Adelbert von Chamisso's Bounding Lines (English Goethe Society Lecture)

Speaker: Polly Dickson (Durham)

Adelbert von Chamisso was a consummate draughtsman as well as a writer, poet and botanist. His notebooks attest to a finely tuned ability to capture, with deft precision, some natural form or human likeness. But Chamisso was also a doodler, and within the extensive collection of materials in his archive are a number of dazzling and bizarre line drawings that have no obvious representational or diagrammatic content. These drawings will form the impetus for the talk. Spirographic and dreamy, tangled and immense, these whimsical designs — for which there is no precise clue as to their function or provenance — are best understood, it will be argued, as experiments in form. Chamisso’s doodles and other graphic experiments will be traced across and beyond his poetry notebooks and draft manuscripts, paying attention to how his doodling practice interweaves with, and interrupts, his forays in verse writing. Doodling emerges as a method of coping with and working through the complexities and pressures of constructing precise metrical forms. By paying close attention to Chamisso’s notebook practice, and exploring cross-medial considerations of his notational ‘style’, the paper will unfold the interplay of pleasure, compulsion, and frustration in the compositional process and make a broader case for doodles and notebook drawings as an ‘other’ writing, as writing’s shadow self. At the centre of these considerations is the intermedial form of the line — the line of verse, on the one hand, and the graphic line, on the other — measured and constrictive, yet trembling with life.

Polly Dickson is Assistant Professor in German at the University of Durham. 

Attendance free. All are welcome to attend, in person or online via Zoom. Advance online registration is essential, please select appropriate ticket when booking.