative’ aspects of poetry but rather the relation of poetry to thought, to inquiry, to universals, the construction of truths, and the seeking of knowledge.

讲座人简介：

Dr. Andrew J. Carruthers is the author of Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems, 1961-2011: Stave Sightings (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017) and a dozen of academic journal articles and book chapters. He also writes and publishes poetry. Some of his most recent publications include The Tulip Beds: A Toneme Suite, and AXIS Book 1 Areal (Sydney: Vagabond Press, 2014). AXIS Book 2 will be published in September this year.