Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture PDF Author: Evan Kindley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture

Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture PDF Author: Evan Kindley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674981634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Get Book Here

Book Description
The period between 1920 and 1950 saw an epochal shift in the American cultural economy. The shocks of the 1929 market crash and the Second World War decimated much of the support for high modernist literature, and writers who had relied on wealthy benefactors were forced to find new protectors from the depredations of the free market. Private foundations, universities, and government organizations began to fund the arts, and in this environment writers were increasingly obliged to become critics, elucidating and justifying their work to an audience of elite administrators. In Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, Evan Kindley recognizes the major role modernist poet-critics played in the transition from aristocratic patronage to technocratic cultural administration. Poet-critics developed extensive ties to a network of bureaucratic institutions and established dual artistic and intellectual identities to appeal to the kind of audiences and entities that might support their work. Kindley focuses on Anglo-American poet-critics including T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, W. H. Auden, Archibald MacLeish, Sterling A. Brown, and R. P. Blackmur. These artists grappled with the task of being “village explainers” (as Gertrude Stein described Ezra Pound) and legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Kindley shows, created a different form of labor for writers to perform and gave them an unprecedented say over the administration of contemporary culture. The consequences for our understanding of poetry and its place in our culture are still felt widely today.

American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980

American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980 PDF Author: Robert Von Hallberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674030121
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945. Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy for the imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger, and some from the suburbs of the 1980s, are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.

The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900

The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 PDF Author: Daniel Morris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009188194
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 355

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics shows how American poets have addressed political phenomena since 1900. This book helps students, teachers, and general readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics. Offering detailed case studies, this book discusses the relationships between poetry and social views found in work by well-established authors such as Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as lesser known, but influential figures such as Muriel Rukeyser. This book also emphasizes the crucial role contemporary African-American poets such as Claudia Rankine and leading spoken word poets play in documenting political themes in our current moment. Individual chapters focus on specific political issues - race, institutions, propaganda, incarceration, immigration, environment, war, public monuments, history, technology - in a memorable and teachable way for poetry students and teachers.

Feeling as a Foreign Language

Feeling as a Foreign Language PDF Author: Alice Fulton
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

Part of Nature, Part of Us

Part of Nature, Part of Us PDF Author: Helen Vendler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674654761
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394

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Book Description
A collection of book reviews and essays on more than forty modern American poets.

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry

The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry PDF Author: Walter Kalaidjian
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107040361
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Poetry offers a critical overview of major and emerging American poets of the twentieth century.

Du Bois’s Telegram

Du Bois’s Telegram PDF Author: Juliana Spahr
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986962
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In 1956 W. E. B. Du Bois was denied a passport to attend the Présence Africaine Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. So he sent the assembled a telegram. “Any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.” Taking seriously Du Bois’s allegation, Juliana Spahr breathes new life into age-old questions as she explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous, or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? Du Bois’s Telegram brings together a wide range of institutional forces implicated in literary production, paying special attention to three eras of writing that sought to defy political orthodoxies by contesting linguistic conventions: avant-garde modernism of the early twentieth century; social-movement writing of the 1960s and 1970s; and, in the twenty-first century, the profusion of English-language works incorporating languages other than English. Spahr shows how these literatures attempted to assert their autonomy, only to be shut down by FBI harassment or coopted by CIA and State Department propagandists. Liberal state allies such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations made writers complicit by funding multiculturalist works that celebrated diversity and assimilation while starving radical anti-imperial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist efforts. Spahr does not deny the exhilarations of politically engaged art. But her study affirms a sobering reality: aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.

Disseminating Whitman

Disseminating Whitman PDF Author: Michael Moon
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674212459
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
An introduction to the study of local history. Contains a 30 page bibliography. Acidic paper. Moon (English, Duke U.) radically reassess the through close analysis of the first four revisions of Leaves of grass--not to discover which is better, but to glean insight from the pattern and content of the modifications, to show how they intersect with the poet's representation of male-male desire throughout his writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures

Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures PDF Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674988965
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
In the wake of radical social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies’ embrace of politics entailed a widespread rejection of aesthetic considerations. For scholars invested in literature’s role in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, appreciating literature’s formal beauty seemed frivolous and irresponsible, even complicit with the iniquities of the social order. This suspicion of aesthetics became the default posture within literary scholarship, a means of establishing the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s political commitments. Yet as Timothy Aubry explains, aesthetic pleasure never fully disappeared from the academy. It simply went underground. From New Criticism to the digital humanities, Aubry recasts aesthetics as the complicated, morally ambiguous, embattled yet resilient protagonist in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first–century literary studies. He argues that academic critics never stopped asserting preferences for certain texts, rhetorical strategies, or intellectual responses. Rather than serving as the enemy of formalism and aesthetics, political criticism enabled scholars to promote heightened experiences of perceptual acuity and complexity while adjudicating which formal strategies are best designed to bolster these experiences. Political criticism, in other words, did not eradicate but served covertly to nurture reading practices aimed at achieving aesthetic satisfaction. Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures shows that literary studies’ break with midcentury formalism was not as clean as it once appeared. Today, when so many scholars are advocating renewed attention to textual surfaces and aesthetic experiences, Aubry’s work illuminates the surprisingly vast common ground between the formalists and the schools of criticism that succeeded them.

The Poetics of Impersonality

The Poetics of Impersonality PDF Author: Maud Ellmann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780748691296
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this classic work, Maud Ellmann examines T. S. Eliot's and Ezra Pound's criticism in terms of what she calls the 'poetics of impersonality'. Her superb and entirely original readings of the major poems of the modernist canon have earned a lasting place in criticism.