Download or read book Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture written by Evan Kindley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the 1929 crash, Anglo-American poet-critics grappled with the task of legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Evan Kindley shows, created a new form of labor for writers to perform and gave them unprecedented say over the administration of culture, with consequences for poetry’s role in society still felt today.

Download or read book Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture written by Evan Kindley and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-09-18 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the 1929 crash, Anglo-American poet-critics grappled with the task of legitimizing literature for public funding and consumption. Modernism, Evan Kindley shows, created a new form of labor for writers to perform and gave them unprecedented say over the administration of culture, with consequences for poetry’s role in society still felt today.

Download or read book Notes on the Death of Culture written by Mario Vargas Llosa and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-08-11 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE A provocative essay collection that finds the Nobel laureate taking on the decline of intellectual life In the past, culture was a kind of vital consciousness that constantly rejuvenated and revivified everyday reality. Now it is largely a mechanism of distraction and entertainment. Notes on the Death of Culture is an examination and indictment of this transformation—penned by none other than Mario Vargas Llosa, who is not only one of our finest novelists but one of the keenest social critics at work today. Taking his cues from T. S. Eliot—whose essay "Notes Toward a Definition of Culture" is a touchstone precisely because the culture Eliot aimed to describe has since vanished—Vargas Llosa traces a decline whose ill effects have only just begun to be felt. He mourns, in particular, the figure of the intellectual: for most of the twentieth century, men and women of letters drove political, aesthetic, and moral conversations; today they have all but disappeared from public debate. But Vargas Llosa stubbornly refuses to fade into the background. He is not content to merely sign a petition; he will not bite his tongue. A necessary gadfly, the Nobel laureate Vargas Llosa, here vividly translated by John King, provides a tough but essential critique of our time and culture.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry and Politics since 1900 written by Daniel Morris and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-27 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth Century American Poetry and Politics shows how American poets have addressed political phenomena since 1900. This book helps students, teachers, and general readers make sense of the scope and complexity of the relationships between poetry and politics. Offering detailed case studies, this book discusses the relationships between poetry and social views found in work by well-established authors such as Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as lesser known, but influential figures such as Muriel Rukeyser. This book also emphasizes the crucial role contemporary African-American poets such as Claudia Rankine and leading spoken word poets play in documenting political themes in our current moment. Individual chapters focus on specific political issues - race, institutions, propaganda, incarceration, immigration, environment, war, public monuments, history, technology - in a memorable and teachable way for poetry students and teachers.

Download or read book American Guides written by Wendy Griswold and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-26 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the midst of the Great Depression, Americans were nearly universally literate--and they were hungry for the written word. With an eye to this market and as a response to unemployment, Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration created the Federal Writers' Project. They produced the Project's American Guides, an impressively produced series that set out not only to direct travelers on which routes to take and what to see throughout the country, but also to celebrate the distinctive characteristics of each individual state. The series unintentionally diversified American literary culture's cast of characters--promoting women, minority, and rural writers--while it also institutionalized the innovative idea that American culture comes in state-shaped boxes.

Download or read book Red Modernism written by Mark Steven and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2017-12-21 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did modernist poetry respond—both thematically and technically—to communism? In Red Modernism, Mark Steven asserts that modernism was highly attuned—and aesthetically responsive—to the overall spirit of communism. He considers the maturation of American poetry as a longitudinal arc, one that roughly followed the rise of the USSR through the Russian Revolution and its subsequent descent into Stalinism, opening up a hitherto underexplored domain in the political history of avant-garde literature. In doing so, Steven amplifies the resonance among the universal idea of communism, the revolutionary socialist state, and the American modernist poem. Focusing on three of the most significant figures in modernist poetry—Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Louis Zukofsky—Steven provides a theoretical and historical introduction to modernism’s unique sense of communism while revealing how communist ideals and references were deeply embedded in modernist poetry. Moving between these poets and the work of T. S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Muriel Rukeyser, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, and many others, the book combines a detailed analysis of technical devices and poetic values with a rich political and economic context. Persuasively charting a history of the avant-garde modernist poem in relation to communism, beginning in the 1910s and reaching into the 1940s, Red Modernism is an audacious examination of the twinned history of politics and poetry.

