Unorthodox Prose Poetry

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
The Way

This chapter follows contemporary poets whose work exists in formal or generic relationship to prose poetry, but who reject or elude categorization as prose poets. The chapter looks first at the poem “Hanging Coffin” by Ouyang Jianghe, which uses monumentality, rather than prose poetry’s traditional brevity, to engage with culture and history on a grand scale. The end of the chapter reads Bourdieu to track the way in which the avant-garde prose poet Xi Chuan fights against the identification of his work with the settled, more categorically cohesive genre as practiced by orthodox poets. In doing so, he returns to a core distinction between prose poetry and other literary forms and practices: instead of belonging to a fixed genre with a list of desiderata and taboos, Xi Chuan’s works of prose are acts that intervene in and shape the practice of prose.

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.

scholarly journals B.S. Johnson’s Liberatic Cityscape in Albert Angelo

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Biela
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Visual Sensitivity ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Way

For Bryan Stanley Johnson, a British post-war avant-garde author, space was a crucial aspect of a literary work. Inspired by architects and film makers, he was convinced that “form follows function” (“Introduction” to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs) and exercised the book as a material object, thus anticipating liberature – a literary genre defined in 1999 by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik, which encompasses works whose authors purposefully fuse the content with the form. The goal of this paper is to analyse the cityscape theme in Johnson’s second novel, Albert Angelo (1964), in which London is presented as space that accompanies the character in his everyday life and becomes a witness of the formation of his identity. The protagonist is an architect by profession, so special attention is paid to his visual sensitivity and the way the cityscape is reflected in his memories. Furthermore, Johnson’s formal exploitation of the book as an object and its correspondence to the content is analysed with reference to the metaphor of “[t]he book as an architectural structure” discussed by Bazarnik in Liberature. A Book-bound Genre.

What Is the Tradition of Chinese Prose Poetry?

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Admussen
Keyword(s):  
Prose Poetry ◽  
State Socialism ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Rabindranath Tagore ◽  
Fourth Period ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
May Fourth ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines, rejects, and revises the traditional history of the genre of prose poetry. Through a reading of Agamben, it demonstrates that during the May Fourth period, writers called a wide variety of work by the name prose poetry, including lineated free verse, lyric essays, and even fiction. By contrast, the writers of the 1950s wrote generically coherent work, and in the 1980s those same writers produced the focused, meaningful genre definitions that we use today. Because contemporary prose poetry has its roots in the obedient socialist poetry of the 1950s, it is not an inherently subversive form; its acts of refusal often serve to humanize or personalize the dictates of state socialism. The end of the chapter finds that the greatest stylistic influence on early prose poetry were Bing Xin’s translations of Rabindranath Tagore, and the way she made his transcendental music into vernacular prose.

Scelsi, Giacinto (1905–1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Drott
Keyword(s):  
Musical Training ◽  
Twelve Tone ◽  
Early Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Piano Lessons ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
To Come ◽  
The Way

Giacinto Scelsi was an Italian avant-garde composer best known for the single-note style he developed during the 1950s and 1960s, which minimizes harmonic and melodic activity in order to allow microtonal fluctuations and subtle transformations in timbre, intonation, dynamics, and articulation to come to the fore. Although his works were little known and infrequently performed during his lifetime, they gained considerable acclaim in the 1980s. Scelsi’s œuvre has proven extremely influential, and is generally regarded as a precursor to the spectral movement. Many of the elements of Scelsi’s biography remain uncertain, due in part to the composer’s penchant for self-mythologization. His family belonged to the southern Italian nobility, and it was in their ancestral chateau in Irpinie that Scelsi’s interest in music first manifested itself. He had little in the way of formal musical training, apart from receiving private piano lessons in his youth. Scelsi spent much of the 1920s and 1930s abroad, principally in France and Switzerland. It was during this period that he composed his first pieces, most notably Rotativa for pianos, strings, brass and percussion (1930). His early music was stylistically eclectic, embracing post-impressionist, neo-classical and twelve-tone idioms at various points in his life.

World Visions in Swahili Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-144
Author(s):  
Xavier Garnier
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Art Of Living ◽  
Literary Forms ◽  
Crime Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

Abstract Probably because of its relationship with a coastal culture, Swahili literature seems very aware of its position in the world. Through a reading of Swahili poems and novels across a range of genres, this paper explores the ways in which Swahili writers have engaged in a dialogue with the whole world, from the colonial period to the contemporary era. The evolution of well-identified literary forms such as epic poetry, ethnographic novel or crime novel will also pave the way for identifying the specificities of a Swahili cosmopolitanism anxious to cultivate an art of living in the age of a kind of globalization whose effects are often harshly felt at the local level. Because it has long developed an awareness of the world, Swahili literature has often pioneered the invention of literary forms that are able to translate locally the movements of the world.

scholarly journals (Re)framing Movement in Stan Brakhage’s Visions in Meditation N°1

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Emőke Simon
Keyword(s):  
Visual Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Short Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
Stan Brakhage ◽  
The Way

