Abstracts

Chris Norris (Bio)

Language and sayability

I’ll be talking about the ways in which certain kinds of language – especially those of poetry and fiction – can test, explore, challenge, or suggestively exceed the limits of straightforward (discursive or propositional) sayability. Among my points of reference will most likely be Agamben (on poetics), Wittgenstein, Adorno, Benjamin, Grice (on implicature), Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford, and Viktor Schklovski. I shall also use a few of my own shorter poems by way of thematic or formal-prosodic illustration.