Peter B. Gontrum Lecture on Poetry

About

In poems that attend to overlapping social and planetary catastrophes, the Romanian-German Jewish poet Paul Celan provokes an expanded field of memory and trauma that anticipates and stands to inform the current ecological turn in memory studies and across the humanities and social sciences.

In his lecture Professor Groves will present Celan’s poetry as one of the missing articulations of the Anthropocene, and will explore the more-than-human relations that are evoked in the line “we stones” as a rallying cry that resonates in figures of “insurgent geologies” (Kathryn Yusoff) in contemporary art, from Ilana Halperin to Otobong Nkanga.