Author: Laura QuinneyPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813933559
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
The Poetics of Disappointment
Author: Laura QuinneyPublisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813933559
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232
Book Description
The Poetics of the Everyday
Author: Siobhan PhillipsPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231149301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 335
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.
Forms of Disappointment
Author: Lanie MillarPublisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438475926
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264
Book Description
In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba's intervention in Angola's post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation.
The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics"
Author: Walter WatsonPublisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226875083
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317
Book Description
Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".
Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood
Author: David WrayPublisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139429698
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260
Book Description
This book applies comparative cultural and literary models to a reading of Catullus' poems as social performances of a 'poetics of manhood': a competitively, often outrageously, self-allusive bid for recognition and admiration. Earlier readings of Catullus, based on Romantic and Modernist notions of 'lyric' poetry, have tended to focus on the relationship with Lesbia and to ignore the majority of the shorter poems, which are instead directed at other men. Professor Wray approaches these poems in the light of more recent models for understanding male social interaction in the premodern Mediterranean, placing them in their specifically Roman historical context while bringing out their strikingly 'postmodern' qualities. The result is an alternative way of reading the fiercely aggressive and delicately refined agonism performed in Catullus' shorter poems. All Latin and Greek quoted is supplied with an English translation.
Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I'
Author: Micah MattixPublisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
ISBN: 1611470471
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Book Description
While recent works of criticism on Frank O'Hara have focused on the technical similarities between his poetry and painting, or between his use of language and poststructuralism, Frank O'Hara and the Poetics of Saying 'I' argues that what is most significant in O'Hara's work is not such much his 'borrowing' from painters or his proto-Derridean use of language, but his preoccupation with self exploration and the temporal effects of his work as artifacts. Following Pasternak's understanding of artistic inspiration as an act of love for the material world, O'Hara explores moments of experience in an effort to both complicate and enrich our experience of the material world. On the one hand, in poems such as Second Avenue, for example, O'Hara works to 'muddy' language through which experience is, in part, mediated with the use of parataxis, allusions, and absurd metaphors and similes. On the other, in his 'I do this I do that' poems, he names the events of his lunch hour in an effort, among other things, to experience time as a moment of fullness rather than as a moment of loss. The book argues, furthermore, that O'Hara's view of the self as both an expression of the creative force at work in the world and as the temporal aggregate of finite experiences, places him between so-called 'Romantic' and 'postmodern' theories of the lyric. While it is often argued that O'Hara is a forerunner of a new, critically informed, 'materialist' poetics, this study concludes that O'Hara's work is somewhat less radical in its understanding of poetic meaning than is often claimed. Moreover, while O'Hara is preoccupied with his experience in his poems, the book argues that he espouses, in some respects, a rather traditional view of love. In addition to being a metaphor for the creative act, love, for O'Hara, is the chance coming together of two entities. Yet, one of the ironies of this is that while love is, for O'Hara, a feeling that is the result of movement, or the unexpected coming together of two otherwise separate entities, and is itself characterized in his work as a moving, 'life-giving vulgarity,' it produces a feeling of peace and stillness—a feeling that will not remain because of the fact that the self changes and that love is itself a moving, living thing. Thus, love contains within itself the ominous promise of future loss and is, therefore, the highest feeling that contains within itself the seeds of the lowest.
The Dream Palace of the Arabs
Author: Fouad AjamiPublisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307484033
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369
Book Description
From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.
The Poetics of the American Suburbs
Author: Jo GillPublisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137340231
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 394
Book Description
The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.
John Ashbery and English Poetry
Author: Ben HickmanPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748649220
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 201
Book Description
A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets
Clare's Lyric
Author: Stephanie Kuduk WeinerPublisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191511897
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225
Book Description
This book considers the lyric poems written by John Clare and three twentieth-century poets—Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery—who turned to him at pivotal moments in their own development. These writers crafted a distinctive mode of lyric, 'Clare's lyric', that emphatically grounds its truth claims in mimetic accuracy. For these writers, accurate representation involves not only words that name objects, describe scenes, and create images pointing to a shared reality but also patterns of sound, the syntactic organization of lines, and the shapes of whole poems and collections of poems. Their works masterfully investigate how poetic language and form can refer to the world, word by word, line by line, and poem by poem. Written in a lively and accessible style, Clare's Lyric sheds light on a richly diverse body of poems and on enduring questions about how literature represents reality. Weiner's attentive close readings bring the writings of Clare, Symons, Blunden, and Ashbery to life by revealing precisely how they captured a vital, arresting, and complex world in their poems. Their unique approach to lyric is traced from Clare's poems about birdsong, his sonnets, and his later poems of loss and absence to Symons's efforts to make 'amends to nature' Blunden's vivid depictions of a European and English countryside scarred by the First World War, and Ashbery's unbounded and bountiful landscapes. This inventive study refines our understanding of the aesthetic of Romanticism, the genre of lyric, and the practice of literary representation, and it makes a compelling case for the ongoing importance of poems about nature and social life.
