Book Launch: The Search for a Science of Verse, w. Christian R. Gelder
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Friday 27 March, 3:30pm-4:30pm
The Clyde Hotel, 385 Cardigan St, Carlton
Join us for the launch of Christian R. Gelder's The Search for a Science of Verse, 1880 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Antonia Pont (Deakin) and Jeremy George (UniMelb) will join us to offer reflections on the book.
About the book:
From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination—and how that imagination, in turn, responded.
All are welcome!
Speaker bios:
Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow in Literature at Macquarie University, Sydney. His work has appeared in Modernism/modernity, Literature and Medicine, Psychoanalysis and History, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review and elsewhere. With Robert Boncardo, he is the co-author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).
Antonia Pont is Associate Professor in Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University. She publishes across theoretical, critical and creative platforms. Relevant works include: Plain Life: On Thinking, Feeling and Deciding (NewSouth, 2025), A Philosophy of Practising with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (EUP, 2021), Practising with Deleuze (co-authored, EUP, 2017), and You Will Not Know in Advance What You’ll Feel (Rabbit Poets Series, 2019). She is a long-term practitioner of sitting meditation practice/yoga and reading/writing.
Jeremy George is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. He is co-editor, with Cameron Hurst, of Venus in Tullamarine: Sex, Politics and Norman Lindsay (Index, 2023).