Books on the topic 'Poetic attention'
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1
Fellman, Wilma R. The other me: Poetic thoughts on ADD for adults and parents. Plantation, Fla: Specialty Press, 1997.
2
Gilbert, Sandra M. Acts of attention: The poems of D.H. Lawrence. 2nd ed. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990.
3
Skinner, Knute. Concerned attentions. Cliffs of Moher, County Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2013.
4
Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Everyday Blessings. New York: Hyperion, 2010.
5
Scanlon, Patrick James. Fastened from the Start: Inquiry and the Poetics of Attention. [New York, N.Y.?]: [publisher not identified], 2018.
6
Baldi, Massimo, and Fabrizio Desideri, eds. Paul Celan. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.36253/978-88-8453-792-8.
Abstract:
Poetry as a "philosophical frontier" is the concept focused in this book on the poetry of Paul Celan. It is not precipitate to consider that the peculiarity of Celan's poetry and its reception lies in the persistent and ongoing interest displayed by philosophical criticism. Adopting an inclusive formula that goes beyond the mere notion of a "philosophical space", Massimo Baldi and Fabrizio Desideri aim to bring together readings and interpretative theories that are significantly diverse, albeit marked by the common intention of focusing the radical singularity of Celan's writing. All the essays presented here effectively reveal an attention to that engagement inherent in the letter of the poetic dictate, in the pungency of its inscription, which we must respect and listen to if we wish to understand Celan.
7
Ben, Howard. The center of attention: Co. Monaghan, 1948. [Berkeley, Calif.]: Tangram, 1995.
8
Revell, Donald. The Art of Attention: A Poet's Eye. Saint Paul, USA: Graywolf Press, 2007.
9
Koehler, Margaret. Poetry of attention in the eighteenth century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
10
Richardson, Lystra M. The power of poetry for school leadership: Leading with attention and insight. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 2003.
11
Murashova, Natal'ya, and Tat'yana Kazanceva. The history of the Study of the Old Believer Spiritual Verse in the context of the study of the artistic system of extra-liturgical spiritual singing. ru: INFRA-M Academic Publishing LLC., 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.12737/1867637.
Abstract:
The monograph systematizes the historiography of the study of the Old Believer spiritual verse as an independent direction within the framework of the research of the all-Russian extra-liturgical spiritual singing. The chronological principle of the presentation of information resources allowed us to trace the dynamics in the development of research attention to the spiritual verse. The periodization of the history of the study of Old Believer texts of spiritual song-making is determined, the contribution of individual authors is comprehended, key problems are identified and further prospects for scientific research in the field of the musical and poetic heritage of the Old Believers are outlined. The index of publications presented in the work gives an exhaustive idea of the ways of formation and development of research interest in the spiritual song-making of carriers of pre-schismatic Orthodoxy and can be used as an information base for works devoted to spiritual verse. It consists of 447 bibliographic descriptions covering the period from 1859 to 2021. The nominal index includes 226 authors of articles, monographs, dissertations and compilers of collections of various types.
It is intended for specialists engaged in the study of Old Believer culture, folklore, Russian religious poetry and sacred music.
12
Alford, Lucy. Forms of Poetic Attention. Columbia University Press, 2021.
13
Alford, Lucy. Forms of Poetic Attention. Columbia University Press, 2020.
14
Camlot, Jason. Attention All Typewriters. DC Books, 2005.
15
Potvin, PF. The Attention Lesson. Lulu.com, 2006.
16
Camlot, Jason. Attention All Typewriters. DC Books, 2005.
17
Wagstaff, Emma. André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention. BRILL, 2020.
18
Owen, Frank LaRue. The School of Soft-Attention. Homebound Publications, 2018.
19
Fellman, Wilma R. The Other Me : Poetic Thoughts on ADD for Adults, Kids and Parents. Specialty Press (FL), 1997.
20
Borris, Kenneth. Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198807070.001.0001.
