Workshop "Poetry and the End of Reason" mit dem US-amerikanischen Dichter, Übersetzer und Literaturwissenschaftler Eugene Ostashevsky, Prof. an der New York University

Veranstalter: Lehrstuhl für Slavische Literaturwissenschaft

This workshop will focus on the critique of rationality and causation in avant-garde art and literature, and especially in the post-Futurist underground circle around the poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky in 1930s Leningrad (known as OBERIU). Nineteenth-century European humanism favored rationalist models of development, which were expressed in novels like the Bildungsroman, where prior events shaped posterior events, and where objects were classified according to their putative origins. By contrast, twentieth-century avant-garde art was interested in what the Futurists called “simultaneity” (Gleichzeitigkeit), which was roughly equivalent to Cubist collage and cinematic montage. Simultaneity focused on the synchronic at the expense of the diachronic. It bracketed origins and denied determinism. It broke down borders by bringing together objects ripped out from their rational, natural contexts, and studied the way their juxtapositions generated a new meaning in their new, arbitrary context. It was the art of the new mass society: the society of industrial and social revolutions, which was anti-humanist in that it denied individuals’ mastery over their fates.

The main reading materials for the workshop will include the often very funny work of OBERIU (sometimes described as the Russian literature of the absurd), which breaks down the realist conventions of narrative, character, causation, and inference, critiquing the supposedly necessary relationship between the before and the after.

Eugene Ostashevsky’s poetry books include: The Feeling Sonnets (NYRB Poets, 2022); The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017); and The Life and Opinions of DJ Spinoza (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2008). His translations include F Letter: New Russian Feminist Poetry, trans. With Galina Rumba and Ainsley Morse (ISOLARII, 2020); Alexander Vvedensky, An Invitation for Me to Think (NYRB Poets, 2013; Winner of National Translation Award, 2014); OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, ed.; trans. with Matvei Yankelevich (Northwestern University Press, 2006).

Die Unterrichtssprache ist grundsätzlich Englisch. Es ist allerdings auch möglich, sich deutsch oder russisch zu äußern.

Programm

3. Dezember:

DIENSTAGVORMITTAG (9:15–12:00): FUTURISMUS (Scherstjanoi & Marinetti)
DIENSTAGNACHMITTAG (14:15–17:00): OBERIU I (Charms & Vvedenskij)

4. Dezember:

MITTWOCHVORMITTAG (9:15–12:00): OBERIU II (Vvedenskij & Zabolockij/Druskin)
MITTWOCHNACHMITTAG (14:15–17:00): GEGENWART (Belorusets)

☞ Anmeldung und Materialien (orig. und in eng. und dt. Übersetzungen): mailto:christian.zehnder@uni-bamberg.de oder direkt über den VC-Kurs „Literatur des Absurden in Ost und West – Geschichte und Gegenwart"
Es ist auch eine partielle Teilnahme möglich, also z.B. 2 bis 3 Module statt alle 4 zu besuchen.

Kontakt:

Zehnder, Christian Lehrstuhl für Slavische Literaturwissenschaft Telefon +49 951 863-2109, Fax +49 951 863-2111, E-Mail: christian.zehnder@uni-bamberg.de