Poetic Affairs

Poetic Affairs PDF Author: Michael Eskin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478681X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Poetic Affairs deals with the complex and fascinating interface between literature and life through the prism of the lives and works of three outstanding poets: the German-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920–1970); the Leningrad native, U.S. poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996); and Germany's premier contemporary poet, Durs Grünbein (born 1962). Focusing on their poetic dialogues with such interlocutors as Shakespeare, Seneca, and Byron, respectively—veritable love affairs unfolding in and through poetry—Eskin offers unprecedented readings of Celan's, Brodsky's, and Grünbein's lives and works and discloses the ways in which poetry articulates and remains faithful to the manifold "truths"—historical, political, poetic, erotic—determining human existence.

Poetic Affairs

Poetic Affairs PDF Author: Michael Eskin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080478681X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

Get Book Here

Book Description
Poetic Affairs deals with the complex and fascinating interface between literature and life through the prism of the lives and works of three outstanding poets: the German-Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, Paul Celan (1920–1970); the Leningrad native, U.S. poet laureate, and Nobel Prize winner, Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996); and Germany's premier contemporary poet, Durs Grünbein (born 1962). Focusing on their poetic dialogues with such interlocutors as Shakespeare, Seneca, and Byron, respectively—veritable love affairs unfolding in and through poetry—Eskin offers unprecedented readings of Celan's, Brodsky's, and Grünbein's lives and works and discloses the ways in which poetry articulates and remains faithful to the manifold "truths"—historical, political, poetic, erotic—determining human existence.

Forms of Poetic Attention

Forms of Poetic Attention PDF Author: Lucy Alford
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231547323
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
A poem is often read as a set of formal, technical, and conventional devices that generate meaning or affect. However, Lucy Alford suggests that poetic language might be better understood as an instrument for tuning and refining the attention. Identifying a crucial link between poetic form and the forming of attention, Alford offers a new terminology for how poetic attention works and how attention becomes a subject and object of poetry. Forms of Poetic Attention combines close readings of a wide variety of poems with research in the philosophy, aesthetics, and psychology of attention. Drawing on the work of a wide variety of poets such as T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Frank O’Hara, Anne Carson, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Harryette Mullen, Al-Khansā’, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Claudia Rankine, Alford defines and locates the particular forms of attention poems both require and produce. She theorizes the process of attention-making—its objects, its coordinates, its variables—while introducing a broad set of interpretive tools into the field of literary studies. Forms of Poetic Attention makes the original claim that attention is poetry’s primary medium, and that the forms of attention demanded by a poem can train, hone, and refine our capacities for perception and judgment, on and off the page.

The Poetics of International Politics

The Poetics of International Politics PDF Author: Milan Babík
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429794142
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
A cutting-edge contribution to the aesthetic turn in international relations scholarship, this book exposes the role of poetic techniques in constituting the reality of international politics. It has two symmetrical goals: to illuminate the nonempirical fictions of factual international relations literature, and to highlight the real factual inspirations and implications of contemporary international relations fiction. Employing narrative theory developed by Hayden White, the author examines factual and fictional accounts of world affairs ranging from the anarchy narrative, central to mainstream international relations research, to novels by Don DeLillo and Milan Kundera. Chapters analyzing factual literature flesh out its unacknowledged inventions, while those dedicated to fiction explain its political roots and agenda. Throughout, the distinction between factual and fictional representations of international relations breaks down. Social-scientific narratives emerge as exercises in rhetoric: the art and politics of persuasion through language. Artistic narratives surface as real pedagogical lessons and exercises in political activism. The volume challenges the autonomy of academic international relations as an exclusive purveyor of serious knowledge about world affairs and calls for active engagement with literary art. It will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Political Theory, Historiography, Cultural Theory, and Literary Studies and Criticism.

The Poetics of the Everyday

The Poetics of the Everyday PDF Author: Siobhan Phillips
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Householders

Householders PDF Author: Steven D. Carter
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
As direct descendants of the great courtier-poets Fujiwara no Shunzei (1114-1204) and his son Teika (1162-1244), the heirs of the noble Reizei house can claim an unbroken literary lineage that spans over eight hundred years. During all that time, their primary goal has been to sustain the poetic enterprise, or michi (way), of the house and to safeguard its literary assets. Steven D. Carter weaves together strands of family history, literary criticism, and historical research into a coherent narrative about the evolution of the Reizei Way. What emerges from this innovative approach is an elegant portrait of the Reizei poets as participants in a collective institution devoted more to the continuity of family poetic practices and ideals than to the concept of individual expression that is so central to more modern poetic culture. In addition to the narrative chapters, the book also features an extensive appendix of one hundred poems from over the centuries, by poets who were affiliated with the Reizei house. Carter’s annotations provide essential critical context for this selection of poems, and his deft translations underscore the rich contributions of the Reizei family and their many disciples to the Japanese poetic tradition.

