Forms of unsiting in factory compositions by Leslie Kaplan and Joseph Ponthus

ABSTRACT

Leslie Kaplan’s Excess – The Factory (1982, translated in 2018 by Julie Carr and Jennifer Pap) and Joseph Ponthus’s On the Line: Notes from a Factory (2019, translated in 2021 by Stephanie Smee) are rare poetic depictions of industrial environments. Kaplan dwells on the manufacturing setting as exemplifying overproduction, whereas Ponthus attends to how precarious work in globalized supply chains gives rise to localized pressures. The two from-within stagings of labor offer testimony of dehumanizing infrastructure by pointing up intensities and ruptures in the margins of everyday capitalist cycles. They thereby demonstrate how poetry can perform a “critical unsiting” of the factory-site. In the light of this out-of-the-ordinary concept, our article identifies key aspects of (a) absence, (b) dispersal, and (c) density so as to show how poetic language can spark collective awakening and resistance to dehumanizing conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• absence
• density
• dispersal
• environmental humanities
• France
• poetry

Acknowledgments

Our gratitude goes to all those who provided comments during the panel on “Poetry, Place and Displacement” at the annual conference of the Australian Society for French Studies in December 2021, hosted by the University of Queensland.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Finch-Race’s work is co-funded by the European Union and the Italian Ministry of Universities & Research under the National Operational Plan for Research & Innovation 2014–20 (PON R&I Green) as per ministerial decree 1062 from 10 August 2021. Gosetti is the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award : “Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation” (DE200101206).

Notes on contributors

Daniel A. Finch-Race

Daniel Finch-Race FHEA FRGS is Assistant Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna, Communications Consultant for Economia & Ecologia and Treasurer of the European Society of Comparative Literature. He sits on the editorial boards of Modern & Contemporary France and Storicamente. His solo articles and themed issues encompass journals such as European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes and Nineteenth-Century Contexts. He co-edited French Ecocriticism (Peter Lang), Italian Science Fiction and the Environmental Humanities (Liverpool University Press) and Textures (Peter Lang), plus ecocritical issues of Dix-neuf and L’esprit créateur.

Valentina Gosetti

Valentina Gosetti is a poetry translator, Associate Professor in French at the University of New England in Australia and Co-Editor of the Peter Lang Oxford book series “Romanticism and After in France.” She authored Aloysius Bertrand’s “Gaspard de la Nuit:” Beyond the Prose Poem (Legenda), co-edited an issue of Dix-neuf and Still Loitering: Australian Essays in Honour of Ross Chambers (Peter Lang), and co-edited/co-translated the bilingual anthology Donne: Poeti di Francia e oltre – dal Romanticismo a oggi (Ladolfi).

Greg Kerr

Greg Kerr is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Glasgow. He is the author of Exile, Non-Belonging and Statelessness in Grangaud, Jabès, Lubin and Luca: No Man’s Language (UCL Press) and Dream Cities: Utopia and Prose by Poets in Nineteenth-Century France (Legenda). He co-edited a special collection for Modern Languages Open on “Between Borders: French-Language Poetry and the Poetics of Statelessness.”