Download or read book Can Poetry Matter written by Dana Gioia and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "When Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?" appeared in the Atlantic in 1991, it sparked a firestorm of debate and discussion over the role of the poet in today's world - a dialogue in which Gioia participated on radio, television, and in print. One of the more stimulating and provocative figures on our literary horizon, and the author of two widely praised books of poems, Gioia is also an essayist of wide renown." "This collection of essays demonstrates that Gioia's talents do not lie in the area of controversy alone. Can Poetry Matter? is an old-fashioned sort of literary book, part literary criticism, part social commentary, and part plain good reading. Addressing such subjects as the poet as businessman and New Formalism as the real avant-garde, it also includes pieces on the life and work of such diverse figures as Robinson Jeffers, Weldon Kees, Robert Bly, and Wallace Stevens." "In an age when literary discourse often seems either bleached of any real content or academic to the point of inaccessibility, the essays in Can Poetry Matter? are certain to educate, provoke, and, perhaps most of all, delight readers. They also establish Dana Gioia as one of the foremost cultural observers of his generation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Download or read book The Hatred of Poetry written by Ben Lerner and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The novelist and poet Ben Lerner argues that our hatred of poetry is ultimately a sign of its nagging relevance"--

Download or read book The Academic Avant Garde written by Kimberly Quiogue Andrews and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2023-01-10 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising story of the relationship between experimental poetry and literary studies. In The Academic Avant-Garde, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews makes a provocative case for the radical poetic possibilities of the work of literary scholarship and lays out a foundational theory of literary production in the context of the university. In her examination of the cross-pollination between the analytic humanities and the craft of poetry writing, Andrews tells a bold story about some of today's most innovative literary works. This pathbreaking intervention into contemporary American literature and higher education demonstrates that experimental poetry not only reflects nuanced concern about creative writing as a discipline but also uses the critical techniques of scholarship as a cornerstone of poetic practice. Structured around the concepts of academic labor (such as teaching) and methodological work (such as theorizing), the book traces these practices in the works of authors ranging from Claudia Rankine to John Ashbery, providing fresh readings of some of our era's most celebrated and difficult poets.

Download or read book Annotating Modernism written by Amanda Golden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-04 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making extensive use of archival materials by Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Anne Sexton, Amanda Golden reframes the relationship between modernism and midcentury poetry. While Golden situates her book among other materialist histories of modernism, she moves beyond the examination of published works to address poets’ annotations in their personal copies of modernist texts. A consideration of the dynamics of literary influence, Annotating Modernism analyzes the teaching strategies of midcentury poets and the ways they read modernists like T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, and W. B. Yeats. Situated within a larger rethinking of modernism, Golden’s study illustrates the role of midcentury poets in shaping modernist discourse.

Download or read book The Advocates of Poetry written by R. S. Gwynn and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no other period in American history, the twentieth century has produced a great flourishing of critics who not only wrote poetry, but also published criticism dealing directly with the text and aesthetics of poems. Beginning with John Crowe Ransom's "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" and closing with John Ciardi's "How Does a Poem Mean?", R. S. Gwynn has assembled many of the pivotal essays written by these poet-critics over the last fifty years, some long out of print. From the pens of a dozen authors, such as Robert Penn Warren, Louise Bogan, Allen Tate, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell, the essays were written in an atmosphere of practicality. It was a time when critical readings of poetry elucidated the poem rather than the external ideologies and theories of the critic, when criticism was accessible to the educated, common reader.

