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

• Applicant: Dr. Julius Greve
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 450708673

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.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants