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WORKSHOP IN POETICS
Guest Speaker: Prof. Michelle Clayton (Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese, UCLA),"New World Views"
Wednesday May 09, 2012 | 06:00 -08:00 PM | Boardroom

Professor Michelle Clayton (Comparative Literature & Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA) will give a talk entitled "New World Views".
Respondent: Caroline Rose Egan (graduate student, ILAC)
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This paper explores the production of “New World Views” in Latin American poetry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Building on earlier traditions of mapping the continent’s contours and distinct regions, poets associated with both modernismo and the avant-garde began to produce images with a double function: on the one hand, to consolidate connections within Latin America, and on the other, to make the continent visible within the same frame as other parts of the world – particularly, but not solely, Europe. This poetic gambit involves replacing temporal views with spatial ones, turning the world into a legible constellation within which new connections might be drawn, against the backdrop of the increasing circulation of artistic and mass culture. As we will see in works by Julián del Casal, Rubén Darío, Oliverio Girondo, and Carlos Oquendo de Amat, the experiment leads to two crucial questions: what is the place of poetry in international modernity; what is its time?
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Michelle Clayton holds a joint appointment in the departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese. She grew up in Dublin, Ireland, received her BA in Modern Languages (Spanish & German) from Oxford University, and earned a PhD in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures from Princeton University (2003). Her research and teaching focus on the intersection between Latin American and comparative studies, with a particular grounding in the international avant-gardes, and on relays between different art-forms (poetry, film, dance, painting) and the media of modernity in the Americas and Western Europe. She is the author of Poetry in Pieces: César Vallejo and Lyric Modernity (Flashpoints/Modern Language Initiative, University of California Press, 2011), which examines the Peruvian writer’s poetry and prose in the light of the broader Latin American and European avant-gardes and contemporary theory. During a 2008-09 fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA, she began work on a second book, Moving Bodies of the Avant-Garde, which examines various forms of cultural circulation in the early decades of the twentieth century, aiming in particular to foreground the role of dance in the avant-gardes. By illustrating the diverse ways in which avant-garde culture moved, and by comparing divergent responses to circulating icons in Europe and the Americas, the project hopes to offer a more interdisciplinary and transnational approach to questions of cultural exchange.