Download or read book American Poetry and Culture 1945 1980 written by Robert Von Hallberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1985 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the common perception of poets as standing apart from the mainstream of American culture, Robert von Hallberg gives us a fresh and unpredictable assessment of the poetry that has come directly out of the American experience since 1945. Who reads contemporary American poetry? More people than were reading new poetry in the 1920s, von Hallberg shows. How do poets respond to the public preoccupations of their readers? Often with fascination. Von Hallberg put the poems of Robert Creeley and John Ashbery together with the postwar outburst of systems analysis. The 1950s tourist poems of John Hollander, Adrienne Rich, W. S. Merwin, and James Merrill are treated as the cultural side of America's postwar rise to global political power There are chapters on the political poems of the 1950s and 1960s, and on Robert Lowell's sympathy for the imperialism of his liberal contemporaries. Poems of the 1970s on pop culture, especially Edward Dorn's Slinger, and some from the suburbs of the 1980s, are shown to reflect a curious peace between the literary and the mass cultures.

Download or read book Feeling as a Foreign Language written by Alice Fulton and published by . This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Feeling as a Foreign Language, Alice Fulton considers poetry's uncanny ability to access and recreate emotions so wayward they go unnamed. Fulton contemplates topics ranging from the intricacies of a rare genetic syndrome to fractals from the aesthetics of complexity theory to the need for "cultural incorrectness." Along the way, she falls in love with an outrageous 17th century poet, argues for a Dickinsonian tradition in American letters, and calls for a courageous poetics of inconvenient knowledge.

Download or read book Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist Feminism written by Samuel Solomon and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the political potential of poetry in the contemporary era? Exploring an often overlooked history of Marxist-Feminist poetics in post-war Britain – including such poets as Denise Riley, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Wendy Mulford and Nat Raha – this book confronts this central question to debates about the value of humanities education today. Lyric Pedagogy and Marxist-Feminism demonstrates how ideas of social reproduction have been central both to the forms of post-1945 British poetry and the educational institutions where poetry is overwhelmingly encountered and produced. Combining new archival research with close readings of key poets of the period, the book charts the interrelated crises both of poetry itself and literary education more widely. Paradoxically, the very marginalisation of poetry in contemporary culture serves to offer the form new opportunities as an agent of social transformation.

Download or read book Du Bois s Telegram written by Juliana Spahr and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking her cue from W. E. B. Du Bois, Juliana Spahr explores how state interests have shaped U.S. literature. What is the relationship between literature and politics? Can writing be revolutionary? Can art be autonomous or is escape from nations and nationalisms impossible? As her sobering study affirms, aesthetic resistance is easily domesticated.

Download or read book Outside Literary Studies written by Andy Hines and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-05-13 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New criticism and the object of American democracy -- Melvin B. Tolson's belated bomb -- Tactical criticism -- Culture as a powerful weapon.

Download or read book Big Fiction written by Dan Sinykin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-24 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1950s, Random House editor Jason Epstein would talk jazz with Ralph Ellison or chat with Andy Warhol while pouring drinks in his office. By the 1970s, editors were poring over profit-and-loss statements. The electronics company RCA bought Random House in 1965, and then other large corporations purchased other formerly independent publishers. As multinational conglomerates consolidated the industry, the business of literature—and literature itself—transformed. Dan Sinykin explores how changes in the publishing industry have affected fiction, literary form, and what it means to be an author. Giving an inside look at the industry’s daily routines, personal dramas, and institutional crises, he reveals how conglomeration has shaped what kinds of books and writers are published. Sinykin examines four different sectors of the publishing industry: mass-market books by brand-name authors like Danielle Steel; trade publishers that encouraged genre elements in literary fiction; nonprofits such as Graywolf that aspired to protect literature from market pressures; and the distinctive niche of employee-owned W. W. Norton. He emphasizes how women and people of color navigated shifts in publishing, arguing that writers such as Toni Morrison allegorized their experiences in their fiction. Big Fiction features dazzling readings of a vast range of novelists—including E. L. Doctorow, Judith Krantz, Renata Adler, Stephen King, Joan Didion, Cormac McCarthy, Chuck Palahniuk, Patrick O’Brian, and Walter Mosley—as well as vivid portraits of industry figures. Written in gripping and lively prose, this deeply original book recasts the past six decades of American fiction.