Debt is increasing at dramatic rates in the world’s richest countries, which produces a unique experience of time: the wealth of the present is suspended, held in a volatile future that is bound to the fluctuations of speculative finance. In these conditions, what does the present mean? And how does literature confront this confusing, volatile moment? How does it break out of its time and provide an innovative perspective that feels both urgent and disjunctive? In this seminar, we will closely read a few recent poems to bring out the specific mechanisms and devices poets use to escape from the constraints of our time, in particular the enormous debt that withholds any experience of shared presence in the present. We will ask how poets offer us a critical view of the limitations of a shared present. 

Bio: Elliot C. Mason is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Basel and the author of Poetics of Value: The Primacy of Insurgency as Marxist Methodology (Brill 2026).