Towards a Poetics of Un/Commoning: Individual Properties and Common Proprieties in Poetry and Popular Song

New Formations - Print ISSN 0950-2378 - Online ISSN 1741-0789
Volume 2025 Number 115

Towards a Poetics of Un/Commoning: Individual Properties and Common Proprieties in Poetry and Popular Song
Zeno Ackermann pages 12‑31
DOI: 10.3898/NEWF:115.01.2025

Abstract

This article demonstrates how literary and cultural studies, through their emphasis on the linguistic and aesthetic dimensions of human life and productivity, can contribute to the discussion about the commons. On the basis of a purposefully diverse set of examples – ranging from Shakespearean sonnets to German-Turkish music of the 1970s and recent US-American pop – lyric poetry and popular song are examined as laboratories of techniques and as training sites for dispositions that enable collective resource use and governance. The analysis specifically emphasises the problem of the ‘un/ common’, that is the conundrum of negotiating individual properties and collective proprieties. While a new formalism proposes literary forms as blueprints for socioeconomic forms, the article tests an approach that plays a visualist aesthetics of the commons (as forms) off against a sonically informed poetics of un/commoning (as transformative practice). 

SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article

You have the following options:

  1. If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
  2. If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below


    Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate

  3. Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
    PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
    DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
    A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription.
  4. Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon

To cite this article
Zeno Ackermann (2025) Towards a Poetics of Un/Commoning: Individual Properties and Common Proprieties in Poetry and Popular Song, New Formations, 2025(115), 12-31 . https://doi.org/10.3898/NEWF:115.01.2025

Share this