“A Poetics of Refunctioning: From Walter Benjamin to Lyn Hejinian”
Séance spéciale avec Barrett Watten (Wayne State University)
Le séminaire de poésie américaine d’Hélène Aji accueille Barrett Watten, poète, critique et professeur à Wayne State University, pour une présentation intitulée “A Poetics of Refunctioning: From Walter Benjamin to Lyn Hejinian.” Barrett Watten exposera sa recherche sur les brouillons de la poétesse Lyn Hejinian pour son ouvrage Positions of the Sun (Belladonna Press, 2018). Ce travail sur les archives nourrira une réflexion sur le concept de « changement de fonction » (Umfunktionierung), développé par Walter Benjamin dans son essai sur « L'auteur comme producteur » (1934) et qui sous-tend la poétique de Lyn Hejinian dans cette œuvre tardive. La présentation sera suivie d’une discussion avec le public.
Biographie
Barrett Watten is a poet, critic, editor, and long-time collaborator with Lyn Hejinian, with whom he co-edited Poetics Journal (subsequently collected in A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive from Wesleyan University Press). With Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Michael Davidson, he co-authored Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (forthcoming in a Russian edition), and with eight fellow poets of the West Coast Language movement, he produced The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography. His critical works include Total Syntax; the prize-winning The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics; and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences. As poet, he is the author of Frame (1971–1990); Bad History; Progress/Under Erasure; Not This: Selected Writings/Не то: Избранные тексты; and most recently Zone: correlations (1973 2021). He is Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit and a member of its Academy of Scholars.
Mis à jour le 28/4/2026