Global Humanities Junior Fellow at Harvard University

August - October 2015

Time in Poetry. Representations of History in the Poetic Œuvre of Octavio Paz

In the twentieth century, the process of writing entailed a constant confrontation with historical events of global impact. My project is concerned with notions of temporality in Octavio Paz’ poetic œuvre, with particular attention to the transformation of history into art. Other research foci include the significance of different forms of the poetic genre, and the spatial conceptualizations of time as represented in the poems on the part of the Mexican Nobel laureate. Based on Adorno’s suggestion that the poetic form may be read as sedimented history, the project also scrutinizes temporal structures inhering in poetry.

Catarina von Wedemeyer is research associate at Freie Universität’s Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Having obtained a B.A. from the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, and an M.A. in Romance Literature from Freie Universität, she has been a PhD candidate at FU Berlin since January 2013. She was a visiting scholar at Fundación Max Aub, Spain (2012); at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2013); as well as at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2014). In 2014, Catarina von Wedemeyer organized an international conference concerning the relations between poetry and history in Octavio Paz’ œuvre. Her most recent article is entitled: “Pertencimento estético: colunas de jornal de Clarice Lispector” (Cadernos de Língua e Literatura Hebraica, no. 12, 2015).