Opinion Pieces: Forms of Media and Geopolitical Disorder from 1989 to 9/11

This talk considers the role of news form in the growing recognition of multiple perspectives and mappings of the world. The talk traces how, between 1989 and the mid-noughties, writers including Dmitrii Prigov, Lin Yaode 林燿德, Kirill Medvedev, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, and Claudia Rankine gave fresh inflection to the tension between order and disorder inherent to the form of the news. These writers turned to the spatial form of the news to grapple with the geopolitical flux and disintegrating and resurgent empires of the post-1989 world. They also addressed a similarly disintegrative and integrative upheaval in the media of the news: the rise of the internet and the shift from the mass media of newspapers, radio, and television to the simultaneously evermore fragmented and increasingly monolithic world of newsfeeds and social media. The juxtapositions of news form offer rich resources for grappling with a post-1989 media environment and world capable in equal measure of directing opinion and falling to pieces. In terms of East Asia, the talk in part focuses on “Er erba” 《二二八》, a work by Taiwanese poet Lin Yaode written during the “post-martial law boom” in Taiwanese culture. Through this work, the talk reflects on, connects, and contrasts the literary, media, and political upheavals in the late 1980s and early 1990s on both sides of the Taiwanese Straits to the flux in the same period in Russia and Eastern Europe.

Speaker: Jacob Edmond, Professor of English, University of Otago

Jacob Edmond is a professor of English at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. His work explores literary and artistic responses to global shifts in media, culture, economics, and geopolitics. He has a particular interest in generic and inter-art boundary crossing, new media, and globalization in avant-garde poetry in Russian, Chinese, and English. His first book, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (Fordham University Press, 2012), explores how poets responded to the upheavals wrought by the end of the Cold War. His second book, Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (Columbia University Press, 2019), examines literary and artistic works that address the proliferating copies of online media and the replication enabled by globalization. His current book project draws on literary and artistic responses to the news media to ask why our instant access to news from around the world brings not global understanding but paralysing confusion. By closely engaging with texts in Chinese, Russian and English, all his work addresses the global trends and linguistic and cultural differences that shape our contemporary world.

Discussant/Moderator: Ann Komaromi, Centre for Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures

Organizer: Chris Song, Assistant Professor, Department of Language Studies, UTSC