scholarly journals Searching for A Feminist Rights: A Postmodernist Analysis of Selected Poems by Sylvia Plath

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Salman Hayder Jasim ◽  
Adnan Taher Rahma
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Short Life ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Social Scene ◽  
Internal Struggle ◽  
American Poets

Sylvia Plath is one of those American poets who left their thumbprints on early postmodernist writings in America. Though, she lived a short life concluded by a horrible suicide, she produced a large body of poetry whose importance could have competed with later postmodernist poetry such as that written by Adrienne Rich, Maya Angelo and Harriet Mullen. The form and content of Plath's poetry demonstrated a new way of writing in comparison to the modernist poetry that preceded her time. When postmodernism meant the ultimate end of previous metanarratives and philosophies of form and content of writing and when postmodernism advocated selfgeneration over self-understanding, Plath appeared as a newly generated poet with a feminist message. Her appeal for a feminist position found support in the rapidly developing public sphere, which America witnessed during 1960s, as well as in the artistic and literary postmodernist sphere that accompanied it. To make an account for Sylvia Plath's achievement in this respect, the researcher divides the present paper into an introduction, three sections and a conclusion: The introduction of the paper sets the background of Sylvia Plath's literary rise and significance in her posthumous literary American scene. Section One discusses Plath's fight for a feminist role as it started early inside her family. The researcher selects a couple of poems to define the different sides of this internal struggle. Section Two moves out to the larger social scene which Plath choses to confirm her feminist demand on an external level. Here, she re-introduces the images of the 'bee' and the 'spider' to support her feminist stand. Section Three sheds light upon the theme of suicide and how it allures Plath as a means to define her feminist self. The Conclusion sums up the findings of the paper.

Nineteenth-Century Suffrage Journals

2020 ◽  
pp. 42-60
Author(s):  
Linda Steiner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
New Woman ◽  
Postwar Period ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Status Politics ◽  
The Revolution

This chapter use theories of status politics (conflicts as proxies for important debates over the deference paid to a particular group’s lifestyle) to show the importance of nineteenth-century suffragists’ own newspapers and magazines to the movement. The women who wrote for, edited, and published these outlets essentially invented and then celebrated at least four different versions of a new political woman and then proceeded to dramatize that new woman, showing how she named herself, dressed, dealt with her family, and interacted in the larger public sphere, and showing why she deserved the vote. The pre-Civil War suffrage periodicals essentially proposed a “sensible woman” while the postwar period saw competition between the “strong-minded” women aggressively promoted in the Revolution and the more moderate “responsible women” advocated by the Woman’s Journal. Later, the Woman’s Era dramatized an “earnest” new black woman.

How Rich's Sunflower and Her Family Bind a Nation

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 575-610
Author(s):  
Charles Vandersee
Keyword(s):  
Jerusalem Artichoke ◽  
Work Force ◽  
Helianthus Tuberosus ◽  
Long Poem ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Her Family ◽  
Chain Link ◽  
Cross Country ◽  
Edible Root

As Flower, As Edible Root nourishing Natives and wanderers, and as witness to the nation's work force and wars, Helianthus tuberosus repeatedly drew itself to the attention of Adrienne Rich as she drove across the country:Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that bindsthe map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-petalledwith her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to California runs the edges of orchards, chain-link fencesmilo fields and malls, schoolyards and reservationstruckstops and quarries, grazing ranges, graveyardsof veterans, graveyards of cars hulked and sunk, her tubers the jerusalem artichokethat has fed the Indians, fed the hobos, could feed us all.Is there anything in the soil, cross-country, that makes for a plant so generous? (11)Here in part IV of her impressive long poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World” (1991) Rich does not use the botanist's Latin, and she gives no further details about girasol (Jerusalem artichoke), a member of the sunflower family, all of whose varieties are native to the Americas. She (the plant) thrives everywhere, in places both mainstream and marginal, and being thus omnipresent she can feed people in all walks of life.

scholarly journals Life Writing “from Below” in Europe: Authors, Archives, Avenues, Arenas

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. LWFB10-LWFB48
Author(s):  
T. G. Ashplant
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Life Writing ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Public ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Individual Potential ◽  
The Public Sphere

Drawing on a large body of scholarship from the last forty years, this article offers an overview of the diverse forms of life writing “from below” (by authors from low down in a class or status hierarchy) in Europe since the early modern period (including autobiographies, diaries, letters, as well as transcripts of oral testimonies); and the varied and developing national traditions of collecting and archiving which have developed since the mid-twentieth century. It locates such writing within a field of force between an exteriority pole constituted by the state (or by organisations of civil society, or informal community pressures) which compel or otherwise elicit life writings from below, and an interiority pole of the impulse of someone hitherto excluded to narrate their life in some public sphere; and examines diverse ways (state compulsion or solicitation; citizen engagement, challenge or resistance) in which these pressures give rise to the production of texts. It identifies the roles of intermediaries within civil society (patrons, sponsors, commercial publishers, collaborators) as links between individual (potential) authors and the public sphere.

scholarly journals Myths, Legends, and Apparitional Lesbians: Amy Lowell's Haunting Modernism

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-589
Author(s):  
Hannah Roche
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Poetry And Poetics ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Ted Hughes ◽  
Male Dominated

By the end of the twentieth century, Amy Lowell's poetry had been all but erased from modernism, with her name resurfacing only in relation to her dealings with Ezra Pound, her distant kinship with Robert Lowell, or her correspondence with D. H. Lawrence. The tale of how Pound rejected Lowell's Imagism, rebranding his movement as Vorticism and spurning the ‘Amygism’ of Lowell's Some Imagist Poets anthologies (1915–1917), has become something of a modernist myth. Recent critics have begun the project of re-evaluating and ultimately reinstating Lowell, but the extent of her contribution to modernist poetry and poetics – and her influence on other, more popular, twentieth-century writers – has not yet been acknowledged. This essay encourages readers to see the apparitional Lowell, both in the male-dominated world of modernism and in celebrated works by writers that followed. By drawing attention to the weighty impact of Lowell's poetry on Lawrence – and, later, on Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath – I provide compelling reasons not only to revisit Lowell but also to reassess those texts that are haunted by her presence.