Abstract:
This book defines Platonism’s roles in early modern theories of literature, then turns to reappraise the Platonizing major poet Edmund Spenser. Platonic concerns and conceptions profoundly affected early modern English and continental poetics, yet the effects have had little attention. Literary Platonism energized pursuits of the sublime, and knowledge of this approach to poetry yields cogent new understandings of Spenser’s poetics, his major texts, his poetic vocation, and his cultural influence. By combining Christian resources with doctrines of Platonic poetics such as the poet’s and lover’s inspirational furies, the revelatory significance of beauty, and the importance of imitating exalted ideals rather than the world, he sought to attain a visionary sublimity that would ensure his enduring national significance, and he thereby became a seminal figure in the English literary “line of vision” including Milton and Blake among others. Although readings of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender typically bypass Plato’s Phaedrus, this text deeply informs the Calender’s treatments of beauty, inspiration, poetry’s psychagogic power, and its national responsibilities. In The Faerie Queene, both heroism and visionary poetics arise from the stimuli of love and beauty conceived Platonically, and idealized mimesis produces its faeryland. Faery’s queen, projected from Elizabeth I as in Platonic idealization of the beloved, not only pertains to temporal governance but also points toward the transcendental Ideas and divinity. Whereas Plato’s Republic valorizes philosophy for bringing enlightenment to counter society’s illusions, Spenser champions the learned and enraptured poetic imagination, and proceeds as such a philosopher-poet.
21
Knoppers, Laura L., ed. The Oxford History of Poetry in English. Oxford University PressOxford, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/9780198852803.001.0001.
Abstract:
Abstract By taking as its purview the full seventeenth century, 1603–1700, this volume re-draws the existing literary historical map and expands upon recent rethinking of the canon. Placing the revolutionary years at the centre of a century of poetic transformation, and putting the Restoration back into seventeenth-century literary history, the volume registers the transformative effects on poetic forms of a century of social, political, and religious upheaval. It considers the achievements of a number of women poets, not yet fully integrated into traditional literary histories. It assimilates the vibrant literature of the English Revolution to what came before and after, registering its long-term impact. It traces the development of print culture and of the literary marketplace, alongside the continued circulation of poetry in manuscript. It places John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and other mid-century poets into the full century of specifically literary development. It traces continuity and change, imitation and innovation in the full-century trajectory of such poetic genres as sonnet, elegy, satire, georgic, epigram, ode, devotional lyric, and epic. The volume’s attention to poetic form builds on the current upswing in historicist formalism, allowing a close focus on poetry as an intensely aesthetic and social literary mode. Designed for maximum classroom utility, the organisation of volume is both thematic and (in the authors’ section) chronological. After a comprehensive Introduction, organisational sections focus on Transitions; Materiality, Production, and Circulation; Poetics and Form; Genres; and Poets.
22
Huang, Guiyou. Asian American Poets. Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2002. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798400615177.
Abstract:
Even though Asian American literature is enjoying an impressive critical popularity, attention has focused primarily on longer narrative forms such as the novel. And despite the proliferation of a large number of poets of Asian descent in the 20th century, Asian American poetry remains a neglected area of study. Poetry as an elite genre has not reached the level of popularity of the novel or short story, partly due to the difficulties of reading and interpreting poetic texts. The lack of criticism on Asian American poetry speaks to the urgent need for scholarship in this area, since perhaps more than any other genre, poetry most forcefully captures the intense feelings and emotions that Asian Americans have experienced about themselves and their world. This reference book overviews the tremendous cultural contributions of Asian American poets. Included are alphabetically arranged entries on 48 American poets of Asian descent, most of whom have been active during the latter half of the 20th century. Each entry begins with a short biography, which sometimes includes information drawn from personal interviews. The entries then discuss the poet's major works and themes, including such concerns as family, racism, sexism, identity, language, and politics. A survey of the poet's critical reception follows. In many cases the existing criticism is scant, and the entries offer new readings of neglected works. The entries conclude with bibliographies of primary and secondary texts, and the volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.
23
Hetherington, Paul, and Cassandra Atherton. Prose Poetry. Princeton University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691180656.001.0001.
Abstract:
This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.
24
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford University Press, 2016.
25
Gurton-Wachter, Lily. Watchwords: Romanticism and the Poetics of Attention. Stanford University Press, 2016.
