Malachi Black

University of San Diego, USA

About the keynote speaker

↗️ Malachi Black is a 2024-25 Fulbright Scholar to Lithuania and Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego.

↗️ He is the author of Indirect Light, recently published by Four Way Books, and Storm Toward Morning (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award and a selection for the Poetry Society of America's New American Poets Series (chosen by Ilya Kaminsky).

↗️ Malachi Black is also the author of two limited-edition chapbooks: Quarantine (Argos Books, 2012) and Echolocation (Float Press, 2010). Black’s poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, AGNI, The American Poetry Review, The Baffler, The Believer, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among other journals, and in a number of anthologies, including Before the Door of God; Discoveries: New Writing from The Iowa Review; The Poet’s Quest for God; and A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry. 

Keynote presentation On ‘Literariness’: Revising Roman Jakobson

↗️ A little more than a century ago, the young Roman Jakobson endeavored to posit a concrete basis for literary epistemology: “the subject of literary scholarship is not literature but literariness (literaturnost'), that is, that which makes of a given work a work of literature.” Over the course of his long and storied career, Jakobson would return to this concern at various intervals, elaborating a framework through which the “aesthetic” or “poetic function” of language—constitutive of literariness—could be seen and understood. Germane but adjacent to recent scholarly contributions to the study of fictionality (cf., Benedict S. Robinson’s “The True Story of Fictionality”), this lecture returns to Jakobson’s premise, reevaluates his model for understanding the “poetic function” of language, and aims to articulate a novel parameter for literariness as such.