Project Details
Projekt
Poetry as aesthetic practice. Form, experience and everyday relevance of verbal art in Madagascar and Tanzania
Subject Area
African, American and Oceania Studies
Term
from 2016 to 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 289070623
Poetry forms a crucial part of everyday communication both along the Tanzanian coast and in the Malagasy highlands. Orators inspire their audiences at public events with creative metaphors and evocative allegories. Petty traders walk the streets selling poetry collections. Poetry-slams are held on a regular basis at cultural centers. Poems are shared in internet forums, where they are "tagged" and "liked" by others. And, in the form of song lyrics, poetry is disseminated nonstop through countless radio and TV stations. In all these and many more cases, poetic texts not only engage in mimetic reflections of everyday life; by being experienced and also contribute to the perception of everyday life, and therefore significantly add to the ways in which actual lifeworlds are made. It is the aim of this project to empirically study how poetic forms and practices may contribute to the construction of lifeworlds within the urban contexts of Tanzania and Masagascar. We start with the assumption that poetic forms of engaging with the world fundamentally and systematically differ from other more "explicit" forms of communication, due to their unique combination of form and content. Therefore, we argue, their study requires a specific approach. Focusing on the ambiguous relation of poetic artworks and their aesthetic experience, the project will examine how poetic language is actually experienced and how it is rendered meaningful in everyday life. Applying a profoundly empirical perspective, the project tries to go beyond previous approaches deducing both experience and effect from the gestalt of the poems themselves, thus methodologically neglecting the difficult interrelation of artwork, experience, and actual lifeworlds. In order to pursue its goals, the project will investigate both "highbrow" and "popular" genres of poetry. We will deal with three different dimensions of the poetic process during three different stages of our research: First, we will explore the semantic potential of certain groups of poems, as it results from genre-specific combinations of form and content (aspect 1: "form/content"). Then, we will examine how these poems are actually experienced in performative situations (aspect 2: "aesthetic experience"). And finally, we will try to understand the ways in which the aesthetic experience of poetic articulation is rendered meaningful when it comes to making sense of and engaging with actual lifeworlds (aspect 3: "reflection and consequences"). In combining approaches from literary studies and cultural anthropology, by paying special attention to aesthetic form, and in pursuing a strictly empirical approach to the study of both aesthetic experience and its everyday uses, the project not only aims at transcending the ways in which verbal art in Africa is usually studied. It also intends to substantially contribute to general debates about essences, experiences, and effects of aesthetic language, and of aesthetic forms more generally.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
