CHAPTER 4 Ideas of Open Form and Closure in Prose Poetry

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 79-101
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Open Form

Ideas of Open Form and Closure in Prose Poetry

Prose Poetry ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 79-101
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Lyric Poetry ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Open Form ◽  
White Space ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Opening And Closing

This chapter focuses on ideas of open form and closure in prose poetry. While lineated lyric poetry is typically highly suggestive and open to various interpretations, it simultaneously tends toward conveying a sense of formal resolution and closure. The attention to formal elements in lineated lyric poetry, including the beginnings and endings of lines and the opening and closing of works, is very different from other kinds of less formalized writing — including prose poetry, where sentences are drawn together in paragraphs rather than separated. Prose poetry refuses lineated poetry's rhythmic closure even as it visually preempts its conclusion in the capacious white space that follows the last sentence of the paragraph. In other words, openness and closure are likely to be manifested very differently in lineated poems compared to prose poems. Prose poems have their own integrity as works, but their sense of completeness turns on their appeal to incompleteness in the same way as the literary fragment. Structurally, prose poetry's use of the sentence rather than the line as its unit of composition allows the poet to engage in “narrative digression.”

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Poetic Trespass

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lital Levy
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Old World ◽  
History And Literature ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Emile Habiby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Way

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

Prose Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry

The Meaning of Pax

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Cornwell
Keyword(s):  
Interpersonal Relations ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Religious Dimensions ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Relationship Of

This chapter examines the semantic range of the concept of pax, considering its place in the Roman imaginary alongside ‘associated concepts’ (particularly concordia, otium, bellum, and victoria). The traditional Republican meaning and uses of the term pax are examined in a variety of contexts (contemporary prose, poetry, historical writings, numismatics, and religious dimensions) in order to establish more precisely the conceptualization and meaning of pax within the conventional political language of the Republic. Whilst pax was used to describe a usually unequal relationship of power with either the gods or other civic entities, as well as interpersonal relations, it did not conventionally have a strong political presence in Roman thought prior to the first century BC.

Encounter

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Steane
Keyword(s):  
Science And Religion ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
The Relationship

This brief chapter summarizes the relationship between science and religion in four paragraphs of prose poetry.

scholarly journals Snaking into the Gothic: Serpentine Sensuousness in Lewis and Coleridge

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Jeremy Chow
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Animal Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Erotic ◽  
Gothic Studies

This essay charts the ways late-eighteenth-century Gothic authors repurpose natural histories of snakes to explore how reptile-human encounters are harbingers of queer formations of gender, sexuality, and empire. By looking to M.G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1796) and his understudied short story “The Anaconda” (1808), as well as S.T. Coleridge’s Christabel (1797–1800), I centre the last five years of the eighteenth century to apprehend the interwoven nature of Gothic prose, poetry, and popular natural histories as they pertain to reptile knowledge and representations. Whereas Lewis’s short story positions the orientalised anaconda to upheave notions of empire, gender, and romance, his novel invokes the snake to signal the effusion of graphic eroticisms. Coleridge, in turn, invokes the snake-human interspecies connection to imagine female, homoerotic possibilities and foreclosures. Plaiting eighteenth-century animal studies, queer studies, and Gothic studies, this essay offers a queer eco-Gothic reading of the violating, erotic powers of snakes in their placement alongside human interlocutors. I thus recalibrate eighteenth-century animal studies to focus not on warm-blooded mammals, but on cold-blooded reptiles and the erotic effusions they afford within the Gothic imaginary that repeatedly conjures them, as I show, with queer interspecies effects.

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