26
Gibbs, Raymond W. Postscript. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190457747.003.0014.
Abstract:
What is the future of scholarship in cognitive poetics? This chapter provides a guide for possible new directions in the study of cognitive poetic experience. I claim that cognitive poetics can become a distinctive field of study if it embraces certain methodological and theoretical principles. These include attention to a wide range of different poetic experiences both within and across people, acknowledging both generalities and variations in how people create and interpret poetic artifacts, making scholars’ intuitive judgments more transparent in our reports of different research findings, addressing alternative hypotheses for different patterns of data, recognizing the different ways in which “understanding” may occur and be theoretically explained, and seeking connections between cognitive and noncognitive factors that shape people cognitive poetic experiences. We must embrace these new empirical challenges with open-minded vigor and open-hearted passion to truly create better conditions for cognitive poetics to both thrive and flourish.
27
St. Clair, Robert. (Departures) Natural Bodies. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826583.003.0002.
Abstract:
Paying close attention to figures of flight and departure in several early poems, and in particular to “Sensation,” a short poem written in 1870, Chapter 1 re-assesses Rimbaud’s relation to Théodore de Banville and, more generally, the importance of Parnassian poetry at the end of the Second Empire. It shows how “Sensation” stages a reflection on the body and its senses (or aesthetic sensuality), on poetry and nature, that offers us a glimpse into the complex historical and poetic moment in which Rimbaud composed the poem and addressed it to Banville, exploring both Rimbaud’s relation to the politics of aestheticism and a corporeal ecopoetics in the early Rimbaud—a poetics that sees the body as fundamentally involved in the natural world as a kind of inner difference, the presence of something “naturally unnatural” the ultimate figure of which may be poetry itself.
28
St. Clair, Robert. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198826583.003.0001.
Abstract:
The introduction to Poetry, Politics, and the Body in Rimbaud positions the work within the emergent and intersectional field of scholarship of new literary materialisms, and outlines a theory of reading the materiality of poetry (in Rimbaud and in general) as one which involves an interlocking set of relations linking texts to other texts (or, intertexts) as well as to their historical and social contexts. It seeks from the outset to demonstrate both the stakes and the method of formal analysis of Rimbaud’s early poetry which inform study overall, showing how attention to fine textual detail—and in particular to the question and figure of the body, a core surface on which Rimbaud’s radical politics and revolutionary poetics are especially legible—opens Rimbaud’s poetry up to a broader array of relations to poetic, philosophical, and indeed political issues and problems which continue to concern us today.
29
Callaghan, Madeleine. ‘Painted fancy’s unsuspected scope’. Liverpool University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9781786940247.003.0001.
Abstract:
This chapter readsQueen Mab, Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things and the Esdaile Notebook as representative of the range and ambition of Shelley’s early poetry. Exploring the aesthetic power and pleasure embedded in these poems, this chapter explores Shelley’s poetic as well as his polemical faculty. Focusing on previously neglected works, the early work is shown to be deeply significant in its own right, not only for its later echoes in Shelley’s more mature poetry. Particular attention is paid to Shelley’s letter to Elizabeth Hitchener of 16 October 1811, where the performance of this letter sheds light upon the passionate ambition of Shelley’s early poetry. This chapter stresses Shelley’s burgeoning interest in artistry in his poetry and letters, revealing his early work as increasingly alert to the possibilities and the limits of language.
30
Kabat-zinn, Myla, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. Hyperion, 1998.
31
Kabat-Zinn, Myla, and Jon Kabat-Zinn. Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting. MJF Books, 2000.
32
Robinson, Peter. Poetry & Money. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789622539.001.0001.
Abstract:
Poetry & Money: A Speculation is a study of relationships between poets, poetry, and money from Chaucer to contemporary times. It begins by showing how trust is essential to the creation of value in human exchange, and how money can, depending on conditions, both enable and disable such trustfully collaborative generations of value. Drawing upon a vast range of poetry for its exemplifications, the book includes studies of poetic hardship, religious verse and debt redeeming, the South Sea Bubble and the financial revolution, debates upon metallic and paper currency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as modernist struggles with the gold standard, depression, inflation, and the realised groundlessness of exchange value. With its practitioner’s attention to the minutiae of poetic technique, it considers analogies between words and coins, and between poetic rhythm and the circulation of currencies in an economy. Through its close readings of poems over many centuries directly or indirectly engaged with money, it proposes ways in which, while we cannot escape monetary economies, we can resist, to some extent, being ensnared and diminished by them – through a fresh understanding of values money may serve to enable, ones which are nevertheless beyond price.
