Ziegler Lecture Series: Connor Doak

November 19, 2019
12:30 pm
Buchanan Tower Rm. 997

Connor Doak, University of Bristol
“The Poetics of Masculinity: Rereading Vladimir Mayakovsky”

Abstract – How might masculinity be performed in verse? What is the relationship between class;masculinity and modernist poetic experimentation? Is there a poetics of masculinity? This talk explores these questions through the case study of the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), who began his career as a Futurist provocateur in a yellow blouse, reinvented himself as the Soviet worker-poet par excellence in the 1920s, before becoming disillusioned and taking his own life in 1930. I argue that Mayakovsky used formal experimentation in his verse and drama to negotiate a position of gendered agency during a period of political and social transformation, as Russia experienced war, revolution, and the establishment of the world’s first socialist state.

Co-sponsored with the Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies.