Style: The Present Situation

Book launch and panel discussion of Jeff Dolven’s Senses of Style (University of Chicago Press, 2018) at Cabinet magazine Berlin

with Paul Fleming, Eva Geulen, Daniel Tiffany, and the author.
Dolven’s study of poetic style—an eccentric juxtaposition of poets Thomas Wyatt and Frank O’Hara—will serve as a starting point for a general conversation about this protean and self-divided concept. The panelists will be seated at their ease, or unease, in a stylistically provocative repertory of chairs assembled by Cabinet (specialists, after all, in furniture) for the occasion. Ideas will be accommodated and unseated accordingly.

In English.

Jeff Dolven teaches poetry and poetics at Princeton University; in addition to Senses of Style, he has written two books of criticism, Scenes of Instruction (University of Chicago Press, 2007) and the admittedly hasty Take Care (Cabinet Books, 2017), and a volume of poems, Speculative Music (Sarabande, 2013). He is also an editor-at-large at Cabinet.

Paul Fleming is the Taylor Family Director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, where he is also Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. His publications include Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism (Stanford University Press, 2008) and translations of Peter Szondi’s Essay on the Tragic and Hans Blumenberg’s Care Crosses the River. He was co-editor of Cabinet no. 15, with a theme section on “The Average.”

Eva Geulen is the director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin. Her books include Aus dem Leben der Form: Goethes Morphologie und die Nager (August Verlag, 2016) and The End of Art: Readings in a Rumor after Hegel (Stanford University Press, 2006).

Daniel Tiffany is a poet and theorist who lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of Southern California. He is the author of ten books of poetry and literary criticism, including Radio Corpse (Harvard University Press, 1998), Toy Medium (University of California Press, 2000), Infidel Poetics (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and My Silver Planet (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Poems from The Work-Shy (Wesleyan University Press, 2016)—his most recent collection, produced in collaboration with BLUNT RESEARCH GROUP—have appeared in museum exhibitions in the US and been adapted for theater. He has published translations from French, Greek, and Italian, and is a recipient of the Berlin Prize.