Susan Rudy, Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary and Visiting Professor at the Gender Institute
-
Wednesday 15 Februrary 2012
-
5.00-6.00pm
-
NAB.1.15, New Academic Building, LSE
-
Chair: Anne Phillips, Gender Institute
Open to all - no booking required. Followed by a drinks reception from 6.00pm in the Gender Institute (Columbia House).
Abstract
My talk is part of a larger research project on contemporary innovative women's writing in North America and Britain. I am particularly interested in identifying "poetries of enactment" which posit alternative spaces of inquiry and inhabitation through radical experimentation with form. For this talk, I will consider the writing practice of Caroline Bergvall, a French-Norwegian, London-based interdisciplinary artist. Bergvall considers "poetry to be led not only by linguistic or verbal concerns but also by concerns of context & situation" (VIA: Poems 1994-2004 n. pag.). In a world in which language is too often a vehicle of repression ("language kills"), what does it mean to find yourself grappling with texts in which "language keels over" (Say Parsley 2009)? Following Eve Sedgwick who explained it so well in Tendencies (1994), I will argue that "queer" in Bergvall's work refers not only to same-sex object choice or even to the fluidity of gender and sexuality but also to the "open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning" (8) that are released, produced, and made available through this practice of writing. I will focus particularly on two of Bergvall's texts: Cropper (2008) and her collaborative, site-specific project Say Parsley, shown most recently at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol in 2009.
Biography
Susan Rudy is Professor in the Department of English, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada and has served as President of the Executive of several learned societies in North America, including the Canadian Literature Discussion Group of the Modern Languages Association (2008-09) and the Canadian Association of Chairs of English (2007-08). In 2009, she was Visiting Professor, School of American and Canadian Studies, University of Nottingham and, in 2002, Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Professor Rudy will be a visiting professor at the Gender Institute for Lent Term 2012.
Professor Rudy is a literary critic and feminist theorist. Her research interests are in poetry, feminist theory and gender studies, and the history of women's writing in English. Recent publications include "Why Postmodernism Now? Toward a Poetry of Enactment" (a chapter in Re: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism [Ottawa 2010]) and, with Ryan Fitzpatrick, "`These marked spaces lie beneath / the alphabet': Readers, Citizens, and Borders in Erín Moure's Recent Work" (Canadian Literature forthcoming 2012). Her books include Writing in our Time: Radical Poetries in English Canada (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005) and Poets Talk (University of Alberta Press 2005). During her fellowship at the Institute, she will focus on her current book project, Poetries of Enactment: The Work of Erín Moure and Caroline Bergvall, which draws on gender and spatial theory to think about the socially-engaged writing practices of contemporary innovative women writers.