MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | MOBILITIES

Cary Wolfe
Professor of English, Rice University

Birds comprise one of the most storied figural sites in Anglo-American poetry—and particularly in the Romantic genealogy that runs from Keats’s nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, and Poe’s raven to the birds that appear centrally in many of Wallace Stevens’s most important poems. Drawing primarily on the work of Niklas Luhmann and Jacques Derrida, this talk will explore how in the bird topos of Stevens, the lines of animal studies and posthumanism cross in a way that subordinates the problem of the animal other to a more radically inhuman or ahuman otherness that is not limited to animal and human bodies, but in fact (if we believe Luhmann and Derrida) “traverses the life/death relation” (to use Derrida’s phrase). And this, in tandem with Derrida’s speculations on Heidegger and Defoe in the The Beast and the Sovereign, enables us to understand the peculiar quality of Stevens’ “ecological” poetics.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2014  |  6 P.M.
DANIEL FAMILY COMMONS  |  USDAN UNIVERSITY CENTER