Design: Masoud Morgan
REJECTING CLOSURE
Research Workshop
3–4 July 2025
Venue: PULS, Angoulêmeplatz 2 (5mins walking distance from Hildesheim main station)
This workshop is part of my postdoc project in the DFG-Research Training Group "Aesthetic Practice", University of Hildesheim.
“Form is not a fixture, but an activity,” writes poet Lyn Heijinian in The Rejection of Closure (1982). This research workshop looks into writing’s forms and their aesthetic forces that are often overlooked or marginalized in many academic fields or framed as ‘experiments.’
What are the stakes of a continued re-working of knowledge hierarchies, through forms of writing, while ideological discourse turns towards the “fiction” of closure and thus towards the “pleasurable effects” of texts that “are directed toward a single reading”? (Hejinian 2009) What are the many ways, in which “the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” (Hartman 2008) can take form in writing and other media? What are the practical, aesthetic and writerly implications in working towards “knowledge cultivation” and “life-affirming research”? (Sheik 2023)