E.E. Cummings: Poetry and Ecology

E.E. Cummings: Poetry and Ecology PDF Author: Etienne Terblanche
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9401208166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Book Description
By employing the modernist devices of fragmentation, recombination, and accentuated blank space, E. E. Cummings engages singularly with being on earth. This ecological achievement was largely ignored by the New Critics, and the subsequent semiotic spirit which has been holding that the sign hardly has to do with concrete existence on earth ironically perpetuated the neglect. In this book Etienne Terblanche shows that Cummings’s ecology relocates his oeuvre and status in contemporary discourse. For, the poet follows, mimes, and connects with the unfolding changes of earthly existence and growth—what he views as the ‘Tao’ of being—in his lyricism, sex poems, satire, and visual-verbal poems. This is true especially of the elusive manner or ‘how’ of his poetry overall. Careful ecocritical reading of this active culture-nature integrity in his poetry brings about an imperative new understanding and placement of his project. It further serves to show that, in their different ways, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound engage with nature in a similar way, thus again accentuating the importance of Cummings’s poetic project to the neglected and vital ecocritical perception of modernism in poetry.

Zoopoetics

Zoopoetics PDF Author: Aaron M. Moe
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739186639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Zoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species’ poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the material makings of poetry. Moreover, as many species are makers, zoopoetics expands the poetic tradition to include nonhuman poiesis.

Insistent Images

Insistent Images PDF Author: El?zbieta Tabakowska
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027243416
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
Insistent Images presents a number of new departures dealing with iconicity on the conceptual and the structural levels. On the level of structure, the interface between different aspects of iconicity, lexical meaning and grammar is discussed in reference to both spoken and signed languages. Novel approaches to aural iconicity investigate a wide range of phenomena from phonological iconicity to the role of iconic features in discourse, in the nineteenth century practice of reading aloud, in the almost magic incantations of fin de siècle poetry and in Tolkien's invented languages. Several papers examine the function of iconicity in visual and avant-garde poetry, where iconic features allow a reduction of means, which, paradoxically, generates textual diversification and complexity. A discussion of iconic text strategies shows how texts are comprehended through iconic holistic transfer from complex natural and action patterns. 'Liberature', which integrates text, image and physical space, is another novel area of study, as are the investigations into the iconic properties of film and of multimedia performance. Film is intrinsically iconic, while at the same time being, like photography, indexical; in multimedia performance, on the other hand, iconicity functions intermedially by both integrating and reflecting processes of perception and conceptualization. These last two new fields of inquiry further enhance this truly interdisciplinary volume's explorations of icons as 'insistent images'.

Zoopoetics

Zoopoetics PDF Author: Aaron M. Moe
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739186639
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

Book Description
Zoopoetics assumes Aristotle was right. The general origin of poetry resides, in part, in the instinct to imitate. But it is an innovative imitation. An exploration of the oeuvres of Walt Whitman, E. E. Cummings, W. S. Merwin, and Brenda Hillman reveals the many places where an imitation of another species’ poiesis (Greek, makings) contributes to breakthroughs in poetic form. However, humans are not the only imitators in the animal kingdom. Other species, too, achieve breakthroughs in their makings through an attentiveness to the ways-of-being of other animals. For this reason, mimic octopi, elephants, beluga whales, and many other species join the exploration of what zoopoetics encompasses. Zoopoetics provides further traction for people interested in the possibilities when and where species meet. Gestures are paramount to zoopoetics. Through the interplay of gestures, the human/animal/textual spheres merge making it possible to recognize how actual, biological animals impact the material makings of poetry. Moreover, as many species are makers, zoopoetics expands the poetic tradition to include nonhuman poiesis.

A Companion to Modernist Poetry

A Companion to Modernist Poetry PDF Author: David E. Chinitz
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111860444X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 626

Book Description
A COMPANION TO MODERNIST POETRY A Companion to Modernist Poetry A Companion to Modernist Poetry presents contemporary approaches to modernist poetry in a uniquely in-depth and accessible text. The first section of the volume reflects the attention to historical and cultural context that has been especially fruitful in recent scholarship. The second section focuses on various movements and groupings of poets, placing writers in literary history and indicating the currents and countercurrents whose interaction generated the category of modernism as it is now broadly conceived. The third section traces the arcs of twenty-one poets’ careers, illustrated by analyses of key works. The Companion thus offers breadth in its presentation of historical and literary contexts and depth in its attention to individual poets; it brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important and who are likely to appear on syllabi and to attract critical interest for many years to come. Edited by two highly respected and notable critics in the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry boasts a varied list of contributors who have produced an intense, focused study of modernist poetry.

