American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought

American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought PDF Author: Alan Marshall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
Alan Marshall takes Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy in America as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, to George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley a century later. The book begins by considering the political significance of what Marshall describes as 'the invisible physiognomy' of Whitman's poetry, which is followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Other chapters deal with Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies. To that extent it recalls Tocquevilles concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. Marshall brings together an exceptional variety of theoretical writing, including works by Theodor Adorno, Seyla Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Donald Winnicott, as he seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought

American Experimental Poetry and Democratic Thought PDF Author: Alan Marshall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alan Marshall takes Alexis de Tocqueville's discussion of 'Some Sources of Poetic Inspiration in Democracies' in the second volume of his Democracy in America as the starting point for a wide-ranging examination of the nature of democratic thought and expression in American experimental poetry, from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in the mid-nineteenth century, to George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Creeley a century later. The book begins by considering the political significance of what Marshall describes as 'the invisible physiognomy' of Whitman's poetry, which is followed by a re-evaluation of the flawed republican humanism of Ezra Pound in the light of the thought of Hannah Arendt. Other chapters deal with Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Muriel Rukeyser. The book argues against the narrowly ideological interpretation of politics that dominates contemporary literary studies. To that extent it recalls Tocquevilles concern to underline the differences between his own methods and perspectives and the historical determinism of his contemporaries. Marshall brings together an exceptional variety of theoretical writing, including works by Theodor Adorno, Seyla Benhabib, Stanley Cavell, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, James Madison, Karl Marx, David Riesman, and Donald Winnicott, as he seeks to expand and develop Tocqueville's circumspect humanist critical trajectory. The chapters are conceived as a series of innovative dialogical constellations, to which the close reading of poetry is central. The aim throughout is to measure the thought of the poets or their poems against the thoughts of those who are more often called thinkers.

Experimental

Experimental PDF Author: Natalia Cecire
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 142143377X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.

Russian and American Poetry of Experiment

Russian and American Poetry of Experiment PDF Author: Vladimir Feshchenko
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004526307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
An experiment with language. Is it an object cultivated in poetic laboratories where entry is locked for mere mortals? And what do language scholars think about it? Specialists in language and literature studies interested in linguistic innovation and experimental poetry will find answers to these questions in Vladimir Feshchenko’s book. The study investigates various strategies of radical linguistic creativity in Russian and American experimental writing of the 20th century and explores cases of contemporary ‘language-oriented’ and ‘trans-language’ poetry. It is a comparative examination of two national avant-garde cultures, but also a juxtaposition of the relationships that Russian and American avant-garde poetics had with linguistic ideas of their times. The monograph may serve as a wonderful introduction to the entire field of ‘linguistic poetics of the avant-garde’.

Democracy in the Poetry of Walt Whitman

Democracy in the Poetry of Walt Whitman PDF Author: Thomas Riggs
Publisher: Greenhaven Publishing LLC
ISBN: 0737763787
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
This informative edition explores Walt Whitman's poetry through the lens of democracy. Chapters include an examination of Whitman's life and influences, a look at key ideas related to democracy in Whitman's poetry, and a series of essays that explore topics such as Whitman's views of democratic comradeship, the role of bonds between men, Whitman's approach to patriotism, and Whitman's contradictory views on slavery and race. Readers are also presented with contemporary perspectives on democracy, such as the importance of an informed electorate and the impact of American individualism on contemporary politics.

Future-founding Poetry

Future-founding Poetry PDF Author: Sascha Pöhlmann
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1571139516
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 426

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Book Description
An investigation of how American poetry since Whitman makes its beginnings, with what means and to which political and aesthetic ends, and how it addresses fundamental questions about what the future is and how it may be affectednow.

Omnicompetent Modernists

Omnicompetent Modernists PDF Author: Matthew Hofer
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817360611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
"A study of modernist poets who, finding both support and stimulation in popular political theory, were committed to transforming their art in and through attempts to engage the evolving concept of the public sphere"--

The Plural of Us

The Plural of Us PDF Author: Bonnie Costello
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691202907
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet’s use of the first-person plural voice—poetry’s “we.” Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying “I,” “we” has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural. Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering “we” from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden’s interest in the full range of “the human pluralities” in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called “the meaning of being numerous.” Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

Experiments in Democracy

Experiments in Democracy PDF Author: Benjamin J. Hurlbut
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231542917
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Human embryo research touches upon strongly felt moral convictions, and it raises such deep questions about the promise and perils of scientific progress that debate over its development has become a moral and political imperative. From in vitro fertilization to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, and gene editing, Americans have repeatedly struggled with how to define the moral status of the human embryo, whether to limit its experimental uses, and how to contend with sharply divided public moral perspectives on governing science. Experiments in Democracy presents a history of American debates over human embryo research from the late 1960s to the present, exploring their crucial role in shaping norms, practices, and institutions of deliberation governing the ethical challenges of modern bioscience. J. Benjamin Hurlbut details how scientists, bioethicists, policymakers, and other public figures have attempted to answer a question of great consequence: how should the public reason about aspects of science and technology that effect fundamental dimensions of human life? Through a study of one of the most significant science policy controversies in the history of the United States, Experiments in Democracy paints a portrait of the complex relationship between science and democracy, and of U.S. society's evolving approaches to evaluating and governing science's most challenging breakthroughs.

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review

Walt Whitman Quarterly Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description


The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800-1910

The Cambridge History of American Literature: Volume 4, Nineteenth-Century Poetry 1800-1910 PDF Author: Sacvan Bercovitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521301084
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
This is the first complete narrative history of nineteenth-century American poetry. Barbara Packer explores the neoclassical and satiric forms mastered by the early Federalist poets; the creative reaches of once-celebrated, and still compelling, poets like Longfellow and Whittier; the distinctive lyric forms developed by Emerson and the Transcendentalists. Shira Wolosky provides a new perspective on the achievement of female poets of the period, as well as a close appreciation of African-American poets, including the collective folk authors of the Negro spirituals. She also illuminates the major works of the period, from Poe through Melville and Crane, to Whitman and Dickinson. The authors of this volume discuss this extraordinary literary achievement both in formal terms and in its sustained engagement with changing social and cultural conditions. In doing so they recover and elucidate American poetry of the nineteenth century for our twenty-first century pleasure, profit, and renewed study.