Afterlives of a supreme fiction: John Banville’s dialogue with Wallace Stevens

Author(s):  
Pietra Palazzolo
1982 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
Irene Ferreira de Souza Eisenberg

This description of dialectics is a fitting epigraph for a dialectical reading of any poem by Wallace Stevens. In "Notes  Toward a Supreme Fiction," a later poem, the poet reveals his quest for the "ultimate poem," one that"..."Must be Abstract," "Must Change.," and "Must Give Pleasure," titles of its three parts respectively.


1988 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 134
Author(s):  
Alan Filreis ◽  
B. J. Leggett

Author(s):  
Amal Mohan M. S. ◽  
Prof. A. Khaleel Rahuman

The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing.” - Sigmund Freud There have been a lot of writers throughout history who praised or criticized the world’s beauty and ways. They all had their ideas and advice for humanity. But America’s most celebrated twentieth-century poet Wallace Stevens did not just rain down his ideas in his writings but took them as his motto for life. And he called the sum of his ideas ‘Supreme Fiction’. This Supreme Fiction, according to Stevens, is a supreme level of poetry that cleanses the mind and soul of its readers and reduces the hardships they have to face in real life. In other words, Supreme Fiction is Stevens’ replacement for the idea of God. Deeply influenced by the Nietzschean idea of the ‘Death of God’, Stevens wants to create a replacement for God for people to find comfort in a world of disbelief and disorder in the twentieth century.


Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod

This chapter advances a “tropological history” of inter-Americanism by showing how foreign words (xenoglossia) became a key poetic device for Wallace Stevens, José Lezama Lima, and Jorge Luis Borges after World War II, at the low ebb of political inter-Americanism. It shows how Stevens’s monumental “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” used this device in order to reimagine the poetic identity of the Americas—a gesture resonant with the US Congress’s contemporaneous debates about globalization. While Stevens’s “lingua franca et jocundissima” (his self-designated attempt to fashion a playful, sonorous global language) was rebuked in the United States by nationalistic postwar critics, the chapter demonstrates how it belongs to a rich vein of postwar poetry by Borges and Lezama, who respond to national and insular literary formations with similar turns toward international language norms and the style of “post-symbolism.”


1988 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 510
Author(s):  
John Unsworth ◽  
Joseph Carroll

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document