CfP: GSA 2025 Panel, Poetry, Doing, Arlington, VA (01.03.2025)
GSA 2025 Call for Papers: Poetry, Doing
Panel series for the 2025 meeting of the German Studies Association, Arlington, VA, September 25-28.
Organizers: Hannah V. Eldridge (U of Wisconsin-Madison), May Mergenthaler (Ohio State U), Lea Pao (Stanford U)
Deadline: 03/01/2025
“What is poetry doing?” In recent years, inquiries into the purpose or value of poetry have often involved formulating, defining, and analyzing a poem’s effects or outcomes. Moving away from ontological interrogations of “what is poetry” or “what is the lyric,” and from focusing on poetry’s internal structures, its reputation as a genre invested in obscuring meaning and avoiding facticity, or its autonomy as a l’art pour l’art (cf. Staiger 1959; Zymner 2016; Bers 2016), newer approaches have emphasized poetry’s ability to have significant and positive cognitive, emotional, therapeutic, social, political, or eco-political impact (e.g., Freeman 2009; Holmes 2014, Wunker 2023; Petzold/Orth 2009; cf. Zymner 2016, 116; Zemanek/Rauscher 2017). These claims have shifted to terms like “performance” and “Ereignischarakter,” supporting productive and innovative readings of poetry as “doing what it says.” However, they seem rarely to engage with discussions of poetry’s inherent performativity. Historically, poetry has fulfilled numerous performative functions alongside its commitment to the poetic/lyric genre, from commemorating a specific event, praising heroes and saints, celebrating a marriage, or mourning the death of a child, to enacting linguistic experiments challenging social or political norms. There “seems to be no function that could not be connected with poetry,” from prophesy to “for the heck of it” (Zymner 2016, 115; Marti 1966).
This panel series proposes to investigate performativity as a key term in lyric studies. We will reexamine the many facets of what poetry is doing, or thought to be doing, and to what end, and we will consider critical reflections of the idea of poetry as doing—one may think of Keats’ notion of negative capability, Hölderlin’s poem “Blödigkeit” (“Timidity”), the poetry of Dadaism, or AI-generated lyrics. Question we may ask include: does the question of “what is poetry doing?” replace the longstanding guiding question: “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” What theories of performativity and the lyric could account for our practices of reading and interpreting poetry while also extending to purposes external to the poem? What does the question “what is poetry doing,” itself, do for lyric theory and literary studies?
Building on the seminar “Poetry Doing Things” held at the GSA 2024, and aiming to open its inquiries to additional participants, the panel series invites papers from any period about the doings of the poet, the poem, and the reader, including the scholar (cf. Spoerhase/Martus 2022), or any other “user” of the genre. Analysis of poetry or metapoetic reflections and critical discussions of theories of the lyric are welcome.
Possible areas of exploration include, but are not limited to:
- Performance, performativity, and their theorization for poetry
- Concepts of the poet as actor – e.g., as artist, priest, prophet, revolutionary, social critic, scholar, teacher, worker, scientist, or influencer
- Theoretical or metapoetic reflections of the poem as action
- Theoretical, metapoetic, or empirical reflections on the reception of poetry
- Theoretical or metapoetic reflections on poetic action
- The practice of scholars or scholarship on poetry
- Doing things with poetry (e.g., in other art forms, songs, visual art)
Interested authors please send their abstracts (350 words) and a short bio (150 words) directly to all three organizers, Hannah Eldridge (heldridge@wisc.edu), May Mergenthaler (mergenthaler.4@osu.edu), and Lea Pao (lpao@stanford.edu) by March 1, 2025. The organizers will then assemble a group of panels, providing moderators and commentators, and submit them to the GSA, by the official GSA submission deadline is March 18, 2025. If accepted by the organizers, applicants must purchase membership of the GSA by March 17, 2025.
Selected/Suggested Readings:
Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Cornell University Press, 2003.
