Politics Poetics Affect

This book seeks to re-vision the life and work of the Peruvian poet, CÃ(c)sar Vallejo (1892â "1938). It consists of ten essays grouped into three complementary sections on Politics, Poetics and Affect. In Part I, William Rowe draws out the latent layers of political meaning in Vallejoâ (TM)s â ~pre-politicalâ (TM) work, Trilce; Adam Feinstein weighs the evidence for and against the case that there was a rift between the two most important Latin American poets of the twentieth century (Vallejo and Pablo Neruda); and David Bellis compares and contrasts Vallejoâ (TM)s Spanish Civil War poetry with that composed by Neruda and the Cuban poet Nicolàs GuillÃ(c)n. In Part II, Dominic Moran provides a line-by-line dissection of Vallejoâ (TM)s favourite poem of his early period, â ~El palco estrechoâ (TM); Adam Sharman offers a close reading of Poem XXIII of Trilce; Paloma Yannakakis looks at the role played by the human body in Vallejoâ (TM)s poetics; while Michelle Clayton reviews the ways in which animals are represented in Vallejoâ (TM)s poetry. In Part III, Santi Zegarra discusses the influence that Vallejoâ (TM)s poetry has had on his film-making; Eduardo Gonzàlez Viaña reveals how he re-created Vallejoâ (TM)s experience of imprisonment in his novel Vallejo en los infiernos; while Stephen Hart compares and contrasts the two main muses of Vallejoâ (TM)s early poetry, his niece (Otilia Vallejo Gamboa) and the woman he met in Lima (Otilia Villanueva Pajares).

This volume proposes the ‘poetics of politics’ as an analytic angle to interrogate contemporary cultural production in the United States. As recent scholarship has observed, American literature and culture around the turn of the millennium, while still deeply informed by the textual self-consciousness of postmodernism, are marked by a rekindled interest in matters of social concern. This revived interest in politics is frequently read as a ‘grand epochal transition.’ Sidestepping such a logic of periodization, this book points to the interplay between the textual and the political as a dynamic – always locally specific – that affords unique insights into the characteristics of the contemporary moment. The sixteen case studies in this book explore this interplay across a wide range of media, genres, and modes. Together, they make visible a broad cultural concern with negotiating social relevance and textual self-awareness that permeates and structures contemporary US (popular) culture.

In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."

“Reconnect[s] affect studies with major issues in literary studies, philosophy, and aesthetics. . . . a fundamental contribution to this emergent field.” —Jonathan Culler, Cornell University, author of Structuralist Poetics In Mood and Trope, John Brenkman introduces two provocative propositions to affect theory: that human emotion is intimately connected to persuasion and figurative language; and that literature, especially poetry, lends precision to studying affect because it resides there not in speaking about feelings, but in the way of speaking itself. Engaging modern philosophers—Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze—Brenkman explores how they all approach the question of affect primarily through literature and art. He draws on the differences and dialogues among them, arguing that the vocation of criticism is incapable of systematicity and instead must be attuned to the singularity and plurality of literary and artistic creations. In addition, he confronts these four philosophers and their essential concepts with a wide array of authors and artists, including Pinter and Poe, Baudelaire, Jorie Graham and Li-Young Lee, Shakespeare, Tino Sehgal, and Francis Bacon. Filled with surprising insights, Mood and Trope provides a rich archive for rethinking the nature of affect and its aesthetic and rhetorical stakes. “Combining philosophical inquiry with brilliant interpretive readings, Brenkman, draws out the distinctive imbrications of mood and trope across a range of modern poetic projects.” —Amanda Anderson, Brown University, author of Psyche and Ethos “Brenkman shows us how literature has extended and deepened the possibilities of feeling and knowledge of feeling alike.” —Susan Stewart, Princeton University, author of The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics “Eminently readable.” —Choice

Poetics and Politics of Shame in Postcolonial Literature provides a new and wide-ranging appraisal of shame in colonial and postcolonial literature in English. Bringing together young and established voices in postcolonial studies, these essays tackle shame and racism, shame and agency, shame and ethical recognition, the problem of shamelessness, the shame of willed forgetfulness. Linked by a common thread of reflections on shame and literary writing, the essays consider specifically whether the aesthetic and ethical capacities of literature enable a measure of stability or recuperation in the presence of shame’s destructive potential. The obscenity of the in-human, both in the colonial setting and in aftermaths that show little sign of abating, entails the acute significance of shame as a subject for continuing and urgent critical attention.

The present book is a bold attempt at revealing the complex and diversified nature of the field of translated literature in Turkey during a period of radical socio-political change. On the broad level, it investigates the implications of the political transformation experienced in Turkey after the proclamation of the Republic for the cultural and literary fields, including the field of translated literature. On a more specific level, it holds translation under focus and explores the discourse formed on translation and translators while it also traces the norms (not) observed by translators throughout the 1920s-1950s in two case studies. The findings of the study suggest that the concepts of translation both affected and were affected by cultural processes in the society, including ideological and poetological ones and that there was no uniform way of defining or carrying out translations during the period under study. The findings also point at the segmentation of readership in early republican Turkey and conclude that the political and poetological factors governing the production and reception of translations varied for different segments of readers.

In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of gender, race, and age by our culture’s scripts for “emotional” behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence. Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity, considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender “new” affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them—the “statistical panic” produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan. The orbit of Statistical Panic is wide, drawing in feminist theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative. Stories of illness—by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others—receive special attention, with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole.

Poetry Matters explores poetry written by women from the United States and Canada, which documents the social and political turmoil of the early twenty-first century and places this poetry in dialogue with recent currents of feminist theory including new materialism, affect theory, posthumanism, and feminist engagements with neoliberalism and capitalism. Central to this project is the conviction that a poetics that explores the political dimensions of affect; demonstrates an understanding of subjectivity as posthuman and transcorpoℜ critically reflects on the impact of capitalism on queer, racialized, and female bodies; and develops an ethical vocabulary for reimagining the nation state and critically engaging with issues of democracy and citizenship is now more urgent than ever before. Milne focuses on poetry published after 2001 by writers who mostly began writing after the feminist writing movements of the 1980s, but who have inherited and built upon their political and aesthetic legacies. The poets discussed in this book--including Jennifer Scappettone, Margaret Christakos, Larissa Lai, Rita Wong, Nikki Reimer, Rachel Zolf, Yedda Morrison, Marcella Durand, Evelyn Reilly, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Dionne Brand, Jena Osman, and Jen Benka--bring a sense of political agency to poetry. These voices seek new vocabularies and dissenting critical and aesthetic frameworks for thinking across issues of gender, materiality, capitalism, the toxic convergences of nationalism and racism, and the decline of democratic institutions. This is poetry that matters--both in its political urgency and in its attentiveness to the world as "matter"--as a material entity under siege. It could not be more timely or more relevant.