Radical Reading Practices, A Symposium, April 18-19, 2013

Presented by UCSC’s Poetry and Politics Research Cluster. Sponsored by the Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund and the UC Humanities Network, with staff support provided by the Institute for Humanities Research.

This symposium attends to the work that readers perform when reading and reconstructing poetry. We focus on the particular ways poetry makes historically and politically significant demands on readers. We hope to foster a conversation about assumptions that structure the way we approach poetry and the larger aesthetic, historical and theoretical categories that are implicated by our approach. Is poetry, for example, a more radical category than prose? Is there a revolutionary way to read it? Is close reading necessary when reading poetry? Is close reading a more radical mode of engaging with texts than other practices? What might those other practices look like?

Symposium Schedule:

Thursday, April 18th, at the Felix Kulpa Gallery (107 Elm Street, Santa Cruz)

5:30-7:00pm An evening of poetry with readings:
Christopher Nealon
Joshua Anderson
Emily Carr
David de La Rocha
Grace Emilie
David Lau
Eireene Nealand
Rob Wilson
Stephanie Young
Friday, April 19th at UC Santa Cruz (Humanities 1, room 210)

8:30-9:00am Light Breakfast

9:00-9:30am Opening remarks
with Keegan Finberg and Juliana Leslie

9:30-10:45am Radical Reading Practices: An Undergraduate Roundtable
Matthew Strebe, “‘Boots Shining and Gleaming’: Poetry and State Violence”
Grace Emilie, “The Unknown Heart Speaks: Embodied Reading Practices and You”
Annie Hill, “Faust Ubersetzt”
Michael Moreno, “Technology and Me: A Look at the Effects of Integrating Technology with Poetry”
Grace Williams, “Reproduction through Interpretation: Exploring Critical Reading”
Moderator and respondent: Tim Willcutts

11:00-12:30pm Panel One: Commons, Collectivity, Community: From Ancient to Contemporary
Stephanie Young, “Precarious Reading”
Emily Carr, “A,B,C: Reading Cultural Jams in Contemporary Poetry”
Kendra Dority, “Figuring Letters: A Politics of Comparative Reading in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae”
Moderator and respondent: Christopher Nealon

12:30-1:30pm Lunch—bring your own or eat on campus restaurants

1:30-3:00pm Panel Two: Historicizing Revolutionary Reading Practices
Daniel Benjamin, “Searching for the Human and Searching for the Ghost in George Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous”
David de la Rocha, “Nicaraguan Poetry and Reading Revolution”
David Lau, “Poetry as Superstructure: Comments on Chris Nealon’s The Matter of Capital”
Moderator and respondent: Dion Farquhar

3:15-4:45pm Panel Three: Models of Reception/Questions of Audience
Whitney De Vos, “Artificial Memory & the Fate of Crystallized Intelligence: Reading Poetry as a Means of Retrieval”
Eireene Nealand, “Why Should We Listen to Criminals?: The Death of the Reader and the Rise of the Trace”
Joshua Anderson, “Implications of the Surface: A Critique of Surface Reading”
Moderator and respondent: Chris Chen

5:00-6:00pm Keynote by Christopher Nealon, “Poetry without Modernity”

6:00pm Reception at the Cowell Provost’s House