A Poetics of Ventriloquism: Verse, Voice, and Mediation from Walt Whitman to Kendrick Lamar

研究项目“口技的诗学：从沃尔特·惠特曼到肯德里克·拉马尔的诗歌、声音和冥想”揭示了从19世纪中期到现在，北美诗歌的发展，通过新的交流和记录实践带来的媒体技术变革，以及流行文化中充满政治和情感的娱乐形式，如黑脸吟诗人，之间的关系。通过研究这种关系，该项目旨在展示自惠特曼的《草叶集》以来，北美许多诗人（通常是权威诗人）的抒情表达在多大程度上引用了媒体技术和流行文化的表达形式。以惠特曼为例，我们可以看出他的诗通过自由诗构建了一种明显未经过滤的情感表达；然而，诗人本人却把这种表达等同于当时摄影的“新媒介”。因此，直接与中介性是纠缠在一起的。这个项目想要表明的是，正是通过这种纠缠，这些诗人成为北美民众的某些群体或传统的喉舌（以种族或特定环境的隶属关系等为标志）。该项目希望通过引入“腹语作为一种诗歌实践”的概念，来描述一种暗示直接的文学风格与同时引用非文学媒体之间的联系，以便让他人的声音通过自己说话。在对选定的诗人（惠特曼和鲍勃·迪伦、埃兹拉·庞德和坎耶·韦斯特、H.D.和帕蒂·史密斯，以及诺贝斯·菲利普和肯德里克·拉马尔）进行比较分析的基础上，该项目试图发展和测试“腹语”一词作为一个分析概念。这个词最初指的是一个过程，在这个过程中，一个声音从它的（假定的）发源地分离出来，出现在其他地方，因此同时被认为是非物质的和物质的。它适合作为一个分析术语，因为它结合了现代诗歌的各个方面，声音的构建，以及上述媒体实践的历史变化，并展示了这些方面的相关性：诗意的腹语是用来描述即时性和媒介性、情感和技术的核心动态，以及被称为“发自内心的写作”的隐喻和物质历史阶段——与现代诗歌和流行文化歌曲的歌词相关。通过在比较分析的基础上提炼腹语的概念，不仅有助于具体诗人的学术研究，而且可以通过诗学，媒体技术和流行文化的概要观点来看待美国文学史。

The research project “A Poetics of Ventriloquism: Verse, Voice, and Mediation from Walt Whitman to Kendrick Lamar” sheds light on the relationship between the development of North American poetry, the media-technological change through ever new practices of communication and recording, and politically and emotionally charged forms of entertainment in popular culture, such as blackface minstrelsy, from the mid-19th century to the present day. By examining this relationship, the project aims to show to what extent the lyrical articulation of many (often canonical) poets from North America has cited media-technological and popular-cultural forms of expression since Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” In Whitman, for example, it it is possible to discern that his poems construct an apparently unfiltered expression of emotion via free verse; this expression, however, is equated by the poet himself with the "new medium" of photography at the time. The immediate, therefore, is entangled with mediation. The project would like to show that it is precisely by way of this entanglement that the poets in question appear as the mouthpiece of certain groups or traditions of the North American populace (marked by ethnic or milieu-specific affiliation, among other things).The project would like to describe this connection between a literary style that suggests directness and simultaneously references non-literary media in order to let the voices of others speak through itself, by introducing the concept of ‘ventriloquism as a poetic practice.’ On the basis of comparative analyses of selected poets (Whitman and Bob Dylan, Ezra Pound and Kanye West, H.D. and Patti Smith as well as M. NourbeSe Philip and Kendrick Lamar), the project seeks to develop and test the term ‘ventriloquism’ as an analytical concept. This term initially denotes a process in which a voice is separated from its (supposed) place of origin, appears elsewhere, and is thus perceived as immaterial and material at the same time. It lends itself as an analytical term, since it combines aspects of modern poetry, the construction of voice, and the abovementioned historical change in media practices, as well as it demonstrates the correlations of these aspects: Poetic ventriloquism is set to describe the central dynamics of immediacy and mediality, affect and technology, as well as the metaphorical and material-historical staging of what has been called a “writing from the gut” – relevant for both modern poetry and pop-cultural song lyrics. By refining the notion of ventriloquism based on the comparative analyses, the project not only contributes to the scholarship on the specific poets, but also enables a new perspective on the history of American literature through the synoptic view of poetics, media technology and popular culture.