Anne Sexton and the Wild Animal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Lasky
Keyword(s):  
Wild Animal ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
American Poets

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.

scholarly journals Sylvia Plath Through the Looking-Glass: Too Beautiful to be Dead

Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Pierre Boileau
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Short Life ◽  
American Girl ◽  
Ideal Image ◽  
Editorial Practice ◽  
Marilyn Monroe ◽  
American Author ◽  
Looking Glass

 Mostly ignored during her lifetime, Sylvia Plath as an author came to life when she committed suicide. It is no wonder she should immediately come to mind when dealing with the question of authorship and its commodification: labeled as a feminist, a post-modern, a victim, a poet, a second-rate author, she has been alienated by all the images that have flourished since her death. In comparison with the relatively limited number of texts she actually wrote in such a short life, the images and pictures of Plath have proliferated indeed. These images filled in a void left by the enigma of her suicide. It is true that Sylvia Plath is “the Marilyn Monroe of the literati”: a beautiful, blonde American girl of the ‘50s who sits in all kinds of dress and who coyly, joyfully or flirtingly looks at the camera like a supermodel. Whether it be on the covers of her books, in the biopic, or elsewhere, Sylvia Plath is associated with an ideal image. All this has undeniably helped glamorize the American author and has contributed to reinforce the myth surrounding her. This paper will focus on how the editorial practice influences our reading to such an extent that it makes us forget that Sylvia Plath’s own relationship with images calls for caution. Most pictures have emphasized some aspects of Plath’s writing (gender roles and femininity), but they have covered up other important issues related with self-representation.

scholarly journals Re-habitar – Translating Gary Snyder into Portuguese

2006 ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
Luci Collin Lavalle ◽  
Gary Snyder
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Gary Snyder ◽  
Robert Creeley ◽  
American Poets

Tradução de: Luci Collin Lavalle.The fact that Gary Snyder is practically unknown in Brazil hasalways worried me. Differently from some other North-American poets such as, for example, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski and Robert Creeley, whose works are already published in Portuguese, Snyder is practically nonexistent in our editorial market and remains very little studied in Brazilian academic circles.

3. Convention and idiosyncrasy

2021 ◽  
pp. 46-66
Author(s):  
David Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Literary Culture ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Phillis Wheatley ◽  
Charles Bernstein ◽  
American Poets

“Convention and idiosyncrasy” shows how the successful use of recognizable artistic conventions can help a poet to enter a literature and a culture that seeks to exclude them. It can moderate skepticism, even hostility, and sanction an outsider’s admittance into a community. At the same time, respect for poetic convention hardly reigns uncontested in American literary culture. With several notable exceptions, American poetry and, even more so, its scholarly discussions value a different quality. American poets and readers alike often appreciate idiosyncrasy and the associated values of disruption, originality, innovation, strangeness, and surprise. Poets as different Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Charles Bernstein, and Maggie Smith consider the competing imperatives of convention and idiosyncrasy.

The Reception of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot in Prewar Japan

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akitoshi Nagahata
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
The United States ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
The Waste Land ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Nishiwaki Junzaburo

Modernist literature was introduced to Japan in the early 20th century, and some of it took root. While modernism, a new movement in art and literature, was first developed in Europe, American poets, especially Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, played a major role in its development. Both of these poets were expatriates, living in Europe after they left the United States. As this fact indicates, there was an international, cosmopolitan nature to modernism, which was also seen in other modernist writers and poets, such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Hilda “H. D.” Doolittle, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Eugene Jolas, to name just a few; this internationalist appeal was also an important factor in the early reception of modernism by the Japanese. In literature in English, Noguchi Yonejirō (Yone Noguchi) and Nishiwaki Junzaburō, for example, had contact with modernist writers abroad, published their own works in English, and introduced foreign poets they knew to Japanese readers. Takahashi Shinkichi, Kitasono Katue (Kitazono Katsue), and other poets also had correspondence with poets and writers of foreign countries and exchanged their works. Following the initial encounter between Japanese poets and modernist American poets at the beginning of the 20th century, their works were introduced to Japanese readers of literature in English in the late 1920s. At the time, within academia, American literature was still considered part of English literature. Although mass-market literature series included many American literature titles, especially novels, the curricula in the English departments at major universities rarely included American literature. Besides, even in English literature studies, the focus was mainly on 19th-century (and earlier) authors, and modernist poetry was still not getting much attention. Thus, the reception of modernist American poetry in Japanese academia was generally slow. Instead, it was literary magazines such as Shi to shiron that actively introduced modernist poetry (including Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound) to Japanese readers. Modernist poetry in English was often seen as “intellectualist” in Japan. As the control of freedom of speech and publication tightened in the late 1930s and the 1940s, in keeping with Japan’s militarization and totalitarianism, it became difficult to read and write about foreign literature. In this situation, adhering to modernist and intellectualist literature assumed its symbolic meaning of resistance. While under totalitarian rule, older Japanese modernists converted themselves into collaborationists, and younger poets such as Ayukawa Nobuo, who started a magazine called Arechi (The waste land), tried their best to maintain their literary independence. They became leading figures in postwar Japanese poetry.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document