Is 21st-century poetry witnessing the revival of poetry? Is performance poetry an effective tool of activism? Are #instapoets the side-effect of a dying art or a new breath that gives it life? In this seminar, we will take seriously the notion of “the contemporary” as that which co-exists with us, shapes us and is shaped by us, and is relevant to our times and our spaces. All poetry on the syllabus have been published in the last twenty-one years, most within the past ten years. This seminar concerns the new poetics that is ever-forming and explores the connections to and departure from the poetic trends that came before. In this class, we will read, watch, listen to, and look at poetry alone and together. The seminar introduces twenty-first-century poetry in its multimodal, experimental, transnational form while engaging with poetry of various themes such as protest poetry, eco-poetry, migrant and border poetry, as well as poetry of the body, sexuality, and more. To do so, in addition to the assigned poetry, we will engage with historical and theoretical readings when necessary. In addition, students will be given writing tasks (academic) throughout the semester. Thus, please note that this class will be both reading and writing intensive. It will ask for your readiness to spend time, think and talk about poetry both in an affective and analytical manner.
On March 10, 1914, Mary Richardson broke the glass of and repeatedly slashed the painting “Rokeby Venus” at the National Gallery in London, an act she later explained by saying “I care more for justice than I do for art, and I firmly believe that when the nation shuts its eyes to justice and prefers to have women who are not only denied justice but who are ill treated and tortured, then I say that this action of mine should be understandable.” This intervention into the museum space was part of a larger movement of suffragette action under the Women’s Social and Political Union to demand rights for women in the first decades of the twentieth century. Richardson’s intervention clearly demonstrates how museums have been a site of social and political critique in the modern era. Indeed, in an attempt to welcome, if not in fact mitigate, critiques of the institution, museums are increasingly inviting guest curators and artistic interventions which comment on the politics of power and belonging within their institutions. Interventions, whether curated or uninvited, draw attention to the rules which inform museum spaces and expose the cultural and historical narratives created by museums to be less authoritative than they may appear at first glance. In engaging with this premise, the seminar will broadly orient itself around the following questions: How do museum spaces function? What constitutes a museum intervention? And how are museums used to make social and political critiques through various forms of interventions? We will look in particular at ways the museum itself can be read as an intervention (Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture), at invited queer feminist interventions in the museum space (“To Be Seen, Queer Lives 1900-1950” special exhibit at the NS Dokumentationszentrum Munich, Sonia Boyce’s “Six Acts” at the Manchester Art Gallery), at curated decolonial interventions (“Wayward Dust” performance at the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, “Das ist kolonial” exhibition at LWL Museum Zeche-Zollern Dortmund, “Collecting and Empire Trail” at the British Museum London), and at the recent series of uninvited climate activist interventions in European museums. Students will familiarize themselves with key concepts and secondary texts within the fields of museum studies and cultural studies, develop the ability to close read and critically evaluate exhibitions/interventions, as well as engage with contemporary debates on the functions of and challenges facing museums as cultural institutions. In examining both museums within anglophone contexts as well as paying particular attention to local museums in North Rhine-Westphalia and Germany more broadly, the course highlights the national and transnational contexts in which museums interventions are embedded.
- Lehrende/r: Rita Elizabeth Maricocchi