Den Körper per_formen. Verschränkungen von Physis, Persona und Poetik im (jugendliterarischen Schreiben über) Spoken-Word

Within the contemporary literary scene, multimodal forms of poetic expression such as spoken word or (young adult) verse novels have gained considerably in frequency and popularity. In the performative genre of spoken word, the aesthetic text is produced within the performance, in which the poet-performer’s voice and body constitute an essential component (cf. Novak 2011 as well as 2017; Benthien/Prange 2020). As a bridge between the multi-sensory, immersive spoken word performance and the scriptural, printed poem (cf. Coats 2018), the verse novel employs aesthetic strategies that can be read as an em_body_ment of the narrated within the space of narration. Based on selected works by artists such as Elizabeth Acevedo, this article investigates how the texts make use of their respective media-specific multimodal resources to negotiate (1) the relation between the fictional persona and the poet-performer’s body, (2) the performative situation of the (fictional and real) artistic production, as well as (3) the entanglements between (the adolescent search for) identity and intersectional forms of discrimination.