Adorno, Theodor. “Rede über Lyrik und Gesellschaft.” Theodor W. Adorno. Noten zur Literatur, ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Suhrkamp 1981, 49-68.
Austin, J.L. How to do Things with Words. Harvard University Press, 1975 (second edition).
Culler, Jonathan. “Apostrophe.” Diacritics, vol. 7, no. 4, 1977, 59–69.
Derrida, Jacques. “Shibboleth. For Paul Celan”. Trans. Joshua Wilner. Aris Fioretos. Word Traces.Readings of Paul Celan. Johns Hopkins University Press 1994, 3-74.
Freeman, Margaret H. Minding: feeling, form, and meaning in the creation of poetic iconicity. Brône, Geert, and Jeroen Vandaele, editors. Cognitive Poetics: Goals, Gains and Gaps. Mouton de Gruyter 2009, 169-196.
Hamacher, Werner. “Die Sekunde der Inversion: Bewegungen einer Figur durch Celans Gedichte.” Werner Hamacher. Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan. Suhrkamp 1998, 323–68.
Hamburger, Käthe. Die lyrische Gattung. Käthe Hamburger. Logik der Dichtung. Klett-Cotta 1968, 2nd ed. [1957], 187-233.
Klaus W. Hempfer. “Lyrik und Fiktion(alität).” Recherches germaniques, no. HS 14 (July 11, 2019): 56–77, https://doi.org/10.4000/rg.1188.
Jakobson, Roman. “The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry” 1980. Roman Jakobson. Selected Writings (ed. Stephen Rudy). Vol. III. The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry. Mouton 1981, 87-97.
Martus, Steffen, Carlos Spoerhase. Geistesarbeit. Eine Praxeologie der Geisteswissenschaften. Suhrkamp 2022.
Mills, Philip. Poetry, Performativity, and Ordinary Language Philosophy. Palgrave 2024.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Wozu Dichter.” Yearbook of Comparative Literature, vol. 57, 2011, 9-14.
Poetry in Notions. https://www.poetry-in-notions.net/.
Kunststiftung NRW, Düsseldorf. Von Sprache sprechen I-IV. Die Thomas-Kling-Poetikdozentur. Lilienfeld 2014-2024.
Ramazani, Jahan. “Poetry and Race: An Introduction.” New Literary History 50, no. 4 (2019): vii–xxxvii, https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2019.0050.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter. Insel 1929.
Schestag, Thomas. “Armes Lesen.” Contribution to the Conference “‘Was immer am Wort ist‘. Zeitgenössische Dichtung im Dialog mit Dante Alighieris Commedia.“ Wien / Retz (NÖ), October 14-17 2021. https://vivo.brown.edu/docs/t/tschesta_cv.pdf?dt=540915214 [Jan. 11, 2025].
Scott, Chris. “Beyond Theory of the Lyric.” Critical Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2022): 80–106, https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12661.
Schuster, Jana. “‘Tempel im Gehör’: Zur Eigenbewegtheit des Klinggedichts am Beispiel des ersten der Sonette an Orpheus von Rainer Maria Rilke.” Matthias Buschmeier and Till Dembeck, ed. Textbewegungen 1800/1900. Königshausen und Neumann 2007, 354-373.
Wellbery, David E. The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism. Stanford University Press 1996.
Zemanek, Evi, Anna Rauscher. “Das ökologische Potenzial der Naturlyrik: Diskursive, figurative und formsemantische Innovationen Diskursive.” Evi Zemanek. Ökologische Genres: Naturästhetik – Umweltethik – Wissenspoetik, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2017, 91–118.
Zæsur.Poesiekritik. https://www.zaesur-poesiekritik.de/.
Zymner, Rüdiger. Funktionen der Lyrik. Brill 2013.
Zymner, Rüdiger. Funktionen der Lyrik. Dieter Lamping. Handbuch Lyrik: Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte, edited by Dieter Lamping, J. B. Metzler 2016 [2nd ed.], 112-118.