Poetry And Dialogism

These essays extend an ongoing conversation on dialogic qualities of poetry by positing various foundations, practices, and purposes of poetic dialogism. The authors enrich and diversify the theoretical discourse on dialogic poetry and connect it to fertile critical fields like ethnic studies, translation studies, and ethics and literature.

"Using Mikhail Bakhtin as a kind of theoretical starting point, this volume of essays investigates the manifestation of such competing "voices" within the tradition of lyric poetry. The lyric subject's understanding of himself/herself - through the very act of speaking/writing - is irrevocably connected, on multiple levels, to the heard and unheard voices of others. No matter how private the voice of the lyric speaker appears to be, nearly every utterance is formed from and then positioned between what others have said or will say. Included here are essays on the classical, medieval, early modern, and modern lyric. Some of the essays in this volume engage Bakhtin "head-on"; others, by focusing explicitly on the construction of the subject through multiple discursive dialogues implicitly bring Bakhtin to bear. These essays engage multiple elements of dialogism, including the convergence of masculine and feminine voices, public and private discourses, intertextuality and the "voices of the past," the dialogue between literature and art, and the always present dialogue between speaker(s) and reader(s)."--BOOK JACKET.

What is poetry? Often it is understood as a largely self-enclosed verbal system—“suspended from any mutual interaction with alien discourse,” in the words of Mikhail Bakhtin. But in Poetry and Its Others, Jahan Ramazani reveals modern and contemporary poetry’s animated dialogue with other genres and discourses. Poetry generates rich new possibilities, he argues, by absorbing and contending with its near verbal relatives. Exploring poetry’s vibrant exchanges with other forms of writing, Ramazani shows how poetry assimilates features of prose fiction but differentiates itself from novelistic realism; metabolizes aspects of theory and philosophy but refuses their abstract procedures; and recognizes itself in the verbal precision of the law even as it separates itself from the law’s rationalism. But poetry’s most frequent interlocutors, he demonstrates, are news, prayer, and song. Poets such as William Carlos Williams and W. H. Auden refashioned poetry to absorb the news while expanding its contexts; T. S. Eliot and Charles Wright drew on the intimacy of prayer though resisting its limits; and Paul Muldoon, Rae Armantrout, and Patience Agbabi have played with and against song lyrics and techniques. Encompassing a cultural and stylistic range of writing unsurpassed by other studies of poetry, Poetry and Its Others shows that we understand what poetry is by examining its interplay with what it is not.

Poetry in Dialogue in the Duecento and Dante provides a new perspective on the highly networked literary landscape of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy. It demonstrates the fundamental role of dialogue between and within texts in the works of four poets who represent some of the major developments in early Italian literature: Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante. Rather than reading the cultural landscape through the lens of Dante's works, significant though they may be, the first part of this study reconstructs the rich network of literary, especially poetic dialogue that was at the heart of medieval writing in Italy. The second part uses this reconstruction to demonstrate Dante's engagement with, and indebtedness to, the dynamics of exchange that characterised the practice of medieval Italian poets. The overall argument—for the centrality of dialogic processes to the emerging Italian literary tradition—is underpinned by a conceptualisation of dialogue in relation to medieval and modern literary theory and philosophy of language. By triangulating between Brunetto Latini's Rettorica, Mikhail Bakhtin's 'dialogism', and as sense of 'performative' speech adapted from J. L. Austin, Poetry in Dialogue shows the openness of its corpus to new dialogues and interpretations, highlighting the instabilities of even the most apparently fixed, monumental texts.

If the post of Poet Laureate was allocated on the basis of popularity, Carol Ann Duffy would have been the first woman to hold this prestigious post. Like Philip Larkin in his day, Duffy is both a poet respected by many academics and teachers, and widely read and enjoyed by children and adult readers of poetry. This is the first full-length collection of essays on the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, approaching and exploring her work from a variety of literary theoretical perspectives, including feminism, masculinity, national identity, and post-structuralism. This lively anthology situates Duffy's poems in relation to current debates about the state, value and social relevance of contemporary British poetry.

‘Bakhtin and his Others’ aims to develop an understanding of Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas through a contextual approach, particularly with a focus on Bakhtin studies from the 1990s onward. The volume offers fresh theoretical insights into Bakhtin’s ideas on (inter)subjectivity and temporality – including his concepts of chronotope and literary polyphony – by reconsidering his ideas in relation to the sources he employs, and taking into account later research on similar topics. The case studies show how Bakhtin's ideas, when seen in light of this approach, can be constructively employed in contemporary literary research.

This volume explores poetic dialogue and dialogic patterns in medieval vernacular Italian poetry. It focuses on representations of conversion narratives and poetic subjectivity in the writings of Guittone d'Arezzo, Guido Guinizzelli, and Guido Cavalcanti, and Dante.

A consideration of Petrarch's influence on, and appearance in, French texts - and in particular, his appropriation by the Avignonese.