In Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva explicates her foundational distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic and explores their interrelationships. Linking the psychosomatic to the literary and the literary to a larger political horizon, she questions the premises of linguistic, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and literary theories.
The first study of poetic language from a historical and philosophical perspectiveIn a series of 12 chapters, exemplary poems - by Walter Ralegh, John Milton,William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, W. S. Graham, Tom Raworth, Denise Riley and Thomas A. Clark - are read alongside theoretical discussions of poetic language. The discussions provide a jargon-free account of a wide range of historical and contemporary schools of thought about poetic language, and an organised, coherent critique of those schools (including analytical philosophy, cognitive poetics, structuralism and post-structuralism). Via close readings of poems from 1600 to the present readers are taken through a wide range of styles including modernist, experimental and innovative poetries. Paired chapters within a chronological structure allow lecturers and students to approach the material in a variety of ways (by individual chapters, paired historical periods) that are appropriate to different courses.
An accessible introduction to poetry's unusual uses of language that tackles a wide range of poetic features from a linguistic point of view. Equally appealing to the non-expert and more experienced student of linguistics, this book delivers an engaging and often witty summary of how we define what poetry is.
Austere and uncompromising, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein had no use for the avant-garde art works of his own time. He refused to formulate an aesthetic, declaring that one can no more define the "beautiful" than determine "what sort of coffee tastes good". And yet many of the writers of our time have understood, as academic theorists generally have not, that Wittgenstein is "their" philosopher. How do we resolve this paradox? Marjorie Perloff, our foremost critic of twentieth-century poetry, argues that Wittgenstein has provided writers with a radical new aesthetic, a key to recognizing the inescapable strangeness of ordinary language. Wittgenstein's ladder is an apt figure for this radical aesthetic, and not just in its ordinariness as an object. The movement "up" this ladder can never be more than what Wittgenstein's contemporary, Gertrude Stein, called "Beginning again and again". Wittgenstein shows us, too, that we cannot climb the same ladder twice: the use of language, the context in which words and sentences appear, defines their meaning, which changes with every repetition. Wittgenstein's aesthetic brooks no theory, no essentialism, no metalanguage - only a practice, a mode of operation, fragmentary and elliptical.
The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.
Gosetti-Ferencei argues that Heidegger has overlooked central elements in Hlderlin's poetics, such as a Kantian understanding of aesthetic subjectivity and a commitment to Enlightenment ideals. These elements, she argues, resist the more politically distressing aspects of Heidegger's interpretations, including Heidegger's nationalist valorization of the German language and sense of nationhood, or Heimat.
This compact volume makes available a selection of 402 entries from the widely praised Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, with emphasis on prosodic and poetic terms likely to be encountered in many different areas of literary study. The book includes detailed discussions of poetic forms, prosody, rhetoric, genre, and topics such as theories of poetry and the relationship of linguistics to poetry. Originally published in 1987. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Metrics is often defined as a discipline that concerns itself with the study of meters. In this volume the term is used in a broader sense that more or less coincides with the traditional notion of versification . Understood this way, metrics is an eminently complex object that displays variation over time and in space, that concerns forms of a great variety and with different statuses (meters, rhymes, stanzas, prescribed forms, syllabification rules, nursery rhymes, slogans, musical textsetting, ablaut reduplication etc.), and that as a cultural manifestation is performed in a variety of ways (sung, chanted, spoken, read) that can have direct consequences on how it is structured. This profusion of forms is thought to correspond, at the level of perception, to a limited number of cognitive mechanisms that allow us to perceive and to represent regularly iterating forms. This volume proposes a relatively coherent overall vision by distinguishing four main families of metrical forms, each clearly independent of the others and amenable to separate typologies."
