Conference | Rethinking Lyric Communities in Premodern Worlds

Organised by Laura Banella, Irene Fantappiè, Francesco Giusti, and Nicolas Longinotti. In cooperation with Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership and the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. 

From the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, through the envisioning of local, national and transnational discursive communities, to the negotiations of poetic filiations and social positions, lyric poetry seems to be a privileged site for an inquiry into community formation and its politics. Various theoretical approaches cast poetry in this peculiar role, from French and French-oriented political philosophy (exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s) to the reevaluations - in reader-response criticism as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies - of poetry’s roots in orality and performance.

The two workshops Rethinking Lyric Communities, funded by the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership in 2021 and held at Christ Church (Oxford) on 23 June 2022 and at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry on 5 July 2022, focused on modern and contemporary poetry. With this third workshop, we intend to expand the inquiry to premodern times in both European and Middle Eastern worlds, with the following topics in mind: the direct exchange of poems, the sharing of poetic codes, forms of collective writing, individual or collective performance, lyric poetry as a collective practice, the construction of collective voices, the practice of commentary for and within specific communities, the composition and circulation of manuscripts and early printed editions, transhistorical and transnational poetic communities, multilingual and homosocial literary relationships, and the role of translation in community formation.

23 June, 2022: Workshop | Rethinking Lyric Communities (Part I, Oxford Session)

5 July, 2022: Workshop | Rethinking Lyric Communities (Part II, Berlin Session)

Time & Location

Jun 20, 2023 - Jun 21, 2023

Christ Church Research Centre
Oxford