Recent academic Talks:

 Recently participated in these wonderful conferences this fall: 

28-30 novembre: PHILIPPE BECK: UNE AUTRE CLARTE organized by Paris-Cité and Virginia Tech. I gave the talk: Création et didactique : la place de la pensée dans l’œuvre récente de Philippe Beck by Jennifer K Dick

Cette intervention poserait des questions et des réflexions sur l'usage de trois styles de pensée "didactique" dans la poésie du livre Ryrkaïpii (Flammarion, 2023) de Philippe Beck. Style 1: l’énonciation dans un ordre énuméré (a, b, c).  Style 2: l’emploi du signe « égale » en contraste avec son usage des deux points. Style 3 : Phrases du type « axiome » (qui vont en paire avec des questions, souvent rhétoriques). Pour cette troisième "style didactique", j'ai aussi proposé des sous-catégories des axiomes : Catégorie 1 : axiome directe, Catégorie 2: axiome-observation, Catégorie 3:  axiome d’insistance : emphatique, Catégorie 4:  axiome de l’ordre taxonomique et Catégorie 5: axiome avec une logique par connexions. Pour conclure: je montrerai comment l'usage des styles didactiques contribuent, dans cet œuvre, à établir l'énigme et à établir un espace de transformation.

24 November 2023: Participated in the Round Table at the close of the MICROSCOPIC IMAGINARIES IN 20th and 21st CENTURY LITERATURE Journée d'étude at la Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris.  

Round Table with: Sarah Bouttier (Ecole Polytechnique), Jennifer K. Dick (Université de Haute Alsace), Catherine Larose (Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement) and Dorothy Lehane (Litmus Publishing). We discussed poems by the following authors: Jen Bervin, Pattiann Rogers, Les Murray, Adam Dickinson, and Simon Smith--adding some remarks on Christian Bök. 

9 and 10 October 2023: Gave a talk on the 10th of October for the International and quite interdisciplinary conference "BORDERS IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD: MAPPING AND COUNTER-MAPPING" at la MISHA, Université de Strasbourg.  My talk was:  De-or re-routing California in Fugitive Assemblage by Jennifer Calkins

Mapping loss, ancestral history and the self onto the backbones of California: the roadways, no-tell motels, tourist sites and natural landscapes that surround and are embedded in the body and history of the speaker, Fugitive Assemblage (the 3rd Thing, Washington, 2020) is a work both deconstructing and reconstructing self and geographic (s)place. What makes us whole? What tears and rends us? Calkins' fragmented, collaged (including specific geographical maps) road-trip, which intended to go straight up the 105, takes a detour and thus maps, accidentally, the state onto the event haunting this story. Or rather, it is the map of place that makes this story about a rending from a whole. It asks what is native/who is native of a place? What is place over time? What borders are we allowed to traverse in what directions (north-south into and out of Mexico, south-north as a questionable return)? This talk will explore the intimate lineage of self and place as it is mapped and as the map is followed and detoured from in Calkins' unusual “assemblage”. Is the author scrambling the maps of California, or rather, in her own search for clarity, straightening the lines and the lineages of space and place back into place? Can we map our way home? Are maps redrawn by personal trips and the order we follow the lines of a place? Where do navigation and mapping collide? This literary work provides a form of counter-mapping demanding exploration in the context of a conference on mapping and counter-mapping like this one in Strasbourg. 

Keep an eye out for publication announcements following these events!