In seeking to give voice to absent things or lost experiences, Richard Stamelman says, modern poetry attempts to give absence a shape. Loss, in his view, is both the cause and the subject of the modern poem. Fittingly, in Lost beyond Telling he formulates and develops what he calls a poetics of loss, with which he frames his treatment of modern French poetry.
Samuel Beckett: A Casebook may be characterized as a new collection of essays by a generation of Beckett scholars who did not have access to the author. This text demarcates the line between the critical work produced when Beckett was alive, and the critical work produced within ten years of the author's death. This collection is distinctive, too, because the text offers a variety of critical perspectives which engage and problematize Beckett's dramatic canon. From Deleuzean rhizomatics to New Historicism to the crucial question of gender-each reading re-positions Beckett's plays and forces us to rethink our standard interpretations of Beckett's drama.
The Lost Words by composer James Burton takes its inspiration and text from the award-winning 'cultural phenomenon' and book of the same name by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris: a book that was, in turn, a creative response to the removal of everyday nature words like acorn, newt and otter from a new edition of a widely used children's dictionary. Both the book and Burton's 32-minute work, which is written in 12 short movements for upper-voice choir in up to 3 voice parts (with either orchestral or piano accompaniment), celebrates each lost word with a beautiful poem or 'spell', magically brought to life in Burton's music. At its heart, the work delivers a powerful message about the need to close the gap between childhood and the natural world. Burton's piece was co-commissioned by the Hallé Concerts Society for the Hallé Children's Choir and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The piano accompaniment version was premiered at the Tanglewood Festival in 2019 by the Boston Symphony Children's Choir, of which Burton is founder and director. The Hallé Children's Choir will premiere the orchestral version of the full work in Manchester, UK, post-pandemic. Vocal Score Co-commission by Boston Symphony and Hallé Concerts Society for their respective Children's Choirs. Two versions - with orchestral or with piano accompaniment. The vocal score is the same for both versions. James Burton is a composer but also a conductor. He is conductor of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and choral director of the Boston Symphony. The book The Lost Words, exquisitely designed, has won multiple awards and is an international best-seller. The vocal score includes Jackie Morris's beautiful imagery in its cover design.
Upon his death in 1898, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé (b. 1842) left behind a body of published work which though modest in quantity was to have a seminal influence on subsequent poetry and aesthetic theory. He also enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for extending help and encouragement to those who sought him out. Rosemary Lloyd has produced a fascinating literary biography of the poet and his period, offering a subtle exploration of the mind and letters of one of the giants of modern European poetry.Every Tuesday, from the late 1870s on, Mallarmé hosted gatherings that became famous as the "Mardis" and that were attended by a cross section of significant writers, artists, thinkers, and musicians in fin-de-siecle France, England, and Belgium. Through these gatherings and especially through a voluminous correspondence--eventually collected in eleven volumes--Mallarmé developed and recorded his friendships with Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Berthe Morisot, and many others. Attractively written and scrupulously documented, Mallarme: The Poet and His Circle is unique in offering a biographical account of the poet's literary practice and aesthetics which centers on that correspondence.
At least since the Romantic era, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But what, then, of the exiled, migrant or translingual poet? How might writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue complicate this picture of the relation between poet, language and literary system? What of those for whom the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease, suggesting a condition of not being at home in any one language, even that of their mother tongue? These questions are crucial for four French-language poets whose work is the focus of this study: Armen Lubin (1903-74), Ghérasim Luca (1913-94), Edmond Jabès (1912-91) and Michelle Grangaud (1941-). Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere – from Algeria to Armenia, to Egypt, to Romania – this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held assumptions of the relation between subjects, the language they use and the place from which they speak.
Margaret Laurence's much admired Manawaka fiction—The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners—has achieved remarkable recognition for its compassionate portrayal of the attempt to find meaning and peace in ordinary life. In Writing Grief, Christian Riegel argues that the protagonists in these books achieve resolution through acts of mourning, placing this fiction within the larger tradition of writing that explores the nuances and strategies of mourning. Riegel's analysis alludes to sociological and literary antecedants of the study of mourning, including the tradition of elegy, from Derrida and Lacan to Freud, van Gennep, and Milton. The "work" of mourning is necessary to move from a state of emotional paralysis to one of acceptance and active engagement. Laurence's characters "perform the work of mourning ... returning over and over again to the key issues relating to loss," and, as Riegel's close examination of the texts suggests, are changed thereafter fundamentally and significantly. As an important study of one aspect of Laurence's oeuvre, Writing Grief not only illustrates how Laurence's own preoccupations with mourning are figured, but also how different ways of working through grief result in renewed potential for consolation and connection, and "a renewed definition of self."
The Bedouin, or 'desert dwellers', have a rich cultural heritage often expressed through music and poetry. Here, Moneera Al-Ghadeer provides us with the first comparative reading of women's oral poetry from Saudi Arabia. She examines women's lyrics of love, desire, mourning and grievance. We come to understand Bedouin mores and - most significantly - the unique description of a desert that is consistently held to be infinite, evocative, stimulating and an eternal freedom. As the first English translation and analysis of this poetry, "Desert Voices" is both a gesture to preserving the oral poetic tradition of Bedouin women and a radical critique addressing the exclusion of their poetry from current academic literary studies. The book provides invaluable material for reflection in the debates around oral culture and women's poetic composition while it translates, presents and critically examins a genre, which opens Arabic poetry and literature to contemporary theory and criticism.
Hailed as our era's most profound theorist of literary influence, Harold Bloom's own influence on the landscape of literary criticism has been decisive. His wide-ranging critical writings have plumbed the depths of Romanticism, explored the anxiety caused by the influence of one generation of poets on another, wrestled with the idea of a literary canon, and examined the relationship between religion and literature. --
A young girl takes refuge in a London Tube station during WWII and confronts grief, loss, and first love with the help of her favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, in the debut novel from Tony Award-winning playwright Steven Sater. London, 1940. Amidst the rubble of the Blitz of World War II, fifteen-year-old Alice Spencer and her best friend, Alfred, are forced to take shelter in an underground tube station. Sick with tuberculosis, Alfred is quarantined, with doctors saying he won't make it through the night. In her desperation to keep him holding on, Alice turns to their favorite pastime: recalling the book that bonded them, and telling the story that she knows by heart--the story of Alice in Wonderland. What follows is a stunning, fantastical journey that blends Alice's two worlds: her war-ravaged homeland being held together by nurses and soldiers and Winston Churchill, and her beloved Wonderland, a welcome distraction from the bombs and the death, but a place where one rule always applies: the pages must keep turning. But then the lines between these two worlds begin to blur. Is that a militant Red Cross Nurse demanding that Alice get BACK. TO. HER. BED!, or is it the infamous Queen of Hearts saying...something about her head? Soon, Alice must decide whether to stay in Wonderland forever, or embrace the pain of reality if that's what it means to grow up. In this gorgeous YA adaption of his off-Broadway musical, the Tony Award-winning co-creator of Spring Awakening encourages us all to celebrate the transformational power of the imagination, even in the harshest of times.
