Love Songs of Serial Desire:
Robert von Hallberg, Feb. 16

Robert von Hallberg, an expert on comparative poetry and poetics and the Helen A. Regenstein Professor in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago, will speak at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum on Tuesday, Feb. 16, as a guest of The Gould Center of Humanistic Studies at CMC. His address, "Love Songs of Serial Desire," begins at 6:45 p.m., and is free and open to the public, with seating on a first-come basis.
Von Hallberg has written on the subject of avant-garde American poetry and on the evolution of American poetry from 1945 through more recent years. He is also especially interested in the culture of literary intellectuals, having authored Literary Intellectuals and the Dissolution of the State (1996), and The Sociology of Literature. In his academic research, he further evaluates about the relations between political history and literary culturethe topic of his 1987 book Poetics and Poetic Value.
Von Hallberg currently is working on two additional projects: a book examining African-American poetry, and another that will be a short defense of lyric poetry. The genesis for the latter work comes from his growing interest in poetry and song.
He also teaches courses on German poetry and theories of poetic modernity at the University of Chicago. His areas of interest include early literary modernism (1909-1925) in London, New York, Berlin and Munich; poet Ezra Pound; postwar American poetry; and East German writing (1975-89). He is co-editor of the journal Modernism/Modernity, published by Johns Hopkins, and directs an ongoing graduate workshop in poetry and poetics.
Von Hallberg received a doctorate in English and American literature from Stanford University, and has since taught there and at the University of Chicago, as well as short professorships in Germany. He has received numerous research fellowships, including the Guggenheim, Alexander von Humbolt, and Fulbright awards.
In his address at the Athenaeum, he will consider "Love Songs of Serial Desire," based on his knowledge of the genre written in both English and other languages. As in the courses that he teaches, he explores the relationship between poetry and song and other general questions of poetics.