Poetics of Liveliness

Poetics of Liveliness PDF Author: Ada Smailbegović
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231552564
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök’s insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin’s considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein’s examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson’s studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

Conversations with Shotetsu

Conversations with Shotetsu PDF Author: Robert Brower
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472901575
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
Shōtetsu monogatari was written by a disciple of Shōtetsu (1381–1459), whom many scholars regard as the last great poet of the courtly tradition. The work provides information about the practice of poetry during the 14th and 15th centuries, including anecdotes about famous poets, advice on how to treat certain standard topics, and lessons in etiquette when attending or participating in poetry contests and gatherings. But unlike the many other works of that time that stop at that level, Shōtetsu’s contributions to medieval aesthetics gained prominence, showing him as a worthy heir—both as poet and thinker—to the legacy of the great poet-critic Fujiwara no Teika (1162–1241). The last project of the late Robert H. Brower, Conversations with Shôtetsu provides a translation of the complete Nihon koten bungaku taikei text, as edited by Hisamatsu Sen'ichi. Steven D. Carter has annotated the translation and provided an introduction that details Shôtetsu’s life, his place in the poetic circles of his day, and the relationship of his work to the larger poetic tradition of medieval Japan. Conversations with Shōtetsu is important reading for anyone interested in medieval Japanese literature and culture, in poetry, and in aesthetics. It provides a unique look at the literary world of late medieval Japan.

Cynewulf

Cynewulf PDF Author: Robert E. Bjork
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000526119
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Two original essays and 16 published since 1950 offer a comprehensive view of Cynewulf, his language, and his poetry. The collection contains important new statements on dates, provenance, and canon by R.D. Fulk and Patrick W. Conner, four influential essays that thoroughly explore Cynewulf's runic signature and poetic style, and major contributions to our understanding of the four signed poems of Cynewulf, Fates of the Apostles, Christ II, Juliana, and Elene. Three essays are devoted to each of these poems, and the essays themselves exemplify a broad range of approaches to this highly elusive Anglo-Saxon poet. The volume complements existing book-length treatments of the subject and will be welcome to scholars and students who need the foundations of Cynewulf scholarship at their fingertips.

Borders of Chinese Civilization

Borders of Chinese Civilization PDF Author: Douglas Howland
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822382032
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
D. R. Howland explores China’s representations of Japan in the changing world of the late nineteenth century and, in so doing, examines the cultural and social borders between the two neighbors. Looking at Chinese accounts of Japan written during the 1870s and 1880s, he undertakes an unprecedented analysis of the main genres the Chinese used to portray Japan—the travel diary, poetry, and the geographical treatise. In his discussion of the practice of “brushtalk,” in which Chinese scholars communicated with the Japanese by exchanging ideographs, Howland further shows how the Chinese viewed the communication of their language and its dominant modes—history and poetry—as the textual and cultural basis of a shared civilization between the two societies. With Japan’s decision in the 1870s to modernize and westernize, China’s relationship with Japan underwent a crucial change—one that resulted in its decisive separation from Chinese civilization and, according to Howland, a destabilization of China’s worldview. His examination of the ways in which Chinese perceptions of Japan altered in the 1880s reveals the crucial choice faced by the Chinese of whether to interact with Japan as “kin,” based on geographical proximity and the existence of common cultural threads, or as a “barbarian,” an alien force molded by European influence. By probing China’s poetic and expository modes of portraying Japan, Borders of Chinese Civilization exposes the changing world of the nineteenth century and China’s comprehension of it. This broadly appealing work will engage scholars in the fields of Asian studies, Chinese literature, history, and geography, as well as those interested in theoretical reflections on travel or modernism.

The Cynewulf Reader

The Cynewulf Reader PDF Author: Robert E. Bjork
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134980213
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
The Cynewulf Reader is a collection of classic and original essays presenting a comprehensive view of the elusive Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf, his language, and his work.