Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems

Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems
Author: Joe Moffett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2014-10-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611461634

Written from a literary critic’s perspective, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a “contemplation of the divine.”

The Fire That Breaks

The Fire That Breaks
Author: Daniel Westover
Publisher:
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2020
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1942954360

In terms of literary history, Gerard Manley Hopkins has been difficult to pin down. Many of his concerns - industrialism, religious faith and doubt, science, language - were common among Victorian writers, but he is often championed as a proto-modernist despite that he avoids the self-conscious allusiveness and indirectness that typify much high modernist poetry. It is partly because Hopkins cannot be pigeonholed that his influence remains relevant. The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins's extended influence on the poets and novelist who defined Anglo-American literature throughout the past century.

Blanca Andreu, Galicia, and the New Iberian Mysticism

Blanca Andreu, Galicia, and the New Iberian Mysticism
Author: Robert Simon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1498565727

This book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the place of contemporary Galician writer Blanca Andreu’s work within the 1980s post-“novísimo” movement, as part of a larger resurgence of the Surrealist in Spanish poetry and its possible placement in the more recent mystical poetry of Spain. It provides a detailed textual analysis of her poetry, and in doing so reveals not only that her work encompasses notions of the surreal and the mystical but also, although Andreu has so far written entirely in Castilian (Spanish), that her poetry utilizes a variety of traditional Galician and Portuguese symbols and images. In this way her work challenges the boundaries between what we as readers may accept as a solely Castilian, Galician, or Spanish poetic. It bases its transtheoretical framework on findings from such fields as Galician studies, Iberian studies, mysticism studies, paradigm shift studies, and regional studies over the past two decades. Ultimately, this comprehensive and unique study shows how Andreu’s multifaceted transnational work may pertain to, and expand, our knowledge of each of these areas of focus.

Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry

Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry
Author: D. Huntsperger
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2010-03-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0230106102

This book explores the political significance of formal experimentation in American poetry written during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. It focuses on the use of procedural forms, which involve the invention of rules or methods designed to structure the production of a poem's content.

Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics

Postmodern Poetry and Queer Medievalisms: Time Mechanics
Author: David Hadbawnik
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2022-06-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501511238

This volume builds on recent scholarship on contemporary poetry in relation to medieval literature, focusing on postmodern poets who work with the medieval in a variety of ways. Such recent projects invert or “queer” the usual transactional nature of engagements with older forms of literature, in which readers are asked to exchange some small measure of bewilderment at archaic language or forms for a sense of having experienced a medieval text. The poets under consideration in this volume demand that readers grapple with the ways in which we are still “medieval” – in other words, the ways in which the questions posed by their medieval source material still reverberate and hold relevance for today’s world. They do so by challenging the primacy of present over past, toppling the categories of old and new, and suggesting new interpretive frameworks for contemporary and medieval poetry alike.

Psalms as Postmodern Poetry

Psalms as Postmodern Poetry
Author: Lyola Thomas
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2023-06-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1527513246

This book offers a refreshing new look at the Book of Psalms, presenting an analysis of the postmodern elements found in its poetry, and, as such, will be of special interest to scholars in the field of literature and Bible studies. The book highlights the continued relevance of the Book of Psalms as a source of sustenance and comfort, and as an enduring practical handbook for life.

Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman

Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman
Author: Jeffrey Charles Archer
Publisher: Booktango
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2015-08-07
Genre: Body, Mind & Spirit
ISBN: 1468954903

Disillusioned with the official religion and institution, artifice and constructs offered as "reality," author Jeffrey Charles Archer hit the road and discovered things are indeed not what they say. Shapeshifters, skinwalkers, sasquatch, fairies and other fantastic creatures and extraordinary experiences make up the true tellings of Memories and Musings of a Post-Postmodern Nomadic Mystic Madman.

Thinking with the Poem

Thinking with the Poem
Author: Andrew R. Mossin
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-12-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0826367232

Broad-ranging and pluralistically investigative, the essays in Thinking with the Poem document Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s authorial interventions as a poet, scholar, and cultural critic steeped in the linguistic and political frames of her time. The writers included in this volume engage root-level questions at the heart of DuPlessis’s praxis as posed by her in a recent essay: “What is a poem, what is a poet, what is an oeuvre, what is the ‘poetic’?” Inventive and noncanonical, these essays offer substantive responses to these and other questions, providing new routes of inquiry into the poetry and poetics of this preeminent figure of new writing.

Approaching Postmodernism

Approaching Postmodernism
Author: Douwe Wessel Fokkema
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 313
Release: 1986
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9027222061

Most of the essays collected in this volume deal with theoretical issues that dominate the international debate on Postmodernism, issues such as the shifting nature of the concept, the problem of periodization and the problem of historicity. Other essays offer readings of Postmodernist texts and relate practical criticism to a theoretical framework. Hans Bertens (Utrecht) sketches the historical development of the concept Postmodernism in American criticism, distinguishing between the various definitions that have been proposed over the last twenty-five years, in an attempt to bring some order to the field and to facilitate future discussion. Brian McHale (Tel Aviv) and Douwe Fokkema (Utrecht) offer models for the description of Postmodernist texts. Richard Todd (Amsterdam) argues convincingly that Postmodernism is much more of a presence in contemporary British fiction than has so far been assumed, and Herta Schmid (Munich) presents a similar argument with respect to Russian avant-garde theater. Elrud Ibsch (Amsterdam) presents a contrastive analysis of Thomas Bernhard and Robert Musil; Ulla Musarra (Nijmegen) writes on Italo Calvino. The relation between Existentialism and Postmodernism is examined by Gerhard Hoffman (Würzburg); Theo D'haen (Utrecht) finds important parallels between Postmodernism in literature and in the visual arts; Matei Calinescu (Bloomington, Ind.) relates literary Postmodernism to a far more general cultural shift, rejecting, however, Foucault's notion of an epistemic break and arguing for both continuity and discontinuity. Finally, Helmut Lethen (Utrecht) and Susan Suleiman (Harvard) sharply question the concept of Postmodernism. Suleiman argues that the supposed Postmodernist reaction against Modernism may well be a critical myth or, if it isn't, a reaction limited to the American literary situation.

A Postmodern Reader

A Postmodern Reader
Author: Joseph P. Natoli
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 608
Release: 1993-01-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780791416372

These readings are organized into four sections. The first explores the wellsprings of the debates in the relationship between the postmodern and the enterprise it both continues and contravenes: modernism. Here philosophers, social and political commentators, as well as cultural and literary analysts present controversial background essays on the complex history of postmodernism. The readings in the second section debate the possibility--or desirability--of trying to define the postmodern, given its cultural agenda of decentering, challenging, even undermining the guiding "master" narratives of Western culture. The readings in the third section explore postmodernism's complicated complicity with these very narratives, while the fourth section moves from theory to practice in order to investigate, in a variety of fields, the common denominators of the postmodern condition in action.