33
Stewart, Garrett. Attention Spans. Edited by David LaRocca. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9798765102268.
Abstract:
Attention Spans’ chronological review of Garrett Stewart’s critical approach tracks and maps the evolution of intersecting disciplines from late New Criticism through structuralism, deconstruction, narrative theory (by way of narratography), poetics, and media studies, in which Stewart’s has been so persistent and so eloquent a voice. Excerpts from his twenty books are framed by editorial retrospect, then linked by Stewart’s own commentary on the variety – and underlying vectors – of his interpretive career across aesthetic forms, from Victorian narrative to recent American fiction, classic celluloid cinema to postfilmic digital effects, inert book sculpture and literary wordplay to the soundscape of singing on screen. Accompanied by a glossary of his many influential coinages, this cornucopia of analyses is also a chronicle of evolving paradigms in the work of intensive reading.
34
Tyler, Daniel, ed. Poetry in the Making. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198784562.001.0001.
Abstract:
Poetry in the Making investigates the compositional practices of Victorian poets, as made evident in the autograph manuscripts of their poems. Written in an accessible and stimulating style, the book offers careful readings of individual drafts, paying attention to the revisions, cancellations, interlineations, trials of rhyme and form, and sometimes the large structural changes that these documents reveal. The book shows how manuscript revisions offer insights into the creative priorities and decisions of major Victorian poets (Wordsworth, Tennyson, the Brownings, Clough, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne, and Yeats); and investigates ideas of composition in the period, particularly the uneasy balance between inspiration and labour. Collectively, the chapters develop a survey of how Victorian poets experienced and understood their own creativity, setting abstract claims about inspiration and craftsmanship against their own practical experiences. The book testifies to the value for criticism of poetic drafts, establishing the significance of revision and of manuscript studies for the field of Victorian poetry and for literary scholarship more generally.
35
Fearn, David. Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746379.003.0001.
Abstract:
The introduction sets the following discussions in their scholarly context, with particular attention to other contemporary approaches to lyric both within Classics and in comparative literature and critical theory, as well as to art-historical approaches. Literary approaches to lyric deixis are brought together with art-historical and other literary approaches to visuality, subjectivity, and ecphrasis. Pindar’s immersion in a world of material culture and attention to the world as perceived visually fosters a special poetic creativity. The upshot is a poetics of referentiality, according to which Pindar’s consumers are invited to consider the distance between their own situatedness and the worlds being creatively referred to, through the complex mediation of poetic voices. The sensibilities, attitudes, and experiences being constructed also contribute to a new understanding of the importance of lyric as a culturally valuable resource in fifth-century Greece.
36
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.
37
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.
38
Ganteau, Jean-Michel. Poetics and Ethics of Attention in Contemporary British Narrative. Taylor & Francis Group, 2022.
39
Waterman, Rory. Wendy Cope. Liverpool University Press, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781800859524.001.0001.
Abstract:
Wendy Cope (born 1945) is one of Britain's most popular poets: her first two collections have together sold almost half a million copies, and in 1998, when Ted Hughes died, she was the BBC listeners' choice to succeed him as Poet Laureate. She is also contrarian and sometimes controversial, and has been celebrated as one of the finest parodists of her, or any, generation. It is perhaps surprising, then, that her popular appeal has been met with critical near-silence. After five major collections, Cope has received only piecemeal critical attention, mostly confined to book reviews. This is the first in-depth study of her poetry. Drawing on Cope's published work, archival material and correspondence, as well as the available scholarship and journalism, Rory Waterman considers her main collections, her works for children and her uncollected and unpublished poems, with many close readings, and detailed considerations of her cultural and literary contexts and her poetic development.
