Listing 1 - 2 of 2 |
Sort by
|
Choose an application
This book takes enthusiasm to be a defining feature of American literature, showing how successive major writers – Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, Frank O’Hara and James Schuyler – have modernized and re-modeled Emerson’s founding sense of enthusiasm. The book presents the writer as enthusiast, showing how enthusiasm is fundamental to the composition and the circulation of literature. Enthusiasm, it is argued, is the way literary value is passed on. Starting with a brief history of enthusiasm from Plato to Kant and Emerson, the book features chapters on each of Melville, Thoreau, Pound, Moore, O’Hara, and Schuyler. Each chapter presents an aspect of the writer as enthusiast, the book as a whole charting the changing sense of literary enthusiasm from Romanticism to the present day. Lucidly written and combatively argued, the book will appeal to readers of American Literature or Modern Poetry, and to all those interested in the circulation of literary work.
Enthusiasm in literature. --- American literature --- History and criticism. --- Literature --- Literature: History & Criticism --- LITERARY CRITICISM / American / General --- Literature: history & criticism --- American literature. --- Agrarians (Group of writers) --- Ezra Pound. --- Frank O'Hara. --- Henry David Thoreau. --- Immanuel Kant. --- James Schuyle. --- Marianne Moore. --- Ralph Waldo Emerson. --- Socrates. --- William Penn. --- cultural activism. --- enthusiasm. --- nearer testament. --- polemic. --- transmission of literature. --- unbridled self.
Choose an application
"Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
Poetry, modern --- Modern poetry --- Poetry --- History and criticism --- Theory, etc. --- Poetry, Modern --- A. R. Ammons. --- Anglo-American poetry. --- Bob Perelman. --- Discrete Series. --- Frank O'Hara. --- George Oppen. --- Language poetry. --- Leningrad. --- Robinson Crusoe. --- The Materials. --- William Butler Yeats. --- aesthetics. --- collective intention. --- collectivity. --- completeness. --- conversation. --- counterfactual identity. --- cultural determinism. --- ethics. --- eugenics. --- freedom. --- grammaticality. --- inattention. --- interpretation. --- judgment. --- literary life. --- love. --- minimalism. --- particularity. --- perfection. --- person. --- personhood. --- poem. --- poet. --- poetic agency. --- poetic community. --- poetic difficulty. --- poetic knowledge. --- poetic mastery. --- poetic politics. --- poetry. --- preference. --- reading. --- silence. --- slightness. --- social life. --- social recognition. --- symbolism. --- translation.
Listing 1 - 2 of 2 |
Sort by
|