Download or read book Infidel Poetics written by Daniel Tiffany and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-10-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry has long been regarded as the least accessible of literary genres. But how much does the obscurity that confounds readers of a poem differ from, say, the slang that seduces listeners of hip-hop? Infidel Poetics examines not only the shared incomprensibilities of poetry and slang, but poetry's genetic relation to the spectacle of underground culture. Charting connections between vernacular poetry, lyric obscurity, and types of social relations—networks of darkened streets in preindustrial cities, the historical underworld of taverns and clubs, the subcultures of the avant-garde—Daniel Tiffany shows that obscurity in poetry has functioned for hundreds of years as a medium of alternative societies. For example, he discovers in the submerged tradition of canting poetry and its eccentric genres—thieves’ carols, drinking songs, beggars’ chants—a genealogy of modern nightlife, but also a visible underworld of social and verbal substance, a demimonde for sale. Ranging from Anglo-Saxon riddles to Emily Dickinson, from the icy logos of Parmenides to the monadology of Leibniz, from Mother Goose to Mallarmé, Infidel Poetics offers an exhilarating account of the subversive power of obscurity in word, substance, and deed.
Download or read book My Silver Planet written by Daniel Tiffany and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century. Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.
Download or read book End of the Sentimental Journey written by Sarah Vap and published by Infidel Poetics. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarah Vap's End of The Sentimental Journey is a beautiful collection of critically astute filth. With humor, stunning insight, and shimmering vulgarity Vap invents a fresh means of poetic critique in the poem itself. What she unveils for us is our own culpability in the gendered policing of contemporary poetry. The first installment of the Infidel Poetics series, this piece of literary criticism is poetry and poetics intertwined. The Infidel Poetics Series is a venue for shorter critical works by poets in which they address the overlap between poetry and politics, often interrogating notions of identity and their work.
Download or read book The Calamity Form written by Anahid Nersessian and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian explores works by Friedrich Hölderlin, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal strategies—among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural environment—as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing, reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act. Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see literature as a source of information on par with historical or scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes the nature of poetry’s relationship to capital—and capital’s ability to hide how it works.
Download or read book Contingent Figure written by Michael D. Snediker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A masterful synthesis of literary readings and poetic reflections, making profound contributions to our understanding of chronic pain At the intersection of queer theory and disability studies, acclaimed theorist Michael D. Snediker locates something unexpected: chronic pain. Starting from this paradigm-shifting insight, Snediker elaborates a bracing examination of the phenomenological peculiarity of disability, articulating a complex idiom of figuration as the lived substance of pain’s quotidian. This lexicon helps us differently inhabit both the theoretical and phenomenal dimensions of chronic pain and suffering by illuminating where these modes are least distinguishable. Suffused with fastidious close readings, and girded by a remarkably complex understanding of phenomenal experience, Contingent Figure resides in the overlap between literary theory and lyric experiment. Snediker grounds his exploration of disability and chronic pain in dazzling close readings of Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and many others. Its juxtaposition of these readings with candid autobiographical accounts makes Contingent Figure an exemplary instance of literary theory as a practice of lyric attention. Thoroughly rigorous and anything but predictable, this stirring inquiry leaves the reader with a rich critical vocabulary indebted to the likes of Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze, D. O. Winnicott, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. A master class in close reading’s inseparability from the urgency of lived experience, this book is essential for students and scholars of disability studies, queer theory, formalism, aesthetics, and the radical challenge of Emersonian poetics across the long American nineteenth century.
Download or read book News of War written by Rachel Judith Galvin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new work of scholarship that considers several of the most prominent poets writing from the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War to the end of World War II.
Download or read book Representing Place in British Literature and Culture 1660 1830 written by Evan Gottlieb and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revising traditional 'rise of the nation-state' narratives, this collection explores the development of and interactions among various forms of local, national, and transnational identities and affiliations during the long eighteenth century. By treating place as historically contingent and socially constructed, this volume examines how Britons experienced and related to a landscape altered by agricultural and industrial modernization, political and religious reform, migration, and the building of nascent overseas empires. In mapping the literary and cultural geographies of the long eighteenth century, the volume poses three challenges to common critical assumptions about the relationships among genre, place, and periodization. First, it questions the novel’s exclusive hold on the imagining of national communities by examining how poetry, drama, travel-writing, and various forms of prose fiction each negotiated the relationships between the local, national, and global in distinct ways. Second, it demonstrates how viewing the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century through a broadly conceived lens of place brings to the foreground authors typically considered 'minor' when seen through more traditional aesthetic, cultural, or theoretical optics. Finally, it contextualizes Romanticism’s long-standing associations with the local and the particular, suggesting that literary localism did not originate in the Romantic era, but instead emerged from previous literary and cultural explorations of space and place. Taken together, the essays work to displace the nation-state as a central category of literary and cultural analysis in eighteenth-century studies.
