French Studies and the Literature Program Presents

Poetry as Praxis? Building Cabins and Living in Ruins with Jean-Marie Gleize

Can poetry be political practice? This talk attends to this question through examination of the work of contemporary French poet Jean-Marie Gleize. Throughout his recent poetry, Gleize draws on a recurrent motif, the cabin, connecting it with both contemporary French political struggles and theoretical notions of community. This talk will demonstrate how his sustained engagement with the cabin ultimately opens onto a conception of a radical form of community that is autonomous from the French state. Close formal readings reveal how Gleize is less concerned about what poetry is and more about what poetry does, treating it as a means of confronting the myriad crises and ruinous logics afflicting our contemporary world, from capitalist expansion to ecological devastation. Our discussion of Gleize’s work will culminate with consideration of how his poetry is conceived as a form of anti-institutional and anti-capitalist political practice that cultivates new modes of inhabiting the earth in its vulnerability.

André Pettman is Assistant Professor in French Studies at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where he teaches contemporary French & Francophone literature. His current research examines twenty-first-century French literature as a site of radical political imagination.

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

Time: 5:30 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities, Room 205

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