You are invited to attend the following seminar at Deakin University's city centre campus on Friday 1 June at 2pm:
Pavlina Radia, “Formulated Flesh: The Inhuman Appetite of Modernist Poetics”
Focusing primarily on the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Djuna Barnes, this paper explores the ways in which modernist poetry and other modernist art forms rely on the symbolic flaying of the body to comment on the artistic process of creation as a moment of renewal and re-invention. Such a process, as T.S. Eliot has argued, requires an elimination of the poet’s subjectivity in order to bring forth the notion of poesisas “a shred of platinum” or a disciplined intensity which I call the “formulated flesh.” The paper then suggests that such formulations not only drive the experimental aesthetic of modernist poetics, but also point to its appetite for movement and multiplicity whereby time becomes space, weight a lightness of being, form an inhuman flesh.
Dr Pavlina Radia is Assistant Professor of English Studies at Nipissing University, Canada.
The seminar will be held in Meeting Room 2. Deakin's city campus is on Level 3, 550 Bourke Street (Deloittes building), Melbourne. It will be followed by afternoon tea.