40
Jagger, Jasmine. Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Oxford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198868804.001.0001.
Abstract:
What does it mean to write or visualize a feeling rhythmically? Where does feeling sit within rhythm, and rhythm within feeling? This book looks into the heart of rhythm and the poetic imagination through the works of three of the most celebrated poets of all time. Through close studies of poetic and visual process, Rhythms of Feeling interprets the manuscripts, letters, diaries, drawings, and poetry of Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith. Tracing exciting lines of interplay, affinity, and influence between these writers for the first time, the book shifts the terms of critical debate on Lear, Eliot, and Smith and subtly reorients the traditional account of the genealogies of modernism. Going beyond a biographically framed close reading or a more general analysis framed by affect theory, Rhythms of Feeling traces out these poets’ ‘affective rhythms’ (tears, nerves, rage) to consider the way that poetics, the mental and physical process of writing and reading, and the ebbs and flows of their emotional weather, might be in dialogue. Attentive, acute, and often forensic, the book broadens its reach beyond these three poets to contemporary writers and medical accounts of creativity and cognition. Alongside deep critical study, Rhythms of Feeling seeks to bring emotional intelligence to criticism, finding ways of speaking lucidly and humanely about emotional and physical states that defy lucidity and stretch our sense of the human.
41
Harrison, Stephen, Fiona Macintosh, and Helen Eastman, eds. Seamus Heaney and the Classics. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198805656.001.0001.
Abstract:
The death of Seamus Heaney in 2013 is an appropriate point to honour the Irish poet’s contribution to classical reception in modern poetry in English; this is the first volume dedicated to that subject, though occasional essays have appeared in the past. The volume comprises literary criticism by scholars of classical reception and literature in English, and has some input from critics who are also poets and from theatre practitioners on their interpretations and productions of Heaney’s versions of Greek drama; it combines well-known names with early-career contributors, and friends and collaborators of Heaney with those who admired him from afar. The papers focus on two main areas: Heaney’s fascination with Greek drama and myth, shown primarily in his two Sophoclean versions but also in his engagement with Hesiod, with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, and with myths such as that of Antaeus, and his interest in Latin poetry, primarily in Virgil but also in Horace. A number of the papers cover the same material, but from different angles; for example, Heaney’s interest in Virgil is linked with the traditions of Irish poetry, his capacity as a translator, and his annotations in his own text of a standard translation, as well as being investigated in its long development over his poetic career, while his Greek dramas are considered as verbal poetry, as comments on Irish politics, and as stage-plays with concomitant issues of production and interpretation. Heaney’s posthumous translation of Aeneid VI comes in for considerable attention, and this will be the first volume to study this major work.
42
Freeman, Margaret H. The Poem as Icon. Oxford University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190080419.001.0001.
Abstract:
The objective in this book is to show how poetry enables us cognitively to aesthetically access, experience, and identify with the visible and invisible “being” of reality, with art as one cognitive expression of the aesthetic faculty, science another. Just as scientific knowledge of reality is achieved through physically exploring the far reaches of the visible and invisible worlds, so is poetic experience achieved through iconically simulating in semblance the “being” of reality that integrates both self and world in participatory unity. “Being” here should not be understood as the existence of material substance, but as the essence of all that is, both visible and invisible, material and immaterial, a life force in continuous flux and change. The book explores cognition as the sensory-motor-emotive-conceptual processes of “minding” and the aesthetic faculty as the processes of attention, imagination, memory, discrimination, expertise, and judgment that underlie all human cognition, including the arts and the sciences. Drawing from research such as blending and neurocognition in interdisciplinary cognitive literary studies, the book attempts to resolve long-standing questions about the function of poetry. Accepting the premise that poetry is its own artistic reason for being, it introduces the major elements—semblance, metaphor, schema, and affect—that constitute a poem as icon in motivating a poet’s intension and a respondent’s engagement. In so doing the book makes the case that a poem is a potential icon of the felt reality of being and shows that poetic iconicity provides a means for evaluating great poetry and an explanation for its endurance.
43
Chan, Leonard Kwok-Kou. Sense of Place and Urban Images. Edited by Carlos Rojas and Andrea Bachner. Oxford University Press, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199383313.013.20.
