Cultural Studies Speaker Series - Andrew Davison - November 7, Wednesday

Releasing Poetic Attunement into Serious Political Inquiry

Poetic attunementintensifies the empirical, pragmatic, and ethical dimensions of existing political analysis, including in the contemporary study of power. Through a discussion of philosophical accounts of ‘poetic experience,’ Ahdaf Soueif’s postcolonial novel In the Eye of the Sun, and several poems in Rob Sears’ The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump, this paper both explicates the semiotically open, affective, and ethical qualities of poetic attunement and illustrates the difference poetic attunement can make when released into disciplinary spaces occupied by serious political thought and inquiry.