Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens' stance toward the apocalyptic past: his use of and resistance to apocalyptic language. It explores the paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and anti-apocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham.
Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens’s doubled stance toward the apocalyptic past: his simultaneous use of and resistance to apocalyptic language, two contradictory forces that have generated two dominant and incompatible interpretations of his work. The book explores the often paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham. This study begins with an examination of the textual and generic issues surrounding apocalypse, culminating in the idea of apocalyptic language as a form of “discursive mastery” over the mayhem of events. Woodland provides an informative religious/historical discussion of apocalypse and, engaging with such critics as Parker, Derrida, and Fowler, sets forth the paradoxes and complexities that eventually challenge any clear dualities between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic thinking. Woodland then examines some of Stevens’s wartime essays and poems and describes Stevens’s efforts to salvage a sense of self and poetic vitality in a time of war, as well as his resistance to the possibility of cultural collapse. Woodland discusses the major postwar poems “Credences of Summer” and “The Auroras of Autumn” in separate chapters, examining the interaction of (anti)apocalyptic modes with, respectively, pastoral and elegy. The final chapter offers a perspective on Stevens’s place in literary history by examining the work of a contemporary poet, Jorie Graham, whose poetry quotes from Stevens’s oeuvre and shows other marks of his influence. Woodland focuses on Graham's 1997 collection The Errancy and shows that her antiapocalyptic poetry involves a very different attitude toward the possibility of a radical break with a particular cultural or aesthetic stance. Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, offering a new understanding of Stevens’s position in literary history, will greatly interest literary scholars and students.
From Tragedy to Apocalypse in American Literature: Reading to Make Sense of Our Endings argues that imaginative literature is essential to comprehending contemporary threats to the survival of the human species and the preservation of our humanity. Atnip outlines a theory of reading which directs us to realities and imperatives that are ignored, denied, or distorted by dominant social conventions and habits of cognition. She then puts this theory into practice through readings of postwar American works by Robert Lowell, Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy, and Norman Maclean. This book argues that these texts collectively educate us to a new ground of sense—the apocalyptic sublime—and the need for an unending effort to comprehend what it means to live a human life against this inhuman background.
Wallace Stevens is one of the major poets of the twentieth century, and also among the most challenging. His poems can be dazzling in their verbal brilliance. They are often shot through with lavish imagery and wit, informed by a lawyer's logic, and disarmingly unexpected: a singing jackrabbit, the seductive Nanzia Nunzio. They also spoke--and still speak--to contemporary concerns. Though his work is popular and his readership continues to grow, many readers encountering it are baffled by such rich and strange poetry. Eleanor Cook, a leading critic of poetry and expert on Stevens, gives us here the essential reader's guide to this important American poet. Cook goes through each of Stevens's poems in his six major collections as well as his later lyrics, in chronological order. For each poem she provides an introductory head note and a series of annotations on difficult phrases and references, illuminating for us just why and how Stevens was a master at his art. Her annotations, which include both previously unpublished scholarship and interpretive remarks, will benefit beginners and specialists alike. Cook also provides a brief biography of Stevens, and offers a detailed appendix on how to read modern poetry. A Reader's Guide to Wallace Stevens is an indispensable resource and the perfect companion to The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, first published in 1954 in honor of Stevens's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as to the 1997 collection Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose.
This book aims to provide an in-depth introduction to the multifaceted life and times of Wallace Stevens, who is generally considered one of the great twentieth-century American poets. In thirty-six short essays, an international team of distinguished scholars have created a comprehensive overview of Stevens' life and the world of his poetry. Individual chapters relate Stevens to important contexts such as the large Western movements of romanticism and modernism; particular American and European philosophical traditions; contemporary and later poets; the professional realms of law and insurance; the parallel art forms of painting, music, and theater; his publication history, critical reception, and his international reputation. Other chapters address topics of current interest such as war, politics, religion, race and the feminine. Informed by the latest developments in the field, but written in clear, jargon-free prose, Wallace Stevens in Context is an indispensable introduction to this great modern poet.
In Wallace Stevens among Others, David Jarraway explores the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens, but in contexts that are not usually thought about in connection with Stevens's work - gay literature, contemporary fiction, Hollywood film, and avant-garde architecture, among others. By viewing the poet among these "other" contexts, Jarraway considers the nature of self-reflection and pays special attention to the discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American writing - a theme that reflects American authors’ abiding concern for subjectivities that engage the world from spaces of distance and difference. By returning to the work of Stevens, Jarraway seeks to refurbish this preoccupation by linking it to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work applies to American writers from Melville and Whitman to Fitzgerald and Cummings. Jarraway forges the link between Deleuze and Stevens by drawing out the female subjectivity found in each writer’s work to rethink the more static masculinist premises of being. Informed by a deep knowledge of and fluency with the work of Stevens and Deleuze, Jarraway uses these writers as a means of entry into American literature and culture, Wallace Stevens among Others is a sophisticated analysis that will open new directions for future scholarship.
"A perceptive, insightful biography of perhaps the most important American poet of the twentieth century, Wallace Stevens, by an accomplished biographer and poet who traces Stevens's lifelong artistic quest"--
This book discusses the elusive centrality of silence in modern literature and philosophy, focusing on the writing and theory of Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, the prose of Samuel Beckett, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens. It suggests that silence is best understood according to two categories: apophasis and reticence. Apophasis is associated with theology, and relates to a silence of ineffability and transcendence; reticence is associated with phenomenology, and relates to a silence of listenership and speechlessness. In a series of diverse though interrelated readings, the study examines figures of broken silence and silent voice in the prose of Samuel Beckett, the notion of shared silence in Jean-Luc Nancy and Roland Barthes, and ways in which the poetry of Wallace Stevens mounts lyrical negotiations with forms of unsayability and speechlessness.