Abstract:
Through a close reading of works by a number of different Hong Kong poets, this chapter analyzes how the poets construct an identity for themselves and their place by finding expression for their urban experience. The analysis focuses on North Point and Nathan Road—two of the busiest districts in Hong Kong—and their position within the poetic imagination. Paying particular attention to poetry’s sociohistorical function as a construction site of cultural memory, the discussion looks into the feeling of topophilia towards the places, as well as the sociocultural critique of the poems, which gives rise to an antithetical feeling of topophobia.
44
Gilby, Emma. Descartes's Fictions. Oxford University Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198831891.001.0001.
Abstract:
Descartes’s Fictions traces common movements in early modern philosophy and literary method. This volume reassesses the significance of Descartes’s writing by bringing his philosophical output into contact with the literary treatises, exempla, and debates of his age. Arguing that humanist theorizing about the art of poetry represents a vital intellectual context for Descartes’s work, the volume offers readings of the controversies to which this poetic theory gives rise, with particular reference to the genre of tragicomedy, the question of verisimilitude, and the figures of Guez de Balzac and Pierre Corneille. Drawing on what Descartes says about, and to, his many contemporaries and correspondents embedded in the early modern republic of letters, this volume shows that poetics provides a repository of themes and images to which he returns repeatedly: fortune, method, error, providence, passion, and imagination, amongst others. Like the poets and theorists of the early modern period, Descartes is also drawn to the forms of attention that people may bring to his work. This interest finds expression in the mature Cartesian metaphysics of the Meditations, as well as, later, in the moral philosophy of his correspondence with Elisabeth of Bohemia or the Passions of the Soul. Some of the tropes of modern secondary criticism—a comparison of Descartes and Corneille, or the portrayal of Descartes as a ‘tragic’ figure—are also re-evaluated. This volume thus bridges the gap between Cartesian criticism and late-humanist literary culture in France.
45
Tian, Xiaofei, ed. Reading Du Fu. Hong Kong University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.5790/hongkong/9789888528448.001.0001.
Abstract:
This is the first collection of English essays on Du Fu, commonly regarded the greatest Chinese poet. Contributed by well-known experts of Chinese literature as well as scholars of a younger generation, these essays are engaged in historically nuanced close reading of Du Fu’s poems, both canonical and less known, from new angles and in various contexts. They discuss a series of critical issues, including the local and the imperial; the body politic and the individual body; poetry and geography; perspectives on the complicated relation of religion and literature; materiality and contemporary reception of Du Fu; poetry and visual art; tradition and modernity. Many of the poems analyzed in the volume were written in the backwater Kuizhou, far from Du Fu’s earlier residence in the capital city Chang’an, at a time when the Tang dynasty was going through devastating social and political disturbances. The authors contend that Du Fu’s isolation from the elite literary establishments allowed him to become a pioneer who introduced a new order to the Chinese poetic discourse. However, his attention to details in everyday reality, his preoccupation with domestic life and the larger issues embroiled in it, his humor, and his ability to surprise tend to be obscured by the clichéd image of the “poet sage” and “poet historian”—an image this collection of essays successfully complicates.
46
d'Hubert, Thibaut. In the Shade of the Golden Palace. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190860332.001.0001.
Abstract:
In the Shade of the Golden Palace explores the oeuvre of the prolific Bengali poet and translator Alaol (fl. 1651–1671), who rendered five narrative poems and one versified treatise from medieval Hindi and Persian into Bengali. The book maps the genres, structures, and themes of Alaol’s works, paying special attention to the poet’s own discourse on poetics and his literary genealogy, which included Sanskrit, Avadhi, Maithili, Persian, and Bengali authors. The monograph shows how a variety of literary experiments fostered by multilingual literacy took place in a seemingly remote corner of the Bay of Bengal: the kingdom of Arakan that lay between todays southeastern Bangladesh and Myanmar. After a careful contextualization of the emergence of Bengali Muslim literature in Arakan, I focus on courtly speech in Alaol’s poetry, his revisiting of classical categories in a vernacular context, and the prominent role of the discipline of lyrical arts (i.e. music, dance) in his conceptualization of the poetics of the written word. The book also contains a detailed analysis of Middle Bengali narrative poems, as well as translations of Old Maithili, Brajabuli, and Middle Bengali lyric poems that illustrate the styles that formed the core of connoisseurship in the regional courts of eastern South Asia, from Nepal to Arakan. The monograph operates on three levels: as a unique vade mecum for readers of Middle Bengali poetry, a detailed study of the cultural history of the frontier region of Arakan, and an original contribution to the poetics of South Asian literatures.
