A Defense of Poetry
A Defense of Poetry

Author: Paul H. Fry

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780804725316

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A Defense of Poetry argues that literature can be defined - pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding - and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. In qualified opposition to the most sophisticated Formalist definitions involving redundancy or economy of expression, the author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the "ostensive moment" that discloses neither the purpose nor the structure of existence but existence itself, revealed in its nonhuman register.

A Defense of Poetry
A Defense of Poetry

Author: Gabriel Gudding

Publisher:

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13:

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Dangerous, edgy, and dark, Gudding offers a defense not only against the pretense and vanity of war, violence, and religion, but also against the vanity of poetry itself.

Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida
Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida

Author: Mark Edmundson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1995-06-15

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780521485326

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This timely book argues that the institutionalisation of literary theory, particularly within American and British academic circles, has led to a sterility of thought which ignores the special character of literary art. Mark Edmundson traces the origins of this tendency to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, in which Plato took the side of philosophy; and he shows how the work of modern theorists - Foucault, Derrida, de Man and Bloom - exhibits similar drives to subsume poetic art into some 'higher' kind of thought. Challenging and controversial, this book should be read by all teachers of literature and of theory, and by anyone concerned about the future of institutionalised literary studies.

A Defense of Ardor
A Defense of Ardor

Author: Adam Zagajewski

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2014-10-28

Total Pages: 189

ISBN-13: 1466884231

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Ardor, inspiration, the soul, the sublime: Such terms have long since fallen from favor among critics and artists alike. In his new collection of essays, Adam Zagajewski continues his efforts to reclaim for art not just the terms but the scanted spiritual dimension of modern human existence that they stake out. Bringing gravity and grace to his meditations on art, society, and history, Zagajewski wears his erudition lightly, with a disarming blend of modesty and humor. His topics range from autobiography (his first visit to a post-Soviet Lvov after childhood exile; his illicit readings of Nietzsche in Communist Poland); to considerations of artist friends past and present (Zbigniew Herbert, Czeslaw Milosz); to intellectual and psychological portraits of cities he has known, east and west; to a dazzling thumbnail sketch of postwar Polish poetry. Zagajewski gives an account of the place of art in the modern age that distinguishes his self-proclaimed liberal vision from the "right-wing radicalism" of such modernist precursors as Eliot or Yeats. The same mixture of ardor and compassion that marks Zagajewski's distinctive contribution to modern poetry runs throughout this eloquent, engaging collection.