Branka Arsić : Object-Poems – On Emily Dickinson’s late poetics
Channel: pmilat
Date: 2015-07-01

POIESIS : symposium at MaMa, Zagreb [June 11-16, 2015]

http://poiesis.mi2.hr/

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Branka Arsić is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She recently completed a book on Thoreau, called Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau, which discusses the radical way in which Thoreau related mourning practices to biological life by articulating a complex theory of decay, and proposing a new understanding of the pathological. She is also author of On Leaving: A Reading in Emerson (Harvard UP, 2010), and a book on Melville entitled Passive Constitutions or 7½ Times Bartleby (Stanford UP, 2007). She has co-edited (with Cary Wolfe) a collection of essays on Emerson, entitled The Other Emerson: New Approaches, Divergent Paths (University of Minnesota Press, 2010), and edited The American Impersonal (Bloomsbury, 2014), a collection of essays discussing Sharon Cameron’s thinking concerning impersonality.
Arsić is currently working on two projects: a book entitled Flow: Materialist Poetics of the Nineteenth Century Americas, which discusses how American authors from Poe and Melville to Pierce, William James and Chestnutt imagined the capacity of matter to move and transform. Her book brings those authors into dialogue not just with contemporary American materialist-vitalist science, but also with cosmologies of the Caribbean, in order to chart how those philosophically and culturally different approaches to the real intersected in fashioning the ethical and political consequences of metamorphosis and conjuration; and a second to be entitled On Being Scattered: the Happiness of Emily Dickinson’s Late Poetry.