Abstract Considered as one of the main figures of the avant-garde lyrical cinema, Stan Brakhage questions perception. His language of inquiry constantly confronts the spectator with the limits of visual experience of the world and the multiple possibilities of their transgression. Critically addressing one of his short films, Visions in Meditation n°l (1989),1 this analysis aims to discuss the way movement may become a principle of perception, that is to say, according to Gilles Deleuze’s definition - a mode of transgressing the frame of representation. Reappropriating the cinematographic grammar and submitting it to a vibrating movement, Brakhage invents a rhythm which paves the way for a transcendental experience, meanwhile proposing a reflection on the meditative possibilities of the film in terms of the image in meditation. Gilles Deleuze’s way of thinking of cinema in Cinema 1: Movement-image, as well as Slavoj Žižek’s writings on cinema, allows one to consider movement in its cinematographic and philosophical meaning, a project which in Brakhage’s case seems to be primordial

scholarly journals Senses of Echo Lake: Michael Palmer, Stanley Cavell, and the Moods of an American Philosophical Tradition

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Richard Deming
Keyword(s):  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Stanley Cavell ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Ethical Implications ◽  
American Philosophy ◽  
Active Reading ◽  
Moral Perfectionism ◽  
The Way

This essay explores a philosophical tradition that Stanley Cavell has traced out and which he emphasizes as being American inasmuch as it is arises out of the thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. It then investigates how the poems of the avant-garde poet Michael Palmer link with, overlap with, this strain of American philosophy in terms of how it enacts an understanding of what we might call “philosophical mood,” on outlook based on the navigation of representation, generative self-consciousness, and doubt that amounts to a form of epistemology. The essay does not trace the influence—direct or otherwise of Cavell and his arguments for philosophy on the poems, despite a biographical connection between Cavell and Palmer, his former student. Instead it brings out the way that one might fruitfully locate Palmer’s work within an American literary/philosophical continuum. The article shows how that context opens up the work to a range of important existential and ethical implications. I endeavor to show that Notes for Echo Lake, Palmer’s most important collection, locates itself, its language, within such a frame so as to provide a place for readerly encounters with the limitations of language. These encounters then are presented as an opportunity for a deeper understanding of subjectivity and for attuning oneself to the role that active reading and interpretation might play in moral perfectionism.

Richard Hooker: Invention and Re-invention

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-152
Author(s):  
Diarmaid MacCulloch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Oxford Movement ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Way

This study traces the way in which a typical Elizabethan Reformed Protestant became something slightly different during a ministerial career prematurely terminated by death in his forties, and what he became in the centuries that followed. It explains the background of divided theologies in the national Church of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the emergence of ‘avant-garde conformism’, and the way in which Hooker was used by opposing sides to justify their positions, particularly after the Restoration of 1660, when the term ‘Anglicanism’ first becomes fully appropriate for the life and thought of the Church of England. As the Church moved from national monopoly to established status, Hooker became of use in different ways to both Tories and Whigs, though in the nineteenth century the Oxford Movement largely monopolised his memory. His views on the construction of authority may still help Anglicanism find its theological way forward.

The Many Facades of Edith Sitwell

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
British Modernism ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Literary Expression ◽  
The Many ◽  
Historical Discourses ◽  
The Way

Edith Sitwell was a key figure in the establishment of a British avant-garde “scene” and in the development of a unique literary expression. Taken together, each of the contributors gives body to a serious reconsideration, even resurrection, of Sitwell's important place in British modernism. Overall, this book makes a place for the lost story of Sitwellism in modernist history. It shows how her place in that history depends on a continual public and private remaking of self. Further, this book gives substance to the type of avant-garde that she (and her brothers) worked to craft—ornamental and baroque—by exploring the affective traces it produced in melancholic camp and her notion of female poetry. Finally, it demonstrates some ways in which that effect also includes and even invites engagement with socio-historical discourses of class, gender, and empire. Altogether, this volume opens the way for a long and rich reconsideration of this crucial, central figure of British modernism.

A Feminist Still

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. iv-29
Author(s):  
Lakshmi Padmanabhan
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
New Delhi ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Community Organizer ◽  
Visual Artist ◽  
Feminist Historiography ◽  
The Way

What can photographic form teach us about feminist historiography? Through close readings of photographs by visual artist and documentary photographer Sheba Chhachhi, who documented the struggle for women’s rights in India from the 1980s onward, this article outlines the political stakes of documentary photography’s formal conventions. First, it analyzes candid snapshots of recent protests for women’s rights in India, focusing on an iconic photograph by Chhachhi of Satyarani Chadha, a community organizer and women’s rights activist, at a rally in New Delhi in 1980. It attends to the way in which such photographs turn personal scenes of mourning into collective memorials to militancy, even as they embalm their subjects in a state of temporal paralysis and strip them of their individual history. It contrasts these snapshots to Chhachhi’s collaborative portrait of Chadha from 1990, a “feminist still” that deploys formal conventions of stillness to stage temporal encounters between potential histories and unrealized futures. Throughout, the article returns to the untimeliness of Chhachhi’s photography, both in the multiple temporalities opened up within the image and in its avant-garde critique of feminist politics through experiments with photographic form.

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