Postliterary America

Postliterary America PDF Author: Maria Damon
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } In this capacious and challenging book, Maria Damon surveys the poetry and culture of the United States in two distinct but inextricably linked periods. In part 1, "Identity K/not/e/s," she considers the America of the 1950s and early 1960s, when contentious and troubled alliances took shape between different marginalized communities and their respective but overlapping bohemias--Jews, African Americans, the Beats, and gays and lesbians. Damon then turns to more contemporary issues and broader topics of poetics in part 2's "Poetics for a Postliterary America" which goes on to paint a wider picture, dwelling less on close readings of individual poems and more on asking questions about the nature of poetry itself and its role in community formation and individual survival. Discussions of counterperformance, kinetics, the Nuyoricans, Latino identity, and electronic poetics enliven this section.

Postliterary America

Postliterary America PDF Author: Maria Damon
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299577
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

Get Book Here

Book Description
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } In this capacious and challenging book, Maria Damon surveys the poetry and culture of the United States in two distinct but inextricably linked periods. In part 1, "Identity K/not/e/s," she considers the America of the 1950s and early 1960s, when contentious and troubled alliances took shape between different marginalized communities and their respective but overlapping bohemias--Jews, African Americans, the Beats, and gays and lesbians. Damon then turns to more contemporary issues and broader topics of poetics in part 2's "Poetics for a Postliterary America" which goes on to paint a wider picture, dwelling less on close readings of individual poems and more on asking questions about the nature of poetry itself and its role in community formation and individual survival. Discussions of counterperformance, kinetics, the Nuyoricans, Latino identity, and electronic poetics enliven this section.

Racial Things, Racial Forms

Racial Things, Racial Forms PDF Author: Joseph Jonghyun Jeon
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 160938086X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
"In Racial Things, Racial Forms, Joseph Jonghyun Jeon focuses on a coterie of underexamined contemporary Asian American poets — Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and John Yau — who reject many of the characteristics of traditional minority writing. In the poets’ various treatments of things (that is, objects of art), one witnesses a confluence of the avant-garde interest in objecthood and the racial question of objectification."-- Back cover.

Translating the Counterculture

Translating the Counterculture PDF Author: Erik Mortenson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809336545
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
If countercultural literature is meant to "counter" a culture, what happens when another culture borrows that critique? Translating the Counterculture addresses that question by examining the reception of the Beat Generation in Turkey. There, the Beat message of dissent is being given renewed life as publishers, editors, critics, readers, and others dissatisfied with the conservative social and political trends in the country have turned to the Beats and other countercultural forebears for alternatives. Through an examination of a broad range of literary translations, media portrayals, interviews, and other related materials, Translating the Counterculture seeks to uncover how the Beats and their texts are being circulated, discussed, and used in Turkey to rethink the possibilities they might hold for social critique today. By focusing on the ways in which local conditions and particular needs shape reception, Mortenson questions our understanding of the Beats in both popular culture and academic discourse. He examines how in Turkey the Beats have been framed by the label "underground literature"; explores the ways they are repurposed in the counterculture-inspired journal Underground Poetix; looks at the reception of Kerouac's On the Road and how that reaction provides a better understanding of the construction of "American-ness"; delves into the recent obscenity trial of William S. Burroughs's novel The Soft Machine and the attention the book's supporters brought to government repression and Turkish homophobia; and analyzes the various translations of Allen Ginsberg's Howl to demonstrate the relevance Ginsberg still holds for social rebellion today. Translating the Counterculture takes a revolutionary look at how contemporary readers in other parts of the world respond to the Beats. Challenging and unsettling an American-centric understanding of the Beats, Mortenson pushes the discipline toward a fuller consideration of their cultural legacy in a globalized twenty-first century.

What Are Poets For?

What Are Poets For? PDF Author: Gerald L Bruns
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380800
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Book Description
Conceptions and practices of poetry change not only from time to time and from place to place but also from poet to poet. This has never been more the case than in recent years. Gerald Bruns’s magisterial What Are Poets For? explores typographical experiments that distribute letters randomly across a printed page, sound tracks made of vocal and buccal noises, and holographic poems that recompose themselves as one travels through their digital space. Bruns surveys one-word poems, found texts, and book-length assemblies of disconnected phrases; he even includes descriptions of poems that no one could possibly write, but which are no less interesting (or no less poetic) for all of that. The purpose of the book is to illuminate this strange poetic landscape, spotlighting and describing such oddities as they appear, anomalies that most contemporary poetry criticism ignores. Naturally this breadth raises numerous philosophical questions that Bruns also addresses—for example, whether poetry should be responsible (semantically, ethically, politically) to anything outside itself, whether it can be reduced to categories, distinctions, and the rule of identity, and whether a particular poem can seem odd or strange when everything is an anomaly. Perhaps our task is simply to learn, like anthropologists, how to inhabit such an anarchic world. The poets taken up for study are among the most important and innovative in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Paul Celan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Karen Mac Cormack, Steve McCaffery, John Matthias, J. H. Prynne, and Tom Raworth.What Are Poets For? is nothing less than a lucid, detailed study of some of the most intractable writings in contemporary poetry.

Purple Passages

Purple Passages PDF Author: Rachel Blau DuPlessis
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
At once passionate and dispassionate, Rachel Blau DuPlessis meticulously outlines key moments of choice and debate about masculinity among writers as disparate as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg, choices that construct consequential models for institutions of poetic practice.

