CONFERENCE PRESENTED BY:
Goldsmiths Graduate Literary Seminars (GLITS)
Sound
&
Silence
{This conference is made possible due to the generous support of the Erasmus+ programme and the Goldsmiths ECL Department}
ABOUT
Sound & Silence
2018
Sound & Silence is an interdisciplinary postgraduate conference held on 8 June 2018, hosted by the Goldsmiths Literature Seminar (GLITS) at Goldsmiths, University of London. We aim to bring together scholars across multiple fields to ask the question: how do we recognise, break and rebuild boundaries through phonic utterance and expression? What part does silence play in psycho- and socio-logical development and how do we attune ourselves to its cacophony of meanings?
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Plenary
Speaker
Dr. Holly Pester
Lecturer, University of Essex
Department of Literature, Film, & Theater Studies
Drops, Pitches and Break in Civic Delivery
The delivery of a poem is more than the voice played out as utterance. Delivery is the sound a poem makes in and against the world of sounds; machines, animals, crowds; death and life; work and rest. Civic delivery, as I propose it, reads poetic sound in relation to the institutions of public speech; its sonics, its timing and its pitch. My questioning for the composition and condition of a poem is: where sound follows sound, what are we up for? What are you prepared to say, and at what moment? And then, after that, what are you prepared to sound like in the fields of speech?
‘8 black boots’?
‘the striking clatter of real work in the material world’?
‘the movement of subjectivity in language’?
‘shifts / deports / buffers’?
What moments of a poem are cadent with civility? And what lines
will we break to create
syncopation. Plots of silence. Intonation?
that lifts up a possibility, or
drops an idea into the instruments of common life.
Where prosody is life, some words will scale up in both tone and grace, while in the delivery of other words, we fall at their feet. Poetic sound can break open a statement as it can break silence; its contours can define or trash the architecture of a poem and therefore its, and our, governance. As bodies of sound, what are we up for?
Amiri Baraka, ‘How You Sound??’, in The New American Poetry, 1945-1960, ed. by Donald Allen (University of California Press, 1960), pp. 424–25.
J. H. Prynne, ‘Mental Ears and Poetic Work’, Chicago Review, 55.1 (2010), 126.
Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose (Toronto: Book Thug, 2012).
Nat Raha, £/€xtinctions (sociopathetic distro).
Holly Pester is a poet and lecturer at the University of Essex, working in sound, song and speech-based poetics.
9:00
Registration
9:45
Opening Remarks
10:00
“I must go on…” Sound and Silence in Literature
Markus Hardtmann (Goldsmiths), Dictations: The Voice of the Poem in Agamben
Galina Skvortsov (Goldsmiths), Visual Silences: Negative Space in the Work of
Spiegelman, Sacco, Satrapi
Ruth Levai (Eötvös Loránd University), Silence as an Agent of the Dialogic Relationship in The Brothers Karamazov
11:15
Break
11:30
The Silence of Desire/ the Desire of Silence: Affectual and Psychoanalytic Approaches
Natasha L. Eves (Goldsmiths), Tinnitus as a process of protest
Stian Kristensen (University of Manchester), Still Desire: The Impossible Acquiescence of a Brief Encounter
13:00
Lunch
13:50
Sounding Off (Creative Session)
James Nixon (Goldsmiths), Poetry reading
Michael Page (NSAD), DIY Synth Session
Sumia Jaama (Goldsmiths), Poetry reading
14:50
Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership participants: Mediterranean Imaginaries
15:20
Political silencing and radical noise
Rory Hutchings (Goldsmiths), Sound at the limits of sense: Jordan Scott's Lanterns at Guantanamo and the subversive potential of sound
Sam Weselowski (University of Kent), Decolonizing Silence: The Sounds of Literacy and Spatiality in Jordan Abel’s Injun
16:50
Break
17:00
Plenary
Dr Holly Pester (University of Essex), Drops, Pitches and Break in Civic Delivery
18:00
Drinks reception
15:10
Break
Schedule
The
Venue
ABOUT THIS VENUE:
FULL ADDRESS:
Goldsmiths, University of London, is a public research university in London, England, specialising in the arts, design, humanities, and social sciences. It is a constituent college of the University of London, and was founded in 1891 as Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths in New Cross, London.