French Studies Program and Literature Program Present

The Secret History of Erasurism:
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Erasurism consolidates and expands cut-up, collagist, plagiarist, and other foundational techniques of avant-gardist détournement—intersecting on the one hand with the writing-through experiments of John Cage and Jackson MacLow, and with what Kenneth Goldsmith recently theorized and promoted as “uncreative writing”; and on the other with interventionist strategies which seek to reassert the critical and revolutionary potential of experimentalism against the aporias of postmodern pastiche.

Erasurist poetics can be broadly characterized by its interdisciplinary and transmedial nature. In addition to literary examples this talk will be devoted to experiments with poetry off the page and other transmedial works such as Jochen Gerner’s abstract reduction of Hergé’s comics (TNT en Amérique) and Martin Arnold’s uncanny Walt Disney blackouts in Shadow Cuts. 

Michel Delville is a lecturer, writer, and musician born in Belgium. He teaches English, American, and comparative literature at the University of Liège, where he directs the Interdisciplinary Center for Applied Poetics. He is the author or coauthor of ca. twenty books including The American Prose Poem (1998), J.G. Ballard (1998), Hamlet & Co (2001), Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, and the Secret History of Maximalism (2005; w. Andrew Norris), Eating the Avant-Garde (2009), Crossroads Poetics (2013), Radiohead : OK Computer (2015), Undoing Art (2017; w. Mary Ann Caws), and The Politics and Aesthetics of Hunger and Disgust (2017; w. Andrew Norris), as well as several poetry collections.

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For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Language Center, Room 115

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