It is not by chance that the literary studies curriculum was one of the most visible trenches of decolonial activism in the UK, especially in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Student-led demand for change has not gone unheard and, in the name of inclusion, changes were made without the adequate level of reflection that the degree of transformation required demanded. Is the diversification of ethnic background and nationality of authors in a syllabus the kind of change to be brought by an approach that calls itself decolonial?

Departing from the pitfalls of curricular inclusion as a decolonial gesture in literary studies curricula, and building on the lessons on epistemic diversification learnt through the success of postcolonial studies, this paper explores the potential of a decolonial praxis as a way forward to deliver the kind of transformation that the approach has the capacity to inspire and deliver. Building on the definition of praxis by the Brazilian scholar Paulo Freire (1985), this paper will argue that to live up to the liberating promise of the decolonial approach, literary studies must develop a conscious approach to process – which I conceive as the field’s structure and method – as a basis for action that is transformative and capable of unlocking more of literary studies’ untapped potential as worldly episteme.

Through an analysis of the rise of vernacular literary studies in the back of the institutionalisation of the discipline of English in the UK and the development of the literary research method in this context, I argue that the regard for a decolonial praxis is the most fruitful and least co-optable way forward to deliver some of the decolonial promises in a discipline embedded in a history of privilege and exclusion.

The importance artificial intelligence has gained today inevitably leads to the question of whether it can be useful in poetry. There are poets who refuse to use the PC or even the typewriter. Others welcome technological help. They benefit from artificial intelligence not to write but to experiment with language and forms in new ways.

Experimenting with language, not writing – what is the difference? The persons who experiment use language, the person who writes, especially the poet, is searching for language. He does not possess it, he has to find it, including things. Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, the Spanish post-romantic poet aptly describes this kind of poetry as a natural poetry that comes from the imagination itself like an electric spark, following its own rules in a free form and using simple words. It is creative by nature. “It may be called the poetry of the poets.”

The question is whether this creative poetry is in any way compatible with the aid of artificial intelligence. In order to answer this question, it is the intention of the paper at hand to examine the two distinguishable subjects of poetry, i.e. the poet, and the addressee of the poem, the reader. Can they be artificially promoted?

Rimbaud’s famous statement points to what happens to the poet in creative poetry: “I is another”. A verse by Paul Celan echoes this with the important difference however that this event implies the connotation of a personal dialogue: “I am you when I am I”. The unity of the poetic subject is dissolved. By comparing the poetics and poetry of Jacques Dupin, Paul Celan, and André du Bouchet, the paper at hand will attempt to show that the text draws the reader into a vertiginous maelstrom of meanings and differences of the I and the others. It is a texture that Derrida calls by the neologism “différance” (differance”). Once one is immersed in the movement of the text and its radiation in all directions, meanings emerge, words and Others and things appear and enter into dialogue. The poem turns out to be a network that produces a coherent meaning beyond the uncertainty of any I and Others and things in transformation, giving evidence of the body, the mind, the language, and poetry. The reader as an implicit addressee is obviously a part of this movement of shifts and dissolutions. The question of the possible place of artificial intelligence in the poetic act of creation will be answered against the background of this poetic event. The paper concludes with the question of the possible role of artificial intelligence in relation to the explicit reader.

Choice of references:

Blanchot, Maurice : L’Entretien infini. Paris, Gallimard, 1969

Derrida, Jacques : La Dissémination. Paris, Seuil, 1972

Heidegger, Martin : Sein und Zeit. Tübingen, Max Niemeyer, 1984