Zusätzliche Lehrveranstaltung im Sommersemester 2015 Additional

Zusätzliche Lehrveranstaltung im Sommersemester 2015
Additional Course in the Summer Term
Dr. Megan Ewing (Princeton University)
Transatlantic Relays Between German and US Postwar Poetry
Intensive Seminar: 18-21 June, 2015
Module: Projekt und Exploration (B.Ed.);
Aufbaumodul Literaturwissenschaft (Staatsexamen Lehramt / ZFBA)
Please register on Paul or directly with Petra Tegtmeier
In this seminar, we will investigate post-war American experimental poetics and their
effect on the then-contemporary German literary scene(s). While today, intermediality
in art is a commonplace (an installation might include found objects, an original score,
film or video, and feature poetry), this was not always so. The post-war period was a
time of broadening horizons in which artists, musicians, composers, filmmakers,
choreographers and poets felt strongly that if they were to make the most relevant
and interesting work, there needed to be exchange between producers working in
different
media.
Friendships
and
collaborations
resulted
in
transmedial
experimentation, as in the Beats, the New York School or Andy Warhol’s Factory.
Transmedial experimentation meant that musicians like Lou Reed or Jim Morrison
were writing poetry and recording albums in artists’ studios; poet like John Ashbery
adapted film-specific techniques like zooms, pans, or jump cuts to language to write
poetry that was a film in words; William S. Burroughs adapted the collage practice of
the historical avantgarde to language with the cut-up and fold-in and experimented
with sound collage. These are just a few examples of the transmedial relays common
to the New York vanguard arts scene of the time. Meanwhile in Germany, certain
practitioners felt as if German literature was stagnating because a lack of these kinds
of exchanges. Rolf Dieter Brinkmann in particular became the ambassador of this
view and body of work to Germany in the hopes of inspiring a new generation of
European cultural producers. The course will feature readings, short films and
images from the American innovators and will allow students to engage with these
poetics in practice—in addition to traditional response papers, we’ll write some of our
own poems and/or prose in the seminar.