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Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to...
This volume is about what happens to the contemporary French lyric in the translingual Arabic context. Drawing on lyric theory, comparative poetics, and linguistics, it reveals three generic modes of translating Arabic poetics into French in works by Habib Tengour (Algeria), Edmond Jabès (Egypt), Salah Stétié (Lebanon), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Ryoko Sekiguchi (Japan).
Beckett's Political Imagination uncovers Beckett's lifelong engagement with political thought and political history, showing how this concern informed his work as fiction author, dramatist, critic and translator. This radically new account will appeal to students, researchers and Beckett lovers alike.
This study examines Wallace Stevens' ideas and practice of poetic language with a focus on the 1930s, an era in which Stevens persistently thematized a keenly felt pressure for the possible social involvement and political utility of poetic language. The argument suggests how mutually implicated elements of his poetry such as diction, prosody and metaphor are relied on to signify or enact aesthetic closure; both in the negative terms of expressive impotence and unethical isolation and the positive ones of imaginative and linguistic change. In this respect, the study deals closely with the epistemologically and ethically fraught issue of the ambiguous and volatile role of non-semantic element...
This study looks at the origins of the modernist movement, linking gender, modernism and the literary, before considering the bearing these discourses had on Djuna Barnes's writing. The main contribution of this innovative and scholarly work is the exploration of the editorial changes that T. S. Eliot made to the manuscript of Nightwood, as well as the revisions of the early drafts initiated by Emily Holmes Coleman. The archival research presented here is a significant advance in the scholarship, making this volume invaluable to both teachers and students of modern literature and Barnesian scholars.
"The scene with which I begin this chapter is the kind of scene that interests Carson. In the words of her 'Essay on What I Think About Most' (1999), a disquisition on mistake in stanzas of unrhyming verse, the 'wilful creation of error' is the action of the 'master contriver' - the poet: 'what Aristotle would call an "imitator" of reality'. Like the 'true mistakes of poetry', the matter Carson confesses to 'think about most', Streb's choreographed falls perform the conversion of human error into an art form. Under the dancer's regime, and by an extraordinary coup of artifice, the emotions of mistake - shame, exposure, thrill - are handed to us, putting our own contradictions and 'odd longings' centre-stage"--
This book is a cultural history of Stein’s rise to fame and the function of literary celebrity in America from 1910 to 1935. By examining not the ways that Stein portrayed the popular in her work, but the ways the popular portrayed her, this study shows that there was an intimate relationship between literary modernism and mainstream culture and that modernist writers and texts were much more well-known than has been previously acknowledged. Specifically, Leick reveals through the case study of Stein that the relationship between mass culture and modernism in America was less antagonistic, more productive and integrated than previous studies have suggested.
In this critical study, Tidwell examines the conflict of aesthetics and politics in The Diary of Virginia Woolf. As a modernist writer concerned with contemporary aesthetic theories, Woolf experimented with limiting the representative nature of writing. At the same time, as a feminist, Woolf wanted to incorporate her political interests in her fiction, but overt political statement conflicted with her aesthetic ideals. Her solution was to combine innovative narrative techniques and subject matter traditionally associated with women. Tidwell analyzes several of Woolf’s novels, including To the Lighthouse, Jacob’s Room, and Between the Acts to elucidate the diary’s technique and form, as well as to cast it as a valuable contribution to Woolf’s canon.
The first full-length study on the subject of Dickens and work, this book argues that, rather than engaging with work as an abstract, quasi-religious and entirely benign value, Dickens’s writings demonstrate the varied ways in which it shapes gender identity and personality.