A Poetics of Limit: Celan, Mallarmé, and HeideggerDavid Nowell-Smith (University of East Anglia)
March 31, 2014, 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Harvard University
Cambridge
United States
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"A Poetics of Limit: Celan, Mallarmé, and Heidegger." David Nowell-Smith (University of East Anglia)
Germanic Circle Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 31, 2014, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: Harvard, Nebel Room, Barker 365
This paper sketches out a 'poetics of limit' through close readings of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan, read alongside Martin Heidegger. It probes in particular two ‘limits’ operating in Heidegger's thought: firstly, the relation between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ as depicted in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which he characterises as a ‘contest between measure and limit’; secondly, the liminal ‘peal of stillness’ through which an originary logos first enters verbal articulation. Both Mallarmé and Celan attend to the limits of their verbal art--prosodic and ethical--open on to excess such that poetry becomes a medium for speculative thinking; it is such a thinking that this paper ultimately seeks to trace.
David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, where he directs the UEA Poetics Project. His first book was Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (Fordham UP, 2013); The Dimension of Voice will appear next year with Palgrave. He is editor of the online poetics journal Thinking Verse (www.thinkingverse.com) and co-editor (with Abigail Lang) of Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today (Palgrave, 2014 forthcoming).
Germanic Circle Colloquium
Date: Monday, March 31, 2014, 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: Harvard, Nebel Room, Barker 365
This paper sketches out a 'poetics of limit' through close readings of Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Celan, read alongside Martin Heidegger. It probes in particular two ‘limits’ operating in Heidegger's thought: firstly, the relation between ‘world’ and ‘earth’ as depicted in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, which he characterises as a ‘contest between measure and limit’; secondly, the liminal ‘peal of stillness’ through which an originary logos first enters verbal articulation. Both Mallarmé and Celan attend to the limits of their verbal art--prosodic and ethical--open on to excess such that poetry becomes a medium for speculative thinking; it is such a thinking that this paper ultimately seeks to trace.
David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, where he directs the UEA Poetics Project. His first book was Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (Fordham UP, 2013); The Dimension of Voice will appear next year with Palgrave. He is editor of the online poetics journal Thinking Verse (www.thinkingverse.com) and co-editor (with Abigail Lang) of Modernist Legacies: Trends and Faultlines in British Poetry Today (Palgrave, 2014 forthcoming).
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