Golston Poetic Machinations

Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-231-53863-3
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 272 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive, imbuing both form and content with meaning. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought.

Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American poetry's postwar avant-garde achievements.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Golston, Michael

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kultur- und Ideengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Lyrik und Dichter
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert Surrealismus, Abstrakter Expressionismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Polemical Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment
1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker
2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge
3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian
4. Semiologies: Susan Howe
5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Michael Golston is an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science, which won the Louis Martz Prize.