In this special session, we discuss new meanings and approaches to Poetics in the 21^st century. In the twentieth century, scholars of Poetics have largely focused on questions of reception rather than production and used the term to describe methodologies of interpretation, sometimes specifically for poetry, sometimes for literature in general. The contributions explore how “poetics” can signify “something altogether more changeable, porous, and unpredictable, namely the compositional principles that poets themselves discover and apply during the writing process” (Reed 2012). Poetics in the 21^st century, so the hypothesis for this session, cannot be limited to questions of hermeneutics, but ever more inclusive applications of the term bring into focus working conditions and contexts of creative expression. The Greek term poiesis describes the process of making or creating anew and featured prominently in poetic theories ever since Aristotle’s Poetics and Plato’s critiques of poetry both in The Republic and in Ion. While the term led to the formation of “poet,” “poem,” and “poetics,” it was originally not limited to writing or literature. In this panel, we both want to look back to these roots of literary criticism and look forward to ways of making it productive for new approaches.

Philip Mills argues that the poetics of the 21st century is one of bricolage in which poiesis keeps its dimension of transformation but does not attempt to hide this transformative process. He refers to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s opposition between the work of the bricoleur (handyman or handywoman) and that of the engineer, a distinction that Jacques Derrida challenges by considering that some kind of bricolage is always operating in our doing (Lévi-Strauss 1962; Derrida 1967). Pursuing this line of thought, he traces how contemporary French theorists have coined the notions of ‘poetic document’ (Leibovici 2007; 2020) or ‘poetic dispositif’ (Hanna 2003; 2010) to describe such a making, connecting it to thinkers of the dispositif such as Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard (Foucault 1977; Lyotard 1994). Building on examples from contemporary poetry (mainly French), he shows that poetics in the 21^st century operates a shift from poetic invention to poetic intervention.

Alyse Knorr makes the argument that 21^st-century poetry pays particular attention to physically (vs. digitally) material forms radically hybrid, intermedia, and interdisciplinary visual forms. She thereby challenges recent anthologies edited by Claudia Rankine and Marjorie Perloff that positioned contemporary poetry as primarily focused on social and public issues or unambitious, respectively. Knorr presents a case study of two early 21^st-century poetry books: Travis MacDonald’s The Omission Repo and Jill Magi’s Threads—and two more recent books: Diana Nguyen’s Ghost Of and Harmony Holiday’s Go Find Your Father. She discusses how they all collage visual elements such as archival documents and photographs, and how they evoke an artistic interaction with the page through techniques such as hand-sewing, paper-cutting, folding, and redaction. She argues that these approaches resist the ways that digital forms have detached language from its materiality and bring a new and cutting-edge tactility to the reader experience. By closely examining these visually provocative forms, her presentation offers a new definition of 21^st century poetics that focuses on poetry as true poeisis and poems as made objects.

Gundela Hachmann develops her understanding of Poetics in dialog with Amir Eshel’s notion of Poetic Thinking (Eshel 2019), Jacques Rancière’s theory of poeticity (Rancière 2011), and Hans Robert Jauss’s approach to poiesis as work (Jauss 1982). Poetic thinking, according to Eshel, is a mode of imaginative and uninhibited thinking inspired by Hannah Arendt’s distinction between thought and cognition. Rancière understands poeticity as potential for expressiveness and meaning that is proper to all objects and beings. Jauss’s analysis of how notions of poiesis changed through the ages posits that the creation of art and reflection or reception thereof are mutually dependent. Hachmann thus identifies three critical dimensions of Poetics: radical freedom of thought, an expression of the poeticity of the world, and an interrelation of poiesis with aesthesis. She argues that these three dimensions are present in the theory of poetic cinema that the German filmmaker Wim Wenders outlines in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures “The Visible and the Invisible” and “Poetry in Motion” (2018) where he offers three approaches to understanding cinema as poetry: as freedom from the constraints of storytelling, as openness to accepting unplanned gifts of expression, and as representation of the poetry in other arts.

The sessions ends with a discussion of how an interart conception of Poetics can open paths for new methodologies and approaches, and what the limitations may be.