Download or read book Revolutions in Verse written by Isobel Palmer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-11-15 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How modernist interartistic experimentation and the proliferation of new media technologies inspired fresh insights into poetry Isobel Palmer spotlights Russian modernist poets’ and formalist theorists’ conscious engagement with formal convention, showing how their efforts were tied up with broader attempts in the early Soviet era to understand and articulate the nature of poetry and its most characteristic devices. Returning to critical debates around poetic encounters with three key aesthetic categories—rhythm, image, and voice—Palmer unpacks the period’s deeper interest in the material bases of poetic speech itself. Through fresh, incisive readings of canonical poets and theorists, from Andrei Bely and Vladimir Mayakovsky to Yury Tynianov and Viktor Shklovsky, Revolutions in Verse: The Medium of Russian Modernism explores the proliferation of interartistic experiments and the emergence of new media technologies that made poetry visible as a medium in its own right.
Download or read book The Work of World Literature written by Francesco Giusti and published by ICI Berlin Press. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contentious discourse around world literature tends to stress the ‘world’ in the phrase. This volume, in contrast, asks what it means to approach world literature by inflecting the question of the literary. Debates for, against, and around ‘world literature’ have brought renewed attention to the worldly aspects of the literary enterprise. Literature is studied with regard to its sociopolitical and cultural references, contexts and conditions of production, circulation, distribution, and translation. But what becomes of the literary when one speaks of world literature? Responding to Derek Attridge’s theory of how literature ‘works’, the contributions in this volume explore in diverse ways and with attention to a variety of literary practices what it might mean to speak of ‘the work of world literature’. The volume shows how attention to literariness complicates the ethical and political conundrums at the centre of debates about world literature.
Download or read book The Wallflower Avant garde written by Brian Glavey and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Wallflower Avant-Garde argues for the importance of a strain of modernist formalism based in ekphrasis, the literary imitation of the visual arts. Often associated with a conservative aesthetic of wholeness, permanence, and autonomy, ekphrastic writing also involves excess, failure, and mimesis, conjuring an aesthetic sense of closure and unity out of impossible imitations. This choreography of imitation and autonomy resonates with many of the foundational insights of queer theory: the way it situates identity as an effect of performativity, artifice, and mimesis. Unlike many queer theorists, however, this book insists that we value both the imitations and the aspirations that guide them, underlining not only the illusoriness of identity but also its allure. This more capacious formalism allows aspects of modernists aesthetic that have seemed regressive or repressive to be read as generative forms of stasis, quiet, reserve, shyness, and so on.
Download or read book Word of Mouth written by Chad Bennett and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study of modern and contemporary poetry’s vibrant exchange with gossip. Can the art of gossip help us to better understand modern and contemporary poetry? Gossip’s ostensible frivolity may seem at odds with common conceptions of poetry as serious, solitary expression. But in Word of Mouth, Chad Bennett explores the dynamic relationship between gossip and American poetry, uncovering the unexpected ways that the history of the modern lyric intertwines with histories of sexuality in the twentieth century. Through nuanced readings of Gertrude Stein, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara, and James Merrill—poets who famously absorbed and adapted the loose talk that swirled about them and their work—Bennett demonstrates how gossip became a vehicle for alternative modes of poetic practice. By attending to gossip’s key role in modern and contemporary poetry, he recognizes the unpredictable ways that conventional understandings of the modern lyric poem have been shaped by, and afforded a uniquely suitable space for, the expression of queer sensibilities. Evincing an ear for good gossip, Bennett presents new and illuminating queer contexts for the influential poetry of these four culturally diverse poets. Word of Mouth establishes poetry as a neglected archive for our thinking about gossip and contributes a crucial queer perspective to current lyric studies and its renewed scholarly debate over the status and uses of the lyric genre.
