Partly Writing

Partly Writing 4: Writing and the Poetics of Exchange

The Text Festival hosts this year's Partly Writing on 4-5 June 2005


Partly Writing 4 follows the model of the previous Partly Writing events: it is a weekend of conversations and discussions among a range of writers and text practitioners. It emphasises practice, research and open intellectual engagement. This year we are especially keen to discuss examples of social and artistic practice which you feel engage with the role of exchange as part of writing culture. These may be examples that you value and/or that you are actively generating in your own work. In what ways do contemporary writing arts engage with modes of exchange: as social and aesthetic bonds, gift-objects, gift-making activities, forms of circulation, negotiations, transits, limits, inhibitions?

Saturday 4 June 2005

WELCOME
Welcome from the Bury Text Festival (TT)
Introduction to Partly Writing (CB, CW)

Session One
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing and Collaboration
In what ways can one say that artistic collaboration – with materials, with people, with places, with languages – is a form of exchange?
Is collaboration always predicated on exchange?
Is experimental writing predicated on the validity of collaboration (social as much as artistic)?
What are the limits of collaboration?
What is an artistic friendship?

Session Two
Chair: Carol Watts
Specific Economies
In what ways can we say that poetry is an artform currently marked by a gift economy?
What are the implications of this for the creating of bonds, both social and artistic?
What implications for the generation of work?
Do experimental writing practices function outside mainstream means of reward and recognition?
How do we assign value to such practices?
How do these economies traverse forms of practice outside and inside institutions (textual and otherwise)?


Sunday 5 June 2005

Session One
Chair: Tony Trehy
Intertexuality and Textual Borrowings
In what explicit or implicit ways do forms of exchange operate on at the level of the text?
What kind of view on writing and knowledge does intertextuality forward?
What do we understand by textual borrowing?
Do citational and appropriative practices inherently favour the development of poetic and cultural exchanges?
What are the politics at work? Are these always a sign of cultural resistance?


Session Two
Chair: Caroline Bergvall
Writing as Negotiation
What are the politics and pragmatics involved in writing practices that function responsively and/or more or less exclusively through social and cultural negotiations?
What kind of poetics inform from context-specific negotiations?
How do they imply, involve and/or broaden audiences, communities of readers, constituencies of interest?
How might such negotiation-based work be generative of new kinds of aesthetics?
Are poetics of exchange always up for grabs or are they pre-empted by certain art-specific rules?

The Partly Writing website is currently amalgamating material from the past three events (www.partlywriting.com ).