T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth

T.S. Eliot, Poetry, and Earth PDF Author: Etienne Terblanche
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739189581
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

Book Description
T. S. Eliot enjoyed a profound relationship with Earth. Criticism of his work does not suggest that this exists in his poetic oeuvre. Writing into this gap, Etienne Terblanche demonstrates that Eliot presents Earth as a process in which humans immerse themselves. The Waste Land and Four Quartets in particular re-locate the modern reader towards mindfulness of Earth’s continuation and one’s radical becoming within that process. But what are the potential implications for ecocriticism? Based on its careful reading of the poems from a new material perspective, this book shows how vital it has become for ecocriticism to be skeptical about the extent of its skepticism, to follow instead the twentieth century’s most important poet who, at the end of searing skepticism, finds affirmation of Earth, art, and real presence.

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form

Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form PDF Author: Aaron M. Moe
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429592272
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Ecocriticism and the Poiesis of Form: Holding on to Proteus demonstrates how a fractal imagination helps one hold the form of a poem within the reaches of Deep Time, and it explores the kinship between the hazy, liminal moment when Sound becomes Syllable and the hazy, liminal moment when the sage energy of the Atom made a leap toward the gaze of the first cell, to echo Merwin. Moe distills his methodology as follows: "My work?—I point," asserted the aphorism. "That’s what I do." To point, the project integrates a wide range of interdisciplinary ideas—including biosemiotics, fractals, phi, trauma theory, the Mandelbrot Set, hyperobjects, meditative chants, Goethe’s morphology, Ramanujan’s summation, a spiderweb’s sonic properties, and Thoreau’s sense of the plant-like burgeoning force of an Atom—in order to open up multiple trajectories. In this context, the volume foregrounds the insights of poets/storytellers including Hillman, Snyder, Anzaldúa, EEC, okpik, Whitman, Dickinson, Gladding, Melville, Morrison, and Toomer, for they are most attentive to that liminal moment when the vibratory hum in language, and in the cosmos, turns kinetic. As this volume draws on a wide range of writers from many backgrounds, it allows the myriad voices to engage with one another across differences in race, gender, and ethnicity. These writers show us how, to echo Dickinson, the "Freight / Of a delivered Syllable - " can split and how the energy unleashed came from, and points us back toward, the energy (un)making the forms of Gaia. The starting point for discussing the energy of a poem can no longer begin with the human; rather, Holding on explores how the poem’s energy is but a sliver of a hyperobject "massively distributed" throughout the cosmos—a sage energy that brings forth form.

Ecofeminist Science Fiction

Ecofeminist Science Fiction PDF Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000376362
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 156

Book Description
Ecofeminist Science Fiction: International Perspectives on Gender, Ecology, and Literature provides guidance in navigating some of the most pressing dangers we face today. Science fiction helps us face problems that threaten the very existence of humankind by giving us the emotional distance to see our current situation from afar, separated in our imaginations through time, space, or circumstance. Extrapolating from contemporary science, science fiction allows a critique of modern society, imagining more life-affirming alternatives. In this collection, ecocritics from five continents scrutinize science fiction for insights into the fundamental changes we need to make to survive and thrive as a species. Contributors examine ecofeminist themes in films, such as Avatar, Star Wars, and The Stepford Wives, as well as television series including Doctor Who and Westworld. Other scholars explore an internationally diverse group of both canonical and lesser-known science fiction writers including Oreet Ashery, Iraj Fazel Bakhsheshi, Liu Cixin, Louise Erdrich, Hanns Heinz Ewers, Larissa Lai, Ursula K. Le Guin, Chen Qiufan, Mary Doria Russell, Larissa Sansour, Karen Traviss, and Jeanette Winterson. Ecofeminist Science Fiction explores the origins of human-caused environmental change in the twin oppressions of women and of nature, driven by patriarchal power and ideologies. Female embodiment is examined through diverse natural and artificial forms, and queer ecologies challenge heteronormativity. The links between war and environmental destruction are analyzed, and the capitalist motivations and means for exploiting nature are critiqued through postcolonial perspectives.

Ecology, Myth, and Mystery

Ecology, Myth, and Mystery PDF Author: N. D. R. Chandra
Publisher: Sarup & Sons
ISBN: 9788176257428
Category : Ecocriticism
Languages : en
Pages : 466

Book Description


Literature and Ecofeminism

Literature and Ecofeminism PDF Author: Douglas A. Vakoch
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351209736
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
Bringing together ecofeminism and ecological literary criticism (ecocriticism), this book presents diverse ways of understanding and responding to the tangled relationships between the personal, social, and environmental dimensions of human experience and expression. Literature and Ecofeminism explores the intersections of sexuality, gender, embodiment, and the natural world articulated in literary works from Shakespeare through to contemporary literature. Bringing together essays from a global group of contributors, this volume draws on American literature, as well as Spanish, South African, Taiwanese, and Indian literature, in order to further the dialogue between ecofeminism and ecocriticism and demonstrate the ongoing relevance of ecofeminism for facilitating critical readings of literature. In doing so, the book opens up multiple directions for ecofeminist ideas and practices, as well as new possibilities for interpreting literature. This comprehensive volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, literature, gender studies, and the environmental humanities.