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GERMAN STUDIES: NEW PERSPECTIVES
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SPEAKER: Nadine Schwakopf, Independent Scholar
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and Unica Zürn (1916-1970) have left us two eccentric oeuvres that resolutely resist any attempt at classification. As exemplified in Zürn’s Anagrammgedichte and -zeichnungen or Artaud’s dessins écrits, both bodies of work put to the test and, ultimately, take down the boundaries between literary and artistic genres and their respective media. In this respect, the works of Artaud and Zürn may quite literally be read as “borderline works” — as accumulations of marks, spots, and other sensible traces, infused with the drive to exceed, always in excess of themselves. As border-line, the line in Artaud’s and Zürn’s creations is thus always at stake and on the edge, i.e., it is in and of itself bent on becoming other, on being sensible and making sense in a different way.
In the present paper, we shall pinpoint the working(s) of the border-line in the oeuvres of Artaud and Zürn by zooming in on the instance of the letter as it transpires in their respective poetic practices. With the understanding of poetry as praxis, as the coalescence of (forming) bodily gesture and matter (to be formed), we will examine the letter’s multiple becomings. We will notably demonstrate how the couching of the letter on paper or on canvas comprises the complex gesture of “sensing and unsensing,” i.e., of perpetually pushing the letter beyond the limits and constraints imposed by shared systems of signification. Yet, as we shall further argue, it is not solely the sense of the letter that is put on the line here; what is more, the letter’s fluctuating appearances foremost seem to echo the ever-changing shapes of a body laying claim to its own borderline becomings. For Antonin Artaud and Unica Zürn, so we will see, poetry falls in line with what one might call bodily becomings, which as such prove uncontainable and borderless.
About the Speaker
Nadine Schwakopf studied law at the Universität Passau, Germany, and the University of Western Australia in Perth. After graduation, she worked at the European Parliament in Brussels and the Goethe Institut in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a Masters Degree in French and Francophone Literatures from the Université de Montréal and a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Yale University. Between 2018 and 2023, she was first a College Fellow and then a Lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.
Currently, she is completing a book manuscript tentatively titled On Trespass and Withdrawal: The Ethics of Matter in European Experimental Poetry of the Postwar Period, in which she extensively draws on archival research conducted at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her other interests include: law and literature; eco-poetry by contemporary women writers; women in the literary and artistic avant-gardes, especially in Dada and Surrealism; interart studies; the relation between the arts and politics; cinema of the GDR and Socialist Poland; francophone and germanophone feminist film.
