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International students have to attend only Part 1 or Part 2 within the ELC Module: English Literatures and Cultures. Please agree with the seminar instructor on which part you are taking.
How can we think of place in the contexts of a globalising world? In traditional understandings as well as in the theories of the spatial turn, place has usually been seen as something static and stable: a location or territory through which belonging is negotiated. Phenomenological approaches, on the other hand, would see place as a central way of relating to the world that starts from an experience and understanding of ourselves as placed beings. Globalisation, however, presents a different challenge and has lead to new theories of place that see place no longer as static and bounded, but as the effect of various intersecting material, logistic and semiotic levels as places partake in, and thus get defined by, a variety of networks on different scales and different degrees of abstraction and material concreteness. The identities of places or even their fundamental delimitation, according to these approaches, involve geological and archaeological materialities and temporalities, geographical locatedness and modern forms of proximity and connectivity between places, but also the social and communal processes of semiotic place-making. Especially since the 1960s poets have not only recognised the multidimensional complexity of places and the culturally as well as politically critical ways of determining the boundaries and identities of places, but have used explorations into how to represent places in their various material and semiological layers also for reflecting on, and experimenting with, poetic forms and the materiality, historicity as well as performativity of poetic signification. This module, therefore, has a double and interrelated focus: it wants to connect theories of place with readings of poems in which place is more than just a setting and instead gains poetological significance. From the more accessible approaches of poets like Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Alice Oswald or, in the postcolonial context, Arun Kolatkar, to the more experimental poetics of Allen and Roy Fisher or Wendy Mulford and Geraldine Monk, we shall be looking at a variety of place-based poetics from the 1960s to the beginning of the 21st century.
These readings of poems form the centre of the second seminar from 2-4 p.m. For students in Module 8, I would recommend attending this class.
The first seminar, from 12-2 p.m., will be dedicated to the discussion of theories of place from the phenomenological approaches of Tuan and Casey to the decisive contributions of human geographers like Massey and Harvey as well as the newer approaches in the context of Actor-Network-Theory, the New Materialists and post-colonial theorists of globalisation like Appudarai.
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