Disjunctive poetics : from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Disjunctive poetics : from Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe
（Cambridge studies in American literature and culture）
Cambridge University Press, 1992
- : hardback
Available at 32 libraries
Note
Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Disjunctive Poetics examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers whose work forms a counterpoint to the mainstream writing of our time. Peter Quartermain suggests that the explosion of non-canonical modern writing is linked to the severe political, social and economic dislocation of non-English-speaking immigrants who, bringing alternative culture with them as they passed through Ellis Island in their hundreds of thousands at the turn of the century, found themselves uprooted from their traditions and dissociated from their cultures. The line of American poetry that runs from Gertrude Stein through Louis Zukofsky and the Objectivists to the Language Writers, Quartermain contends, is not the constructive but the deconstructive aspect, which emphasises the materiality and ambiguity of the linguistic medium and the arbitrariness and openness of the creative process. Providing close reading of Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, Robert Creeley, Basil Bunting, Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan and Susan Howe, the book explains how these writers describe the modern experience in a multicultural world by displacing commonly accepted cultural icons and by loading their language with multiple potential meanings.
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1. 'A Narrative of Undermine': Gertrude Stein's Multiplicity
- 2. Recurrencies: No. 12 of Louis Zukofsky's Anew
- 3. 'Instant Entirety': Zukofsky's 'A'
- 4. 'Not at All Surprised by Science': Louis Zukofsky's First Half of 'A' - 9
- 5. 'Actual Word Stuff, Not Thoughts for Thoughts': Williams and Zukofsky
- 6. 'Only Is Oreder Othered. Nought Is Nulled': Finnegans Wake and Middle and Late Zukofsky
- 7. 'To Make Glad the Heart of Man': Bunting, Pound and Whitman
- 8. Six Plaints and a Lament for Basil Bunting
- 9. Exploring the Mere: A Note on Charles Reznikoff's Shorter Poems
- 10. Robert Creeley What Counts
- 11. 'Go Contrary, Go Sing': Robert Duncan 1919-1988
- 12. Writing as Assemblage: Guy Davenport
- 13. And The Without: An Interpretive Essay on Susan Howe
- Notes
- Index.
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