Description:

Please join the Poetry & Poetics Colloquium for a lecture, titled “Who Reads Poetry?,” by Virginia Jackson. Professor Jackson’s talk is adapted from her currently in-progress book project, What is Poetry? A graduate student reading group session–focusing on critic Barbara Johnson’s essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion” and Professor Jackson’s article “Apostrophe, Animation, and Racism”–will take place in advance of the lecture.

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Virginia Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair of Rhetoric . She is the author of Before Modernism: Inventing American Lyric ( Princeton University Press, 2023) and the author of Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (Princeton UP, 2005), which won the Christian Gauss Prize and the MLA Prize for a First Book. She is the editor of On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute (ACLS, 2010) and, with Yopie Prins, the co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (Johns Hopkins UP, 2014). Her essays in historical poetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, PMLA, New Literary History, MLQ, Victorian Poetry, Studies in Romanticism, Nineteenth-Century Literature, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is one of the founding members of the Historical Poetics working group https://www.historicalpoetics.com