Professor William Watkin
Professor - English
- English
- English and Creative Writing
Teaching
William Watkin has taught a wide variety of areas at Brunel. His current teaching interests revolve around the changing face of literary theory in the new millennium. He runs courses on the relation of philosophy to literature and the arts from the historical origins of aesthetics through to the most contemporary philosophical statements on aesthetics and literature. He has also taught contemporary literature for many years, specialising in contemporary poetry and poetics. He has a wider interest in poetics and has taught the history of poetry. Another interest is the avant-garde and experimentalism. He taught modernism and the avant-garde for many years and continues to run seminars on experimental, contemporary poetry.Activities:
Key Publications:
“The Poetics of Presentation: Lyn Hejinian’s My Life Project and the work of Giorgio Agamben” Textual Practice 2012.
“The / Turn and the “ ” Pause: Agamben, Derrida and the Stratification of Poetry” in Textures Series, Lexington Press 2011.
“Poetry’s Promiscuous Plurality: On a Part of Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Muses[PG1] ” in Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking SUNY 2011.
The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (London: Continuum University Press, March 2010). “Derrida’s Limits: Aporias between ‘Ousia and Grammē’,” Derrida Today 3.1 (2010): 113-136.
“Projective Recursion: The Structure of Ron Silliman’s Tjanting,” Jacket 39 (2010).
“Taking steps beyond elegy: poetry, philosophy, lineation, and death,” Textual Practice 23.6 (2009): 1051-1065.
“The Materialization of Prose: Poiesis versus Dianoia in the work of Godzich & Kittay, Schklovsky, Silliman and Agamben,” Paragraph 31.3 (2008): 344-364.
“‘Systematic rule-governed violations of convention’: Ron Silliman’s Poetic Procedures,” Contemporary Literature 48.4, 2007: 499-529.
“Counterchange: Derrida’s Poetry,” in Encountering Derrida: Legacies and Futures of Deconstruction (London: Continuum, 2007).
On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature. (Edinburgh University Press, 2004).
“Revolution, Melancholia and Materiality in the Work of Julia Kristeva”. Paragraph 26.3 (2003): 86-107.
“Friendly Little Communities: Derrida’s Politics of Death.” Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture and Politics 15.2 (2002): 219-237.
In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde. (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2001).
“Poetry Machines: Repetition in the Early Poetry of Kenneth Koch.” EnterText 1.1 (Dec. 2000): 83-117.