Gareth Hughes: Narratives of Nation - The Power of Poetic Spaces

Gareth Hughes is in the second year of his PhD in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway. His thesis explores spatial transformations in contemporary French and multilingual poetry.In this episode of the ‘Narratives of Nation’ series, Gareth talks about the multilingual poems of Michèle Métail, the power of poetry to loosen the bind between nationality and language, and how entering into poetic spaces can help us to reimagine the world.--------------References:Gratton, Peter and Morin, Marie-Eve (eds.), Jean-Luc Nancy and Plural Thinking : Expositions of World, Ontology, Politics, and Sense (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).Li, Xiaofan Amy, ‘A Post-Orientalist Turn: Pascal Quignard, Michèle Métail, and China’, The Western Reinvention of Chinese Literature, 1910–2010 (Leiden: Brill, 2022).Les Linguistes atterré(e)s, Le Français va très bien, merci (Paris : Gallimard, 2023).Métail, Michèle, Le Cours du Danube en 2888 kilomètres/vers… l’infini (Dijon : Les presses du réel, 2018). Les Horizons du sol : panorama (Marseille : CipM / Spectres familiers, 1999). Le Vol des oies sauvages (Saint-Benoit-du-Sault : Tarabuste, 2011). Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007).Parish, Nina & Wagstaff, Emma, ‘Michèle Métail : traduire la contrainte’, Michèle Métail : la poésie en trois dimensions, ed. Anne-Christine Royère (Dijon : Les Presses du réel, 2019). --------------Image: “The Map of the Armillary Sphere” by Su Hui, from Michèle Métail’s Le vol des oies sauvages : poèmes chinois à lecture retournée (Tarabuste Éditions, 2011). Credit: Hopscotch Translation, accessed via https://hopscotchtranslation.com/2021/10/18/janet-lee-marcella-durand/ [24 August 2023]---------------Technecast is a podcast series showcasing research from across the arts and humanities. It is produced by Edwin Gilson, Felix Clutson, Isabel Sykes, Morag Thomas and Olivia Aarons. Fancy turning your research into a podcast episode? We’d be happy to hear from you at [email protected].