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Document Type

Article

Author Biography

Paul Jaussen is an associate professor of literature at Lawrence Technological University. His teaching and research focuses on poetry and poetics, literary theory, and the relationship between literature and technology. He is the author of Writing in Real Time: Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital (2017) and a coeditor of A Companion to American Poetry (2022). His essays have appeared in New Literary History, Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Journal of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Chicago Review, and ASAP/J, among others. Currently, he is completing a book on contemporary poetry and the art of breaking worlds, from which this essay is derived.

Abstract

The concept of forensic aesthetics has emerged in recent decades to describe investigative art and design practices that address violence in the public sphere. Forensic art works do not simply seek to document and represent violence; instead, they also construct alternative forums in which violence can appear and be evaluated. Drawing from the theorizations of forensics by Thomas Keenan, Eyal Weizman, and the Forensic Architecture agency, this article argues that a forensic aesthetic can also be found in contemporary poetry, as exemplified by C. D. Wright, Maggie Nelson, and Robin Coste Lewis. By investigating public spaces like the prison, the courtroom, and the art museum, these authors create literary works that extend the established traditions of documentary poetry into new arenas of disputation. Forensic poetics opens alternative ways of conceptualizing fundamental questions in art and literary theory, including the relationships between poetic form and public forum, aesthetic and legal judgment, and linguistic and visual representation.

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