Forms of Disappointment

Forms of Disappointment

Author: Lanie Millar

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2019-09-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1438475926

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In Forms of Disappointment, Lanie Millar traces the legacies of anti-imperial solidarity in Cuban and Angolan novels and films after 1989. Cuba's intervention in Angola's post-independence civil war from 1976 to 1991 was its longest and most engaged internationalist project and left a profound mark on the culture of both nations. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Millar argues, Cuban and Angolan writers and filmmakers responded to this collective history and adapted to new postsocialist realities in analogous ways, developing what she characterizes as works of disappointment. Revamping and riffing on earlier texts and forms of revolutionary enthusiasm, works of disappointment lay bare the aesthetic and political fragmentation of the public sphere while continuing to register the promise of leftist political projects. Pushing past the binaries that tend to dominate histories of the Cold War and its aftermath, Millar gives priority to the perspectives of artists in the Global South, illuminating networks of anticolonial and racial solidarity and showing how their works not only reflect shared feelings of disappointment but also call for ethical gestures of empathy and reconciliation.


The Dream Palace of the Arabs

The Dream Palace of the Arabs

Author: Fouad Ajami

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2009-09-23

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0307484033

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From Fouad Ajami, an acclaimed author and chronicler of Arab politics, comes a compelling account of how a generation of Arab intellectuals tried to introduce cultural renewals in their homelands through the forces of modernity and secularism. Ultimately, they came to face disappointment, exile, and, on occasion, death. Brilliantly weaving together the strands of a tumultuous century in Arab political thought, history, and poetry, Ajami takes us from the ruins of Beirut's once glittering metropolis to the land of Egypt, where struggle rages between a modernist impulse and an Islamist insurgency, from Nasser's pan-Arab nationalist ambitions to the emergence of an uneasy Pax Americana in Arab lands, from the triumphalism of the Gulf War to the continuing anguished debate over the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. For anyone who seeks to understand the Middle East, here is an insider's unflinching analysis of the collision between intellectual life and political realities in the Arab world today.


The Poetics of the American Suburbs

The Poetics of the American Suburbs

Author: Jo Gill

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2013-10-16

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1137340231

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The first scholarly study of the rich body of poetry that emerged from the post-war American suburbs, Gill evaluates the work of forty poets, including Anne Sexton, Langston Hughes, and John Updike. Combining textual analysis and archival research, this book offers a new perspective on the field of twentieth-century American literature.


The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's "Poetics"

The Lost Second Book of Aristotle's

Author: Walter Watson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-06-27

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0226875083

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Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".


Clare's Lyric

Clare's Lyric

Author: Stephanie Kuduk Weiner

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2014-04-10

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0191511897

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This book considers the lyric poems written by John Clare and three twentieth-century poets—Arthur Symons, Edmund Blunden, and John Ashbery—who turned to him at pivotal moments in their own development. These writers crafted a distinctive mode of lyric, 'Clare's lyric', that emphatically grounds its truth claims in mimetic accuracy. For these writers, accurate representation involves not only words that name objects, describe scenes, and create images pointing to a shared reality but also patterns of sound, the syntactic organization of lines, and the shapes of whole poems and collections of poems. Their works masterfully investigate how poetic language and form can refer to the world, word by word, line by line, and poem by poem. Written in a lively and accessible style, Clare's Lyric sheds light on a richly diverse body of poems and on enduring questions about how literature represents reality. Weiner's attentive close readings bring the writings of Clare, Symons, Blunden, and Ashbery to life by revealing precisely how they captured a vital, arresting, and complex world in their poems. Their unique approach to lyric is traced from Clare's poems about birdsong, his sonnets, and his later poems of loss and absence to Symons's efforts to make 'amends to nature' Blunden's vivid depictions of a European and English countryside scarred by the First World War, and Ashbery's unbounded and bountiful landscapes. This inventive study refines our understanding of the aesthetic of Romanticism, the genre of lyric, and the practice of literary representation, and it makes a compelling case for the ongoing importance of poems about nature and social life.


The Poetics of the Everyday

The Poetics of the Everyday

Author: Siobhan Phillips

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 0231149301

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Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"--recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention. Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits. Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.


Disappointment

Disappointment

Author: Michael Mack

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-12-10

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1501366882

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Considering the support behind Brexit and Donald Trump's 'America first' policies, this book challenges the idea that they are motivated solely by fear and instead looks at the hope and promises that drive these renewed forms of nationalism. Addressing these neglected motivations within contemporary populism, Michael Mack explores how our current sense of disappointment with our ecological, economic and political state of affairs partakes of a history of failed promises that goes back to the inception of modernity; namely, to Spinoza's radical enlightenment of diversity and equality. Through this innovative approach, Spinoza emerges less as a single isolated figure and more as a sign for an intellectual constellation of thinkers and writers who – from the romantics to contemporary theory and literature – have introduced various shifts in the way we see humanity as being limited and prone to disappointment. Combining intellectual history with literary and scientific theory, the book traces the collapse of traditional values and orders from Spinoza to Nietzsche and then to the literary modernism of Joseph Conrad and postmodernism of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon.


Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood

Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood

Author: David Wray

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2001-09-06

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1139429698

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This book applies comparative cultural and literary models to a reading of Catullus' poems as social performances of a 'poetics of manhood': a competitively, often outrageously, self-allusive bid for recognition and admiration. Earlier readings of Catullus, based on Romantic and Modernist notions of 'lyric' poetry, have tended to focus on the relationship with Lesbia and to ignore the majority of the shorter poems, which are instead directed at other men. Professor Wray approaches these poems in the light of more recent models for understanding male social interaction in the premodern Mediterranean, placing them in their specifically Roman historical context while bringing out their strikingly 'postmodern' qualities. The result is an alternative way of reading the fiercely aggressive and delicately refined agonism performed in Catullus' shorter poems. All Latin and Greek quoted is supplied with an English translation.


John Ashbery and English Poetry

John Ashbery and English Poetry

Author: Ben Hickman

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2012-03-07

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0748644768

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A study of how we should read one of America's most important poets. Ben Hickman argues that we must attend to Ashbery's radical conception of reading if we are to understand the originality of his writing. His study focuses on Ashbery's reading of English poets, including Andrew Marvell, John Donne, William Wordsworth, John Clare, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden, and examines Ashbery's writing in terms of an 'aesthetic of inattention'. Hickman critiques the Americanisation of Ashbery's work as well as common assumptions about his Romanticism, his avant-garde Modernism and his engagement with the historical present. He demonstrates that Ashbery's generosity as a writer is closely tied to his generosity, inattention and situatedness as a reader.