Download or read book Utopias of One written by Joshua Kotin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction: utopias of one -- The United States of America. Learning from Walden -- W.E.B. Du Bois's hermeticism -- The Soviet Union. Osip and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's utopian anti-utopianism -- Anna Akhmatova's complicity -- The world. Wallace Stevens's point of view -- Reading Ezra Pound and J.H. Prynne in Chinese -- Conclusion: utopias of two
Download or read book Modernist Empathy written by Eve Sorum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-27 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how reading modernist literature gives us fresh insights into tensions within the empathetic imagination and empathy itself.
Download or read book The Form of Love written by James Kuzner and published by Fordham University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can poetry articulate something about love that philosophy cannot? The Form of Love argues that it can. In close readings of seven “metaphysical” poems, the book shows how poets of the early modern period and beyond use poetic form to turn philosophy to other ends, in order not to represent the truth about love but to create a virtual experience of love, in all its guises. The Form of Love shows how verse creates love that can’t exist without poetry’s specific affordances, and how poems can, in their impossibility, prompt love’s radical re-imagining. Like the philosophies on which they draw, metaphysical poems imagine love as an intense form of non-sovereignty, of giving up control. They even imagine love as a liberating bondage—to a friend, a beloved, a saint, a God, or a garden. Yet these poems create strange, striking versions of such love, made in, rather than through, the devices, structures, and forces where love appears. Tracing how poems think, Kuzner argues, requires an intimate form of reading: close—even too close—attention to and thinking with the text. Showing how poetry thinks of love otherwise than other fields, the book reveals how poetry and philosophy can nevertheless enter into a relation that is itself like love.
Download or read book Nathaniel Mackey Destination Out written by Jeanne Heuving and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2021-06-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this first book of essays devoted entirely to Nathaniel Mackey’s work, prominent critics respond to a major oeuvre that is at once affirmative and utopic, negational and dystopic. Drawing on multiple genealogies and traditions, primarily from African and African diaspora histories and cultures, Mackey’s work envisions cultural creation as cross-cultural, based in the damaging relationships of Africans brought against their will to the Americas and the resulting innovations of New World African literatures and music. This collection is organized through broad topics in order to provide entrances into his challenging work: myth, literature, and seriality; music, performance, and collaboration; syncretism, synopsis, and what-saying. It engages Mackey’s spiritual and esoteric disposition along with his attention to what Amiri Baraka called the “enraged sociologies” of Black music. In his manifesto “Destination Out,” Mackey describes his work as “wanting to bid all givens goodbye” and as “centrifugal.” It is also centripetal, manifesting a reflexive interiority that creates itself through recurring forms. Contributors: Maria Damon, Joseph Donahue, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Norman Finkelstein, Luke Harley, Paul Jaussen, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Peter O’Leary, Anthony Reed
Download or read book Ornamental Aesthetics written by Theo Davis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ornamental Aesthetics offers a theory of ornamentation as a manner of marking out objects for notice, attention, praise, and a means of exploring qualities of mental engagement other than interpretation and representation. Although Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were hostile to the overdecorated rooms and poems of nineteenth-century culture, their writings are full of references to chandeliers, butterflies, diamonds, and banners which indicate their primary investment in ornamentation as a form of attending. Theo Davis argues that this essential quality of ornamentation has been obscured by the enduring emphasis of literary studies on the structure of representation, and on how meaning is embodied in material form. Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's sense of ornamentation as a manner of attending is grounded in an understanding of poetry as an adornment to the world, and thus as a way of relating to what is present rather than of representing it. Ornamental Aesthetics investigates the aesthetic practices of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman through readings of the writings of Martin Heidegger, which also presents the human mind as an agitated, responsive, and ornamental presence. Drawing together work in poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Ornamental Aesthetics ultimately argues that the kinds of immediate experience of attending which concerns ornamentation should retain a central place in the study of literature and the humanities more broadly.
Download or read book Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear T S Eliot and Stevie Smith written by Jasmine Jagger and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rich with unpublished material and detailed insight, Rhythms of Feeling offers a new reading of three of the most celebrated poets: Edward Lear, T.S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of Modernism. Going beyond a biographically-framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, the volume traces these poets' 'affective rhythms' (fits, tears, nerves) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, this volume seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.
