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Beginning with an essay on the history and theory of poetic argument, he traces its patterns through Romantic and Modernist literature. He divides his subject into three areas: the paradoxes of reason, language, and argument. Poetic Argument surveys the writings of the five poets in light of what has to be "proved" and identifies the characteristic styles of proof for each. For example, in the chapter on Marianne Moore, Kertzer studies two expressions of poetic argument. The first regards poetry as a waking dream, combining the powers of sleep and calculation. The second, derived from Imagism, treats poetry as a special way of seeing. Kertzer suggests that the combination of these two elements produces Moore's characteristically intricate, but inconclusive, forms of argument.
Patricia Rae's study, while accepting Rorty's view that there is philosophical solidarity between pragmatism and modernism, rejects his interpretation of both as forms of dogmatic skepticism. If pragmatism and modernism coincide, Rae argues, the case of these three writers suggests that the intersection lies not in a rejection of "truthfulness to experience" but in a cautious respect for it.
Often considered America's greatest twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poet whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing both synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevens's poetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of this poet's work, Bart Eeckhout traces both the limits of Stevens's poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. Stevens's work has been interpreted so variously and contradictorily that critics must first address the question of limits to th...
Leon Surette's new study of T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, The Modern Dilemma, challenges the received view that Stevens' poetry expresses a Humanist world view, and - more surprisingly - documents Eliot's early Humanist phase when Eliot and his bride shared Bertrand Russell's tiny London flat, and later rented a country house together (1914-17). Eliot's poetry of that time - up to The Waste Land is seen to reflect his Humanist phase, closed by his conversion, poetically documented in Ash Wednesday. Where Eliot's poetry is dominated by cultural, religious and philosophical angst, Stevens' is bright, witty, and playful - and commonly dismissed as superficial. The Modern Dilemma challenges t...
Let us revive the true sense of fine arts: enchantment! In the conceptualised, commercialised, artificial approach to fine arts, we forgot its authentic experiential sense. It lies at the imaginative heart of all arts there to be retrieved by the creative recipient as the very 'truth of it all'.
Philosophy, art criticism and popular opinion all seem to treat the aesthetics of the comic as lightweight, while the tragic seems to be regarded with greater seriousness. Why this favouring of sadness over joy? Can it be justified? What are the criteria by which the significance of comedy can be estimated vis à vis tragedy? Questions such as these underlie the present selection of studies, which casts new light on the comic, the joyful and laughter itself. This challenge to the popular attitude strikes into new territory, relating such matters to the profundity with which we enjoy life and its role in the deployment of the Human Condition. In her Introduction Tymieniecka points out that the tragic and the comic might be complementary in their respective sense-bestowing modes as well as in their dynamic functions; they might both share in the primogenital function of promoting the self-individualising progress of human existence. For the first time in philosophy, laughter, mirth, joy and the like are revealed as the modalities of the essential enjoyment of life, being brought to bear in an illumination of the human condition.
This volume traces the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophical thinking has been taken up, critically re-appropriated, and disseminated in literary and poetic writing since the middle of the 20th century.
Offers a new conception of modernist autonomy by focusing on Wallace Stevens, one of the renowned poets of the twentieth century.
The modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.