Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219

Browse

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

A Time to Dance: Frank O’Hara Reading Edwin Denby
(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Aaron Deveson
Academic interest in the post-war American poet writers generally gathered together under the label of “the New York School Poets” has never been greater; at the center of this perceived milieu is Frank O’Hara. My article is intended to fill a gap in the critical literature on O’Hara, which has failed to take into account the significant textual relations between his work and the still under-appreciated writings of Edwin Denby. Prompted by O’Hara’s paratextual responses to Denby but above all by the multiple allusions to the latter’s writing which I have found in the 1956 poem “A Step Away from Them,” this essay offers readings that suggest O’Hara’s highly original poetry developed at least partly through a revisionary engagement with the temporal themes and structures he found in Denby’s poetry and dance-themed prose. This article appropriates Clive Scott’s Bergsonian approach in order to illustrate how, contrary to critical responses which emphasize O’Hara’s deliberate lack of “depth,” his poetry’s intertextual engagement with Denby is in fact productive of a highly textured presence of inter-involved memories corresponding to Benjamin’s concept of Erfahrung. Reading O’Hara back through Denby’s already very suggestively phenomenological writings helps us to see the ways in which strategies of silence, of retrospective transformations at the endings of poems, and of the accumulation of perceptual “instants” become the self-protective means by which privileged “moments” of freedom and memorialization can occur. A fuller understanding of these strategies adds to criticism’s recognition of O’Hara’s conflicted relationship with America’s post-war expansionism.
A Time to Dance: Frank O’Hara Reading Edwin Denby
(英語學系, 2011-09-??) Aaron Deveson
Academic interest in the post-war American poet writers generally gathered together under the label of “the New York School Poets” has never been greater; at the center of this perceived milieu is Frank O’Hara. My article is intended to fill a gap in the critical literature on O’Hara, which has failed to take into account the significant textual relations between his work and the still under-appreciated writings of Edwin Denby. Prompted by O’Hara’s paratextual responses to Denby but above all by the multiple allusions to the latter’s writing which I have found in the 1956 poem “A Step Away from Them,” this essay offers readings that suggest O’Hara’s highly original poetry developed at least partly through a revisionary engagement with the temporal themes and structures he found in Denby’s poetry and dance-themed prose. This article appropriates Clive Scott’s Bergsonian approach in order to illustrate how, contrary to critical responses which emphasize O’Hara’s deliberate lack of “depth,” his poetry’s intertextual engagement with Denby is in fact productive of a highly textured presence of inter-involved memories corresponding to Benjamin’s concept of Erfahrung. Reading O’Hara back through Denby’s already very suggestively phenomenological writings helps us to see the ways in which strategies of silence, of retrospective transformations at the endings of poems, and of the accumulation of perceptual “instants” become the self-protective means by which privileged “moments” of freedom and memorialization can occur. A fuller understanding of these strategies adds to criticism’s recognition of O’Hara’s conflicted relationship with America’s post-war expansionism.
Affect in the Writing of Denise Riley
(英語學系, 2009-03-??) Aaron Deveson
Untitled
(英語學系, 2019-03-??) Aaron Deveson
Untitled
(英語學系, 2019-03-??) Aaron Deveson
Untitled
(英語學系, 2017-03-??) Aaron Deveson
The publication in 2013 of The Palm Beach Effect, a book of critical “reflections” on Michael Hofmann, confirmed the importance of this British but German-born poet, translator, and critic. Picking up where some of the contributors to this recent volume left off, this article evaluates a major part of Hofmann’s poetic career through a focus on his cosmopolitanism, and is an attempt to find out what sort of cosmopolitan poet Hofmann has been, at a time when his poetic voice has gone mostly quiet. Hofmann’s poetry is explored on its own terms and through the prism of some recent sociological and other theoretical writing on cosmopolitanism, including the idealistic Europeanist and globalist work of Gerard Delanty.The investigation begins with a close-read and contextual analysis of the cosmopolitanism of Hofmann’s Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983) and, especially, Acrimony (1986). Though these works deploy a variety of anti-imperial figures, I suggest that their way of using European culture to hold Hofmann’s father, the author Gert Hofmann, to account for the displacement suffered by his poet-son adds up to a powerfully internalized but ultimately Eurocentric form of cosmopolitanism. The article goes on to contrast this early phase of Hofmann’s writing with the poems of Corona, Corona (1993), with special emphasis on the Mexico-set travel sequence at the end of that book. I argue that it is in the expansively historical and materialist poetry of this later volume—where Hofmann stages a memorably polyglot encounter between local and global forms of capitalism through an awareness of shared yet differently “rooted” inauthenticity—that this writer approaches the limits of his and “British” poetry’s cosmopolitan imagination. A final section considers the drift away from an engagement with the “stranger” (Appiah) in Hofmann’s later books, as well as the implications of his recent poetic silences.