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After Friendship: Walks with Paul Celan, with Zoe Tuck
Image graphic with reddish brown border and text, and a cream background. Text reads: "Zoe Tuck After Friendship Reading friendship through Jean Daive's Under the Dome laboratoire liminal"
[a 6-week online program via zoom; Saturdays at 12pm EST/9am PDT/5pm GMT+1; begins 11/6]
About this workshop:
After Friendship is the last of Zoe Tuck’s year-long project of reading texts about/around/produced through friendship. Each of the classes has centered on closely reading a particular text. In this class that text is Under the Dome: Walks with Paul Celan by Jean Daive, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, which chronicles the friendship between poet-translators Daive and Celan. As such, After Friendship carries forward inquiries into the relationship between translation and friendship. Being a memoir composed after Celan’s death, Under the Dome raises questions about the aftermath of friendship. How do we remember lost friends? What is at stake when we memorialize them?
With Under the Dome, we also get to approach the setting of friendship. As Robert Kaufman & Philip Gerard note in their introduction:
“The ‘dome’ of the book’s title refers in the first place to the shade-shelter formed by the trees’ foliage, the ‘foliage’ that, in French and German, among other languages, yields terms that can signify ‘leaf’ or ‘page’: feuille; Blatt. The trees—primarily chestnut and paulownia—that populate the Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris’ Fifth Arrondissement where Celan lives, and in whose streets and cafés Celan and Daive delight to stroll, to think aloud, to work: these trees and their leaves generate—and in turn offer the poet-translators a generative—dome.”
Here is a suggestive opportunity to engage the ecopoetics of friendship. Here, also, we have an opportunity to study urban poetics: how do the shapes of a city and a society dictate the shape of a relationship? If, as Gaston Bachelard writes, “the house protects the dreamer,” what shelters the friend?
Logistics: We will meet once a week for two hours on zoom, with time divided between discussion of the reading and writing exercises in support of the ongoing epistolary project. Recordings of classes and transcripts will be made available to participants, along with weekly video lectures, lecture notes, and secondary readings, when applicable.
NOTE: The dates for this workshop are: 11/6, 11/13, 11/20, 12/4, 12/11, 12/18 (**no class on 11/27**)