1. American poetry’s two characteristics

“American poetry’s two characteristics” explains the two characteristics which mark American poetry. On the one hand, several of its major figures promoted American poetry as essentially different from any other nation’s. Although the reasons they offer vary, they typically claim that American experience demands a different kind of expression. Such poets advocate for novelty, for a break with what is perceived to be outmoded and foreign. On the other hand, American poetry might be more rightly called profoundly transnational. American poetry often welcomes techniques, styles, and traditions originating from outside it. The two characteristics do not exist separately from each other. Rather, they work in a productive dialectic, inspiring both individual accomplishment and the broader field. Examples include Anne Bradstreet, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes.

Obiter Dicta

Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Resenha de Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language

Trata-se de uma resenha do livro Wallace Stevens: Poetry, Philosophy, and Figurative Language, editado por Kacper Bartczak e Juakub Mácha e publicado pela Peter Lang (Berlin) em 2018.

Wallace Stevens and the Temporalities of Inception and Embodiment

Beginning with Wallace Stevens’s reimagining of the Promethean origins of man (depicted in The Metamorphoses) in “The Rock,” the chapter argues that this poem’s imagining of origin makes manifest ways his thinking about embodiment and temporality has shifted since the early poems—since, for example, “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” “Sunday Morning,” and “The Idea of Order at Key West.” These early poems can be read to assert the body’s power to transcend itself, paradoxically by dwelling on its desiring and ephemeral nature; they assert the body’s power to transcend human finitude by coupling it with the capacity for sensuous evocation in poetic language. Detailed readings of these poems spell out the complications of this assertion. By “The Rock,” Stevens’s figures have taken on an arid abstraction: Their concrete immediacy often seems in inverse relation to their possible visualization, and the claim of a poetic power of transcendence is difficult to distinguish from the radical destitution of meaning voided in a pure material presence. The earlier poems’ concern with embodiment has been transposed to a more primal drama of inception: the coming into being of the poem and the poetic voice, prior to persons, forms, or meanings.

Sounds and gestures of linguistic reference: the endurance of reality in the poetry of Wallace Stevens

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon.

Rushdie and the Problem of Exile

Exile in the words of Wallace Stevens, is “a mind of winter” in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable. Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider. Although it is true that anyone prevented from returning home is an exile, some distinctions can be made among exiles, refugees, expatriates and émigrés. Edward Said, in his work, Reflections on Exile, writes, “Refugees…are a creation of the twentieth-century state.” The word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries with it, I think, a touch of solitude and spirituality. Expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country; usually for personal or social reasons…An émigré is anyone who emigrates to a new country. (181) In this paper, I will take up Salman Rushdie and his experience of exile and try to analyse and differentiate the two kinds of exiles he underwent in his career.