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What if the religious themes and allusions in modernist poetry are not just metaphors? Following the religious turn in other disciplines, literary critics have emphasized how modernists like Woolf and Joyce were haunted by Christianity’s cultural traces despite their own lack of belief. In Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period, Anthony Domestico takes a different tack, arguing that modern poets such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and David Jones were interested not just in the aesthetic or social implications of religious experience but also in the philosophically rigorous, dogmatic vision put forward by contemporary theology. These poets took seriously the truth claims of Christian th...
Is there life after theory? If the death of the Author has now been followed by the death of the Theorist, what's left? Indeed, who's left? To explore such riddles Life. After.Theory brings together new interviews with four theorists who are left, each a major figure in their own right: Jacques Derrida, Frank Kermode, Toril Moi, and Christopher Norris. Framed and introduced by Michael Payne and John Schad, the interviews pursue a whole range of topics, both familiar and unfamiliar. Among other things, Derrida, Kermode, Moi and Norris discuss being an outsider, taking responsibility, valuing books, getting angry, doing science, listening to music, remembering Empson, rereading de Beauvoir, be...
A reader's companion for Tolstoy's epic novel, War and Peace, inspired by the online book club led by Yiyun Li. For the writer Yiyun Li, whenever life has felt uncertain, War and Peace has been the novel she turns to. In March 2020, as the pandemic tightened its grip, Li and A Public Space launched #TolstoyTogether, a War and Peace book club, on Twitter and Instagram, gathering a community (that came to include writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Garth Greenwell, and Carl Phillips) for 85 days of prompts, conversation, succor, and pleasure. It was an experience shaped not only by the time in which they read but also the slow, consistent rhythm of the reading. And the extraordinary community that gathered for a moment each day to discuss Tolstoy, history, and the role of art in a time like this. Tolstoy Together captures that moment, and offers a guided, communal experience for past and new readers, lovers of Russian literature, and all those looking for what Li identifies as "his level-headedness and clear-sightedness offer[ing] a solidity during a time of duress.
In her first novel since the Pulitzer Prize–nominated The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after an environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. "She practices ... camouflage, except that instead of adapting to its environment, Williams’s imagination, by remaining true to itself, reveals new colorations in the ecology around her.” —A.O. Scott, The New York Times Book Review Khristen is a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen’s failing boarding school for gifted teens...
The Five Quintets is a mammoth poetic adventure undertaken by the celebrated poet Micheal O’Siadhail, attempting nothing less than an exploration of the predicaments of Western modernity. Drawing on inspiration from T S Eliot’s Four Quartets, The Five Quintets brings the premise of Dante’s Divine Comedy into the current day.
No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my purpose to explore." In this inventive and lucid essay, Lerner takes the hatred of poetry as the starting point of his defense of the art. He examines poetry's greatest haters (beginning with Plato's famous claim that an ideal city had no place for poets, who would only corrupt and mislead the young) and both its greatest and worst practitioners, providing inspired close readings of Keats, Dickinson, McGonagall, Whitman, and others. Throughout, he attempts to explain the noble failure at the heart of every truly great and truly horrible poem: the impulse to launch the experience of an individual into a timeless communal existence. In The Hatred of Poetry, Lerner has crafted an entertaining, personal, and entirely original examination of a vocation no less essential for being impossible.
What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve? Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of the Romantic period, Nersessian’s theory of utopia promises not an unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less than we hoped, but more than we had. For the Romantic writers, the project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake believed that without limits, a work of art would b...
One of The New York Times' 10 Favorite Poetry Books of 2014 An astonishing new collection from one of our finest emerging poets A shark's tooth, the shape-shifting cloud drifting from a smokestack, the smoke detectors that hang, ominous but disregarded, overhead—very little escapes the watchful eye of Joshua Mehigan. The poems in Accepting the Disaster range from lyric miniatures like "The Crossroads," a six-line sketch of an accident scene, to "The Orange Bottle," an expansive narrative page-turner whose main character suffers a psychotic episode after quitting medication. Mehigan blends the naturalistic milieu of such great chroniclers of American life as Stephen Crane and Studs Terkel w...
In this unique book, readers are taken on a journey to explore the role of the imagination in the face of mystery, whether it be the mystery of God, whose full reality lies beyond our earthly horizons, or the deepest mysteries of life hinted at in the work of fiction. By attending to a series of novels, Paul Lakeland proposes serious fiction as an antidote to the failure of the religious imagination today and shows how literature might lead the secular mind at least to the threshold of mystery.
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction. The Poet's Mistake -- Chapter 1. Wordsworth's Imperfect Perfect -- Chapter 2. Robert Browning's Bad Habit -- Chapter 3. Wondering about John Clare -- Chapter 4. Emily Dickinson's Eloquent Lies -- Chapter 5. Hart Crane's Wrapture -- Chapter 6. Fact-Checking Elizabeth Bishop -- Chapter 7. Misremembering Seamus Heaney -- Conclusion. Mistaking on Purpose -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.