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Barrett Watten Title Professor  Office# 9204.4, 5057 Woodward Research Area American modernist and postmodernist literature; modernism and social modernity; linguistics and poetics; subjectivity and literary form; cultural politics; historical narration and national identity; the avant-garde; contemporary poetry and poetics. Phone (313) 577-3067 E-Mail b.watten@wayne.edu

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Education

AB, Biochemistry, University of California, Berkeley, 1969
MFA, English, University of Iowa, 1972
PhD, English, University of California, Berkeley, 1995
Dissertation: Horizon Shift: Progress and Negativity in American Modernism

Awards

Fulbright Senior Fellowship, Universität Tübingen, 2005
René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association, 2004

Books (critical)

The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003)
Total Syntax (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985)

Books (creative)

Progress/Under Erasure ( Los Angeles : Green Integer, 2004). New edition of two book-length poems

Bad History (Berkeley, Calif.: Atelos Press, 1998; 2nd printing 2002). Experimental prose poem

Frame: 1971–1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1997). Collected poems

Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union , with Ron Silli¬man, Lyn Hejin¬ian, and Michael Davidson (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991). Multi-authored prose narrative

Chapters

“Foucault Reads Acker and Rewrites the History of the Novel,” in Lust for Life: The Life and Writings of Kathy Acker, ed. Carla Harryman and Amy Scholder ( London : Verso, 2006) 

“Poetics in the Expanded Field: Literary, Visual, Digital . . . ,” in New Media Poetics, ed. Adelaide Morris and Thom Swiss ( Cambridge, Mass. , : MIT Press, 2006)

“What I See in How I Became Hettie Jones,” in Nancy Grace and Ronna Johnson, eds., Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2002) 

Articles

“The Turn to Language and the 1960s,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (Fall 2002)

“The Lost of Love: A Genealogy,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 23, nos. 3-4 (Fall/Winter 2000-2001 [appeared winter 2002]).

“An Epic of Subjectivation: The Making of Americans,” Modernism/Modernity 5, no. 2 (Spring 1998)

Recent conferences and panels

Conference co-organizer, Authorship and the Turn to Language, Universität Tübingen, , , December 2005

Conference co-organizer, Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Dislocation, University of California, Irvine , November 2004

Round table on “Poetics of Diaspora and Displacement,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Pennsylvania State University, March 2005

Panel organizer, “Modernisms Right and Left,” Modernist Studies Association, Vancouver , B.C., , September 2004

Panel organizer, “Modern Authority,” Modernist Studies Association, Birmingham , , , September 2003

Recent public lectures

“Transposing the Limits of Organic Form: Language Writing and Anthony Braxton,” Current Free Practices in Music and Poetry, New York University (March 2006)

“Authorship Under Erasure: Poetics in the Expanded Field,” Universität Erlangen, , December 2005; Ruhr Universität, Bochum , December 2005; Universität Göttingen, , , January 2006

“Language, Memory, and History in Postmodern Poetry,” with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Universität München, December 2005; Universität Mainz, December 2005

“Authority, Personality, and Poetry: From the Cold War to the Era,” Authorship and the Turn to Language, Universität Tübingen, December 2005

 “Global Conceptualism,” American Comparative Literature Association Conference, Pennsylvania State University , March 2005

“Cold War Universals and the Poetics of Displacement,” Post-Soviet Culture and Theory, Duke University , February 2005

“Franco/Luambo Makiadi’s Universalism,” Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Dislocation, University of California, Irvine , November 2004

“Distributions of Authorship: Poetry as a Scene of Decision,” Department of English, SUNY Buffalo, March 2004; Humanities Center Fall Symposium, Wayne State University , November 2004

“Left Modernism, Social Articulation, Permanent Avant-Garde,” Modernist Studies Association, Vancouver , , , October 2004

“Zukofsky’s Historicism,” Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference, Columbia University/Barnard College, September 2004

“Olson’s Historicism,” Poetries of the 1940s, American and International, University of Maine of , June 2004

“Distributions of Authorship: Poetry as a Scene of Decision,” Department of English, SUNY Buffalo , March 2004

“Modern Authority,” Modernist Studies Association, Birmingham , , , September 2003

“Poetics in the Expanded Field: Literary, Visual, Digital . . . ,” Twenty-First Century Literature Conference, University of Louisville of , February 2003

“Foucault Reads Acker and Rewrites the History of the Novel,” Lust for Life: The Life and Writings of Kathy Acker, Fales Library, New York , University, November 2002


Critical responses

Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory, special issue of Aerial, ed. Rod Smith (1995)

Publications available online

The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics

Progress/Under Erasure

Bad History

Frame (1971-1990)

Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union

Barrett Watten: Contemporary Poetics as Critical Theory