Poetic Machinations

Poetic Machinations PDF

Author: Michael Golston

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2015-09-01

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0231538634

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The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive, imbuing both form and content with meaning. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought. Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American poetry's postwar avant-garde achievements.

Cybertext Poetics

Cybertext Poetics PDF

Author: Markku Eskelinen

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 471

ISBN-13: 1441107452

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Equally interested in what is and what could be, Cybertext Poetics combines ludology and cybertext theory to solve persistent problems and introduce paradigm changes in the fields of literary theory, narratology, game studies, and digital media. The book first integrates theories of print and digital literature within a more comprehensive theory capable of coming to terms with the ever-widening media varieties of literary expression, and then expands narratology far beyond its current confines resulting in multiple new possibilities for both interactive and non-interactive narratives. By focusing on a cultural mode of expression that is formally, cognitively, affectively, socially, aesthetically, ethically and rhetorically different from narratives and stories, Cybertext Poetics constructs a ludological basis for comparative game studies, shows the importance of game studies to the understanding of digital media, and argues for a plurality of transmedial ecologies. >

Dictionary Poetics

Dictionary Poetics PDF

Author: Craig Dworkin

Publisher: Fordham University Press

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 0823287998

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The new ways of writing pioneered by the literary avant-garde invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. Dictionary Poetics examines one of those modes: book-length poems, from Louis Zukofsky to Harryette Mullen, all structured by particular editions of specific dictionaries. By reading these poems in tandem with their source texts, Dworkin puts paid to the notion that even the most abstract and fragmentary avant-garde literature is nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. When read from the right perspective, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, or hopelessly cryptic suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent. Following a methodology of “critical description,” Dictionary Poetics maps the material surfaces of poems, tracing the networks of signifiers that undergird the more familiar representational schemes with which conventional readings have been traditionally concerned. In the process, this book demonstrates that new ways of reading can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open otherwise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition, and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels.

A History of Modernist Poetry

A History of Modernist Poetry PDF

Author: Alex Davis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-04-27

Total Pages: 571

ISBN-13: 1107038677

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A History of Modernist Poetry examines innovative anglophone poetries from decadence to the post-war period. The first of its three parts considers formal and contextual issues, including myth, politics, gender, and race, while the second and third parts discuss a wide range of individual poets, including Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, as well as key movements such as Imagism, Objectivism, and the Harlem Renaissance. This book also addresses the impact of both World Wars on experimental poetries and the crucial role of magazines in disseminating and proselytizing on behalf of poetic modernism. The collection concludes with a wide-ranging discussion of the inheritance of modernism in recent writing on both sides of the Atlantic.

Expanding Authorship

Expanding Authorship PDF

Author: Peter Middleton

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 376

ISBN-13: 082636263X

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Expanding Authorship collects important essays by Peter Middleton that show the many ways in which, in a world of proliferating communications media, poetry-making is increasingly the work of agencies extending beyond that of a single, identifiable author. In four sections--Sound, Communities, Collaboration, and Complexity--Middleton demonstrates that this changing situation of poetry requires new understandings of the variations of authorship. He explores the internal divisions of lyric subjectivity, the vicissitudes of coauthorship and poetry networks, the creative role of editors and anthologists, and the ways in which the long poem can reveal the outer limits of authorship. Readers and scholars of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Frank O'Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rae Armantrout will find much to learn and enjoy in this groundbreaking volume.

Provisional Avant-Gardes

Provisional Avant-Gardes PDF

Author: Sophie Seita

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2019-07-23

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 1503609588

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What would it mean to be avant-garde today? Arguing against the notion that the avant-garde is dead or confined to historically "failed" movements, this book offers a more dynamic and inclusive theory of avant-gardes that accounts for how they work in our present. Innovative in approach, Provisional Avant-Gardes focuses on the medium of the little magazine—from early Dada experiments to feminist, queer, and digital publishing networks—to understand avant-gardes as provisional and heterogeneous communities. Paying particular attention to neglected women writers, artists, and editors alongside more canonical figures, it shows how the study of little magazines can change our views of literary and art history while shedding new light on individual careers. By focusing on the avant-garde's publishing history and group dynamics, Sophie Seita also demonstrates a new methodology for writing about avant-garde practice across time, one that is applicable to other artistic and non-artistic communities and that speaks to contemporary practitioners as much as scholars. In the process, she addresses fundamental questions about the intersections of aesthetic form and politics and about what we consider to be literature and art.

Invisible Terrain

Invisible Terrain PDF

Author: Stephen J. Ross

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-25

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 019251931X

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In his debut collection, Some Trees (1956), the American poet John Ashbery poses a question that resonates across his oeuvre and much of modern art: 'How could he explain to them his prayer / that nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?' When Ashbery asks this strange question, he joins a host of transatlantic avant-gardists—from the Dadaists to the 1960s neo-avant-gardists and beyond—who have dreamed of turning art into nature, of creating art that would be 'valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape—not its picture—is aesthetically valid' (Clement Greenberg, 1939). Invisible Terrain reads Ashbery as a bold intermediary between avant-garde anti-mimeticism and the long western nature poetic tradition. In chronicling Ashbery's articulation of 'a completely new kind of realism' and his engagement with figures ranging from Wordsworth to Warhol, the book presents a broader case study of nature's dramatic transformation into a resolutely unnatural aesthetic resource in 20th-century art and literature. The story begins in the late 1940s with the Abstract Expressionist valorization of process, surface, and immediacy—summed up by Jackson Pollock's famous quip, 'I am Nature'—that so influenced the early New York School poets. It ends with 'Breezeway,' a poem about Hurricane Sandy. Along the way, the project documents Ashbery's strategies for literalizing the 'stream of consciousness' metaphor, his negotiation of pastoral and politics during the Vietnam War, and his investment in 'bad' nature poetry.

Make It the Same

Make It the Same PDF

Author: Jacob Edmond

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 0231548672

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The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature. Make It the Same explores how poetry—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound’s oft-repeated slogan “make it new”—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.

Othermindedness

Othermindedness PDF

Author: Michael Joyce

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 9780472088430

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Meditations on network culture, hypertext, the geography of cyberspace, and interactive film

Poetry, Media, and the Material Body

Poetry, Media, and the Material Body PDF

Author: Ashley Miller

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-08-09

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1108311482

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From the Romantic fascination with hallucinatory poetics to the turn-of-the-century mania for automatic writing, poetry in nineteenth-century Britain appears at crucial times to be oddly involuntary, out of the control of its producers and receivers alike. This elegant study addresses the question of how people understood those forms of written creativity that seem to occur independently of the writer's will. Through the study of the century's media revolutions, evolving theories of physiology, and close readings of the works of nineteenth-century poets including Wordsworth, Coleridge and Tennyson, Ashley Miller articulates how poetry was imagined to promote involuntary bodily responses in both authors and readers, and how these responses enlist the body as a medium that does not produce poetry but rather reproduces it. This is a poetics that draws attention to, rather than effaces, the mediacy of the body in the processes of composition and reception.