47
Brown, Ruth Nicole. When Black Girls Look at You. University of Illinois Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.5406/illinois/9780252037979.003.0004.
Abstract:
This chapter considers what it means to be seen and looked at as a Black girl. Building on the visual-poetic analysis of June Jordan's (1969) Who Look at Me and M. NourbeSe Philip's (2008) Zong!, the chapter offers an “anti-narrative photo-poem” that couples photography, poetry, and intersubjective insights of Black girlhood to specifically address the institutional norms and interpersonal dynamics that govern their lives and promote a limited knowing of Black girls premised on sight alone. The primary purpose of this chapter is to show that Black girls actively decide who and what is worthy of their presence and attention. The anti-narrative photo-poem invites those who dare to look to answer with action, as June Jordan suggested, but to do so while giving attention to the kinds of nuanced intersubjective interactions that hinge on the particular usable truth that Black girls are looking at you, watching them.
48
Yelle, Robert A. Semiotics. Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198729570.013.15.
Abstract:
Within those disciplines pursuing semiotic approaches to religion, recent decades have been characterized by a shift toward the pragmatic and performative dimensions of discourse. Roman Jakobson’s analysis of the poetic function of language has been extended to ritual, which in some cases deploys poetry to enhance rhetorical performance. The metricalization of ritual often constructs indexical icons that mirror and converge with real-world events that ritual seeks to bring about. The ability of the sign to figure something absent intersects with the general problem in religion concerning how (and whether) to represent transcendence. Semiotics is shifting attention from universalizing and formalist approaches to a study of cultural and historical differences, including differences in semiotic or linguistic ideologies. The semiotic ideology of modernity reflects an inheritance from Protestant iconoclasm: a bias against metaphysical and poetic language. Differences in semiotic ideology were on display in various colonial encounters between Europeans and indigenous peoples.
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Fearn, David. Language and Vision in the Epinician Poets. Oxford University Press, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198746379.003.0005.
Abstract:
This chapter explores the ways in which the other two contemporary epinician poets, Simonides and Bacchylides, use aesthetics and material culture as a way of drawing attention to their own individual and distinctive poetic voices and poetic agendas. Their affinities with and differences from Pindar are explored on the strength of the available evidence. Simonides’ Danae fragment receives detailed coverage, interpreted in visual-cultural terms in relation to Simonides’ ongoing fame as the original commentator on the relation between art and text. Discussion then turns to Bacchylides, and the predominance of a visual narrative style in his work. The argument covers not only epinician material but also an interesting but understudied fragmentary dithyramb. The focus then returns to Pindar with a short treatment of the themes of vision and visual and material culture in Nemean 10.
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Scully, Stephen. Hesiodic Poetics. Edited by Alexander C. Loney and Stephen Scully. Oxford University Press, 2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190209032.013.10.
Abstract:
In terms of poetics, the contest between Hesiod and Homer seems simultaneously natural and surprising: natural because both of them composed in the artificial “song dialect” and highly formulaic medium of epea, and surprising because Homer’s long, heroic poetry differed so greatly in voice, theme, length, structure, and style from Hesiod’s much shorter, catalogic narrative poetry or from his didactic poetry. This chapter examines Hesiod’s poetry alongside Homer’s in terms of voice and theme, length and form, and style and genealogical lists. With examples from both singers, I propose that it may be a stylistic feature of catalogic poetry to interweave the personified names in a list with the corresponding lowercase words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) in the surrounding narrative. I also propose that, to a greater extent than Homer, Hesiod, with his fondness for word play and etymological punning, draws attention upon individual words.