Redstart

Redstart PDF Author: Forrest Gander
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609381378
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 97

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Book Description
The damage humans have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet’s means and material. But can poetry be ecological? Can it display or be invested with values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between the human and the nonhuman realms? Aside from issues of theme and reference, how might syntax, line break, or the shape of the poem on the page express an ecological ethics? To answer these questions, poets Forrest Gander and John Kinsella offer an experiment, a collaborative volume of prose and poetry that investigates—both thematically and formally—the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception. They ask whether, in an age of globalization, industrialization, and rapid human population growth, an ethnocentric view of human beings as a species independent from others underpins our exploitation of natural resources. Does the disease of Western subjectivity constitute an element of the aesthetics that undermine poetic resistance to the killing of the land? Why does “the land” have to give something back to the writer? This innovative volume speaks to all people wanting to understand how artistic and critical endeavors can enrich, rather than impoverish, the imperiled world around us.

In Visible Movement

In Visible Movement PDF Author: Urayoan Noel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609382544
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Since the 1960s, Nuyorican poets have explored and performed Puerto Rican identity both on and off the page. Emerging within and alongside the civil rights movements of the 1960s, the foundational Nuyorican writers sought to counter the ethnic/racial and institutional invisibility of New York City Puerto Ricans by documenting the reality of their communities in innovative and sometimes challenging ways. Since then, Nuyorican poetry has entered the U.S. Latino literary canon and has gained prominence in light of the spoken-word revival of the past two decades, a movement spearheaded by the Nuyorican Poetry Slams of the 1990s. Today, Nuyorican poetry engages with contemporary social issues such as the commodification of the body, the institutionalization of poetry, the gentrification of the barrio, and the national and global marketing of identity. What has not changed is a continued shared investment in a poetics that links the written word and the performing body. The first book-length study specifically devoted to Nuyorican poetry, In Visible Movement is unique in its historical and formal breadth, ranging from the foundational poets of the 1960s and 1970s to a variety of contemporary poets emerging in and around the Nuyorican Poets Cafe “slam” scene of the 1990s and early 2000s. It also unearths a largely unknown corpus of poetry performances, reading over forty years of Nuyorican poetry at the intersection of the printed and performed word, underscoring the poetry’s links to vernacular and Afro-Puerto Rican performance cultures, from the island’s oral poets to the New York sounds and rhythms of Latin boogaloo, salsa, and hip-hop. With depth and insight, Urayoán Noel analyzes various canonical Nuyorican poems by poets such as Pedro Pietri, Victor Hernández Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero, Sandra María Esteves, and Tato Laviera. He discusses historically overlooked poets such as Lorraine Sutton, innovative poets typically read outside the Nuyorican tradition such as Frank Lima and Edwin Torres, and a younger generation of Nuyorican-identified poets including Willie Perdomo, María Teresa Mariposa Fernández, and Emanuel Xavier, whose work has received only limited critical consideration. The result is a stunning reflection of how New York Puerto Rican poets have addressed the complexity of identity amid diaspora for over forty years.

Ghostly Figures

Ghostly Figures PDF Author: Ann Keniston
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609383532
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
From Sylvia Plath’s depictions of the Holocaust as a group of noncohering “bits” to AIDS elegies’ assertions that the dead posthumously persist in ghostly form and Susan Howe’s insistence that the past can be conveyed only through juxtaposed “scraps,” the condition of being too late is one that haunts post-World War II American poetry. This is a poetry saturated with temporal delay, partial recollection of the past, and the revelation that memory itself is accessible only in obstructed and manipulated ways. These postwar poems do not merely describe the condition of lateness: they enact it literally and figuratively by distorting chronology, boundary, and syntax, by referring to events indirectly, and by binding the condition of lateness to the impossibility of verifying the past. The speakers of these poems often indicate that they are too late by repetitively chronicling distorted events, refusing closure or resolution, and forging ghosts out of what once was tangible. Ghostly Figures contends that this poetics of belatedness, along with the way it is bound to questions of poetic making, is a central, if critically neglected, force in postwar American poetry. Discussing works by Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Jorie Graham, Susan Howe, and a group of poets responding to the AIDS epidemic, Ann Keniston draws on and critically assesses trauma theory and psychoanalysis, as well as earlier discussions of witness, elegy, lyric trope and figure, postmodernism, allusion, and performance, to define the ghosts that clearly dramatize poetics of belatedness throughout the diverse poetry of post–World War II America.

Renegade Poetics

Renegade Poetics PDF Author: Evie Shockley
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609380584
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
"Beginning with a deceptively simple question--what do we mean when we designate behaviors, values, or forms of expression as "black"?--Evie Shockley's Renegade poetics teases out the more complex and nuanced possibilities the concept has long encompassed. She redefines black aesthetics descriptively, resituating innovative poetry that has been marginalized becuase it was not "recognizably black" and avant-garde poetry dismissed because it was"--Back cover.

A History of Western American Literature

A History of Western American Literature PDF Author: Susan Kollin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316033465
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 662

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Book Description
The American West is a complex region that has inspired generations of writers and artists. Often portrayed as a quintessential landscape that symbolizes promise and progress for a developing nation, the American West is also a diverse space that has experienced conflicting and competing hopes and expectations. While it is frequently imagined as a place enabling dreams of new beginnings for settler communities, it is likewise home to long-standing indigenous populations as well as many other ethnic and racial groups who have often produced different visions of the land. This History encompasses the intricacy of Western American literature by exploring myriad genres and cultural movements, from ecocriticism, settler colonial studies and transnational theory, to race, ethnic, gender and sexuality studies. Written by a host of leading historians and literary critics, this book offers readers insight into the West as a site that sustains canonical and emerging authors alike, and as a region that exceeds national boundaries in addressing long-standing global concerns and developments.