Literature and Culture Seminar:

Jacob Edmond

From "Make It New" to "Make It the Same":
The Poetry of Repetition
in an Age of Global Media

Monday, November 18th, 5pm

Barker Center Thompson Room

From Taipei to London, Kingston to Moscow, Beijing to New York, globalization and new media have led to a world of proliferating copies and to forms of poetry that exploit the aesthetic and political possibilities of copying and repetition. This copy poetry draws into question many of the concepts that inform literary and cultural history on a global scale, including originality, national location, and the boundaries of literature itself.

This talk urges a corresponding reconceptualization of our theories of comparative and world literature and cultural globalization. It shows how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.

Jacob Edmond is associate professor in English at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He is the author of Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012), and of numerous essays, which have appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, Slavic Review, and The China Quarterly.

Event co-sponsored by the Asia Center, Comparative Literature, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, EALC, English, and Slavic Departments.