Notes toward transformalism(s): a poetics? (original) (raw)
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Literature Compass, 2006
By comparing avant-garde visual poetry to the avant-garde architecture of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, this essay describes how one virtually “moves through” poetic space. Appealing to examples from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaffery and Susan Howe and contemporary Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña, I steer the reader through complex visual poems based on the grounds that a disruption of the reader’s sense of space has aesthetic and political implications.
Transmuting F. H. Bradley: T. S. Eliot’s Notes Toward a Theory of Poetry
The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, 2017
This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heather Jackson’s work on marginalia, I argue that Eliot’s notes on Bradley provide a window on this act of reading. In particular, I suggest that Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s use of the word “transmute” – evident in the marginalia – opens up an extended conversation between the two authors and within which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can be located. I offer not so much a new account of Bradley’s influence on Eliot as an enriched picture of the manner in which influence can be said to be exerted.
文山評論: 文學與文化, 2010
The expression of modern existence as a disconnected entity with shocking and distressful consequences is reflected in the writings of many modernist writers, but it seems to take centre stage in the poetry of T. S. Eliot. The decline of values and the multifarious problems of the twentieth century have caused modern man to create parentheses that detach them from each other, from society, from nature and even from themselves. This paper examines the horrifying consequences of life in a chaotic and disconnected universe on human existence from the perspectives of frustration, despair, and alienation. From a Structuralist theoretical standpoint, the paper analyses the poetry of Eliot with the aim of showing that the poet explores and employs rhetorical tropes and linguistic codes that present individuals whose lives have been torn apart as a result of political, economic, social and religious crises. Social limitations and individual inadequacies have pushed modern man into hopeless individualistic worlds that are not connected to those of others around them, and the consequences of this are devastating.
Analysis and the Comparative Study of the Critical and Creative Process in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot
International Journal of Psychosocial Rehabilitation, ISSN: 1475-7192, https://www.psychosocial.com/article/PR260567/17977/, 2020
The subject of this paper is to investigate the creative and critical process in the poetry of T. S. Eliot systematically. There are some sardonic undercurrents that can be seen running through Eliot’s poetry which have an analytical as well as a creative process. A detailed reference comparative study has been underpinned to the poems of Wordsworth’s “Composed upon Westminster Bridge”, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale”, Arthur Mizener’s “To Meet Mr. Eliot”, W. B. Yeats’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “The Second Coming”, F. R. Leavis’s “The Significance of the Modern Waste Land”, and Allen Tate’s “On Ash Wednesday”, have also been referred in which the creative and critical process has been critically analyzed with the selected poems of T. S. Eliot for their scientific discourse analysis. Keywords--Expunging, Pastiche, Irrevocable, Disjointedness, Impersonalized, Defeatism. Weblinks: https://www.psychosocial.com/article-category/issue-6/ https://www.psychosocial.com/article/PR260567/17977/
Agorapoetics: Poetics After Postmodernism
This collection of nine papers explores the possibilities of a poetics which, after three decades of postmodernist experiments, wishes to refocus on the social and political dimension of the creative enterprise. In the latter years of the twentieth century, poetics has seen a variety of styles and modalities that have both called into question the very nature and need of poetry, and put forth a number of hypotheses. Among these we can list performance art, hybridity with pop and rap music, parody and collage, multilingualism, and an apparently acritical recycling of older or traditional forms. The lyric tradition seems to have continued unperturbed, especially in university settings. What seems to have disappeared from the scene is a poetics of the public sphere, one which is more in tune with broader movements that grew from the smoking debris of the Twin Towers in 2001. In a way, suddenly even postmodernism collapsed. Within a few short years, new poetics emerge (clearly some had been in gestation for decades), such as immigrant poetry, hyphenated poetry, poetry in translation, prose poems, computer-generated textualities, memorialism, technoallegories, and in general political poetry after the void left behind by the Beat generation and European committed writings of the 1970s and the 1980s. The questions the critic and the philosopher ask themselves are: what is the meaning of this transition? What carries over, what is gone for good? And what prospects lie before us? This collection addresses the necessity, in the context of this problematic set of issues, of whether new critical models need to be devised in order to better recognize, describe and relaunch a poetics for the twenty–first century.
"This dissertation, entitled '"Paralysed force, gesture without motion": A Queer Reading of Aporetic Space in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry', investigates queer sexuality in the early Eliot poems written between 1909 and 1927, specifically 'The Waste Land' (1922) and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925). Queer theory, in this dissertation, acknowledges its foundations in the poststructuralist Foucauldian critiques of history and identity categories, and connects them to aspects of multiplicity, fragmentation and transgression. The representation and subsequent deconstruction of sexual dimorphism and the metaphysics of presence, which emerge in these literary and theoretical texts, is further critiqued through extensive reference to Derrida’s work, particularly in relation to 'Aporias'. Building in its first chapter on distinctions governing Derrida’s use of problem and aporia, along with Foucault’s genealogical method and writings on sexuality, this study follows through with close readings of selected early poems by Eliot in order to determine whether the discernible yet indeterminate sexual space is problematic or aporetic. To this end, the second chapter deals primarily with the figures of Gerontion and Tiresias, and examines whether the hermaphroditic figure serves to deconstruct the sexual binary or only manages to problematically displace its hierarchy. Foucault’s and Derrida’s writings here help in further understanding Tiresias’s self-representations, as well as how 'The Waste Land'’s extensive use of allusion problematises tradition and constructions of individuality. The third chapter recalls Derrida’s critique in 'Aporias' of Heidegger’s three distinctions between different ways of death in order to highlight the transgressive nature of what this dissertation calls ‘aporetic indeterminacy’ within Eliot’s literary work. Furthermore, it looks at possible prefigurative links between ‘The Hollow Men’ and aspects of the limit/liminal experience, in conjunction with Foucauldian thoughts on madness. The queer and ultimately irrational, post-structuralist (non-)presence in Eliot’s poetry, if truly demonstrable, points to the possibility that Eliot is awaiting (at) the arrival of post-structuralist thought. On the basis of the above research, the conclusion examines how the entirety of this dissertation has also maintained a close relation to the question of death and its (im)possibility, and intimates further study in consideration of the experientialist aspect of queerly transgressive sexuality, especially in regards to more post-structurally oriented approaches to T. S. Eliot’s poetry."
Cultural and Textual (Dis)unity: Poetics of Nothingness in
The Waste Land at 90, 2011
Poets of modernism were by and large preoccupied with the idea of disorder. This preoccupation reflected itself in their style, as well as in general views on post-World War I culture. Fragmented society, detachment from the past and tradition in many aspects of human lives, gradual liberation from social constraints and norms, density of cities and mobility of their inhabitants all of these factors led to new forms of viewing human culture. The Great Depression and its consequences strengthened the feeling of impossibility of loosening the grip of the past. The economic crisis also brought about a sense of pessimism in most men and women of the time. These were the social conditions that formed new aesthetics which consisted of two opposing stances: Pound s credo Make It New on the one hand, and the insistence on keeping traditional values on the other.