Adam Joseph Shellhorse (Temple University), "Post-Poetry: The Unthought Poetics and Politics of Augusto de Campos"

Adam Joseph Shellhorse (Associate Professor of Spanish, Portuguese, and Global Studies, Temple University) will present a paper entitled "Post-Poetry: The Unthought Poetics and Politics of Augusto de Campos."

Through an examination of the primacy of poetics—understood as embodied, multiplex, experiential forms of knowledge, perception, sensation, and affection—in the work of Augusto de Campos, this paper zeroes on the ways in which the poet conceives of and deploys his pós-poesia [post-poetry] for common, yet singular ends. Paying special heed to Campos’s final book of poetry, Pós Poemas [Post-Poems] (2025), I conceptualize what I call, following Marisa Galvez and Friedrich Nietzsche, the “unthought” and “untimely” dimensions of his work as related to history, politics, sensation, affect, and traditional conceptions of Latin American literature.  If the “unthought” for Galvez entails reconceptualizing poetic forms such that they are no longer viewed through the lens of philology as static, linguistic-centered objects but rather as freer, creative, phenomenological forms of experience, I argue that such a framework can prove consequential for reimagining the power of affect, sensation, and perception in Campos, as well as the modes in which his sui generis oeuvre engages history, politics, multimedia, and the other arts so as to induce fresh forms of experience that disrupt customary conceptions of what is meant by “literature,” even as they summon forth new perceptions of the political.

Adam Joseph Shellhorse (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is associate professor, graduate chair in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and former director of Latin American Studies at Temple University. He specializes in 19th, 20th, and 21st century Latin American literature, poetry, and film, viewed within a comparative, inter-American, and Latin American context. Bridging these historically divided fields, four issues guide his research: 1. the radical constructivist and reflexive turn in Latin American poetics and art during the 1950s and 1960s; 2. the legacies of the historical Latin American avant-gardes; 3. the examination of literature in relation to the other arts, media, and technology, and how literature relates to issues of affect, power, pop culture, and social justice; 4. the crisis of literary expression and nation-state discourses in the 20th and 21st centuries and, in consequence, the uneven relationship of literature to politics, critical theory, philosophy, race, and gender in Latin American studies today. The aim is to forge a new vision of the problem and the situation in the field that productively illuminates the discussion of literature and its crisis. Shellhorse is the author of Anti-Literature: The Politics and Limits of Representation in Modern Brazil and Argentina (University of Pittsburgh Press, Illuminations, Cultural Formations of the Americas, 2017) and Antiliteratura (Editora Perspectiva 2025) which was recently published in Brazil. Moreover, he won the Antonio Candido Best Article Award in the Humanities in 2021 (LASA Brazil Section) for his essay on the “verbivocovisual revolution” in Augusto de Campos. Shellhorse’s recent work has or soon will appear in The Cambridge Companion to Latin American Poetry, Luso-Brazilian Review, Revista Hispánica Moderna, CR: The New Centennial Review, Política Común, Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Santa Barbara Portuguese Studies, Littera, Revista da Anpoll, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, and Dictionary of Literary Biography.  His book-in-progress provides a generative, hemispheric appraisal of the problem and power of affect and poetics in Spanish American, Brazilian, and African American experimental literature, deepening the stakes of what he calls the (anti-)literary’s ultimate “untimeliness” in a Latin and North American comparative context.  The book centers its attention largely on the writings of Augusto de Campos, Juan José Saer, Clarice Lispector, James Baldwin, and the Brazilian concrete poets. Shellhorse serves as Chair of the Latin American Studies Association’s Brazil Section.