Date/Time
Date(s) - 03/20/2025
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
4010 JFSB
Category(ies)
Aaron Eastley, Associate Professor of English, will present at this week’s Humanities Center colloquium, on Thursday, March 20th at 3:00 pm in 4010 JFSB. This presentation will explore how poets who move between countries use their experiences in different places and cultures to shape their writing. Refreshments will be served.
Title: “All Distance Gone”: Leslie Norris’s Transnational Poetics
Jahan Ramazani has emphasized the importance in the 20th and 21st centuries of “traveling poets.” Drawing on the ideas of Edward Said and James Clifford, Ramazani emphasizes that writers should not be assumed to be always and forever (or especially solely) defined by their places of birth: that in a modern world of “exiles, emigres, [and] refugees” identities tend to become “overlapping and conflicted, multiple and fluid.” In the case of a writer like Leslie Norris, born in Wales but dividing his adult life between England and America, we must ascertain how he traveled: key choices he made and ways his experiences shaped him—even unawares. The point of a “transnational poetics,” as Ramazani calls it, is to discover and evaluate in particular poems the traces of places and cultures that influenced the writing. This presentation will attempt to so illustrate the poetics of a specifically transnational Norris.
About our presenter:
Aaron Eastley is Associate Professor of English. He holds a PhD from the University of California at San Diego, and specializes in transnational literatures in English, British Modernism, and diaspora and globalization studies. He is the Honors Coordinator for English and taught Honors Unexpected Connections courses from 2017-2022. His scholarship has appeared in venues such as the Journal of Caribbean Literatures, ARIEL, the Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, Twentieth-Century Literature, and Research in African Literatures. His current interests center on the Caribbean and Wales. Over the past several years he has collaborated with colleagues in Trinidad to put together a collection of the journalism of Seepersad Naipaul that come out from Peepal Tree Press in March 2024.
