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

Finch-Race, D. A., Gosetti, V. and Kerr, G. (2024) Forms of unsiting in factory compositions by Leslie Kaplan and Joseph Ponthus. Journal of Cultural Geography, (doi: 10.1080/08873631.2023.2295591) (Early Online Publication)

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.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: Funding details: 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 a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council: “Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation” (DE200101206).
• Keywords: absence, density, dispersal, environmental humanities, France, poetry.
• Status: Early Online Publication
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kerr, Dr Greg
• Authors: Finch-Race, D. A., Gosetti, V., and Kerr, G.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Modern Languages and Cultures > French
• Journal Name: Journal of Cultural Geography
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• ISSN: 0887-3631
• ISSN (Online): 1940-6320
• Published Online: 03 January 2024
• Copyright Holders: © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor and Francis Group
• First Published: First published in Journal of Cultural Geography 2024
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy