Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

DeepDyve requires Javascript to function. Please enable Javascript on your browser to continue.

Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry

Part of the American Literature Readings in the 21st Century Book Series

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-55284-2

ISBN: 978-3-319-55283-5

Publisher: Springer International Publishing - Springer Journals

Apr 29, 2017

LitStream

Chapter 1Introduction

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 1 –14

[This chapter takes as its subject the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and explores the ways in which experimental poets—Language writers and other formally innovative poets—formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology. Lagapa argues...
LitStream

Chapter 2Our Message Was Electric: Susan Howe and the Resuscitation of Failed Utopian Projects

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 15 –39

[This chapter reveals the utopian impulse and rhetoric of negation that underpin Susan Howe’s investigation of the historical past. Two of Howe’s works, Souls of the Labadie Tract and The Midnight, address the consequences of failed utopian social ideals. Central to each book is a visionary...
LitStream

Chapter 3And Be Whole Again: Antiphony, Deprivation, and the “Not-Yet” Place of Utopia in Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 41 –65

[The focus of this chapter is the imagined world that Nathaniel Mackey creates in Splay Anthem, a book-length poem that depicts a devastated urban landscape traversed by a lost band of travelers. Lagapa argues, however, that the book’s dystopian spaces, strewn with amputated bodies and beset by...
LitStream

Chapter 4Leave Us the World: Apophasis, Dissent and the Pluralist Politics of Charles Bernstein’s Poetry

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 67 –90

[Charles Bernstein makes prominent use in his poetry of the strategy of apophasis—a rhetorical figure of negation wherein an individual denies saying something in the exact moment of saying it. Lagapa contends that Bernstein’s denials are elaborate rhetorical gestures that not only explain his...
LitStream

Chapter 5Pages to Come: Utopian Longing and the Merging of the Detective Story with the Artist’s Novel in Alice Notley’s Disobedience

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 91 –116

[This chapter examines how Alice Notley forges a utopian poetics from an unlikely fusion of the hard-boiled detective genre with the kunstlerroman, or artist’s novel. Lagapa contends that Notley draws on the detective novel to depict the utopian imagination: a detective’s sudden illumination into...
LitStream

Chapter 6Afterword—Not Yet the End: the Resistance to Closure in Bloch’s Anticipatory Consciousness and Contemporary Experimental Poetry

Lagapa, Jason

Pages: 117 –125

[This chapter illustrates the ways in which the “rejection of closure” in experimental poetry finds its counterpart in Bloch’s concept of anticipatory consciousness. If the promise of utopia can be forecast as what is on the horizon, as an event that has “not yet” occurred, the open-ended...

results per page

Prev
1
Next

Browse All eBooks