|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
What role did music play in the creation of a new aesthetics of
poetry in French from the 1860s to the 1930s? How did music serve
as an unassimilable 'other' against which the French symbolist
poets crafted a new poetics? And why did music gradually disappear
from early twentieth-century poetic discourse? These are among the
questions Joseph Acquisto poses in his lively study of the ways in
which Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ghil, and Royere question the nature
and function of the lyric through an ever-shifting set of
intertextual and cultural contexts. Rather than focusing on
'musicality' in verse, the author addresses the consequences of
choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry. Acquisto argues
that memory plays an under acknowledged yet vital role in these
poets' rewriting of symbolist poetics. His reading of their
interactions, and his focus on both major and neglected poets,
exposes the myth of a small handful of 'great authors' shaping
symbolism while a host of disciples propagated the tradition.
Rather, Acquisto proposes, the multiplicity of authors writing and
rewriting symbolism invites a dialogic approach to the poetics of
the period. Moreover, music, as theorized rather than performed or
heard, serves as a privileged mobile space of poetic creation and
dialogue for these poet-critics; it is through engagement with
music, supposedly the purest or most abstract of the arts, that one
can retrace the textual and cultural transformations accomplished
by the symbolist tradition. By extension, these poets' rethinking
of poetics is an occasion for present-day critics to re-examine
assumptions, not only about the intersections of music and poetry
and our understanding of symbolist poetics but also about the role
that the aesthetic implicitly plays in the creation, preservation,
or reshaping of cultural memory.
What role did music play in the creation of a new aesthetics of
poetry in French from the 1860s to the 1930s? How did music serve
as an unassimilable 'other' against which the French symbolist
poets crafted a new poetics? And why did music gradually disappear
from early twentieth-century poetic discourse? These are among the
questions Joseph Acquisto poses in his lively study of the ways in
which Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ghil, and Royere question the nature
and function of the lyric through an ever-shifting set of
intertextual and cultural contexts. Rather than focusing on
'musicality' in verse, the author addresses the consequences of
choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry. Acquisto argues
that memory plays an under acknowledged yet vital role in these
poets' rewriting of symbolist poetics. His reading of their
interactions, and his focus on both major and neglected poets,
exposes the myth of a small handful of 'great authors' shaping
symbolism while a host of disciples propagated the tradition.
Rather, Acquisto proposes, the multiplicity of authors writing and
rewriting symbolism invites a dialogic approach to the poetics of
the period. Moreover, music, as theorized rather than performed or
heard, serves as a privileged mobile space of poetic creation and
dialogue for these poet-critics; it is through engagement with
music, supposedly the purest or most abstract of the arts, that one
can retrace the textual and cultural transformations accomplished
by the symbolist tradition. By extension, these poets' rethinking
of poetics is an occasion for present-day critics to re-examine
assumptions, not only about the intersections of music and poetry
and our understanding of symbolist poetics but also about the role
that the aesthetic implicitly plays in the creation, preservation,
or reshaping of cultural memory.
This book traces the emergence of modern pessimism in
nineteenth-century France and examines its aesthetic,
epistemological, ethical, and political implications. It explores
how, since pessimism as a worldview is not empirically verifiable,
writers on pessimism shift the discussion to verisimilitude,
opening up rich territory for cross-fertilization between
philosophy and literature. The book traces debates on pessimism in
the nineteenth century among French nonfiction writers who either
lauded its promotion of compassion or condemned it for being a sick
and unliveable attempt at renunciation. It then examines the way
novelists and poets take up and transform these questions by
portraying characters in lived situations that serve as testing
grounds for the merits or limitations of pessimism. The debate on
pessimism that emerged in the nineteenth century is still very much
with us, and this book offers an interhistorical argument for
embracing pessimism as a way of living well in the world,
aesthetically, ethically, and politically.
This book is about reading Proust's novel via philosophical and
musicological approaches to "modern" listening. It articulates how
insights into the way we listen to and understand classical music
inform the creation of literary meaning. It asks: are we to take at
face value the ideas about art that the novel contains, or are
those part of the fiction? Is there a difference between what the
novel says and what it does, and how can music provide a key to
answering that question? According to this study, Proust asks us to
temporalize our interpretation by recognizing the distance between
initial and final experiences of the novel, and by being open to
the ways in which it challenges attempts at interpretive closure.
Proust's novel responds to the kind of attentive and eternally
changing perspectives that can be generated from music and our
attempts to make sense of it.
This book traces the emergence of modern pessimism in
nineteenth-century France and examines its aesthetic,
epistemological, ethical, and political implications. It explores
how, since pessimism as a worldview is not empirically verifiable,
writers on pessimism shift the discussion to verisimilitude,
opening up rich territory for cross-fertilization between
philosophy and literature. The book traces debates on pessimism in
the nineteenth century among French nonfiction writers who either
lauded its promotion of compassion or condemned it for being a sick
and unliveable attempt at renunciation. It then examines the way
novelists and poets take up and transform these questions by
portraying characters in lived situations that serve as testing
grounds for the merits or limitations of pessimism. The debate on
pessimism that emerged in the nineteenth century is still very much
with us, and this book offers an interhistorical argument for
embracing pessimism as a way of living well in the world,
aesthetically, ethically, and politically.
Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary
Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the many ways in which
the castaway, particularly in the form of engagement
with Robinson Crusoe, has been reinterpreted and appropriated
in nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. The
book is not merely a literary history of
the robinsonnade in France; rather, Acquisto
demonstrates how what he calls the genre of “solitary
adventure” becomes a vehicle for exploration of much larger
questions about the reception of texts, modes of reading, and the
relationship between popular and serious literary traditions. The
heart of Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French
Literature examines a crucial moment in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries when the history of cultural
perspectives on reading and solitude intersect, catalyzing a
reconsideration of Defoe’s tale. Acquisto’s philosophically
inflected readings of works by writers from Rousseau to Balzac,
Verne to Gide, Valéry to Tournier enhance intertextual and
cultural approaches to the castaway myth and broaden our
appreciation of the dynamic relation it has to modern French
literature writ large. Published by University of Delaware Press.
Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide? Poets make
poems, but they also make meaning and craft a kind of learned and
creative ignorance as they provide infinitely revisable answers to
the question of what poetry is. That question of poetry's
definition invites broader ones about the relationship of poetry to
other lived experience. Poetry thus implies something like a way of
life that is resistant to definitive statements and conclusions,
and the creation of communities of readers and writers that live in
ever-renewed questioning. To resist concluding is to embrace a kind
of productive ignorance, a knowledge that is first and foremost
aware of poetic knowledge's own limits. Poetry's Knowing Ignorance
shows, through an examination of French poetry, how it is this
dialogue in response to a constant questioning, to an
answer-turned-question, that continues to blur the boundary between
poetry and writing about poetry, between poetry and criticism, and
between poetry and other kinds of experience.
Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists
who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework
from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of
salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that
Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling
the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to
embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress
or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical"
readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150
years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to
articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of
attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these
writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both
literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third
option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of
political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding
section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to
account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of
salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to
redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.
What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide? Poets make
poems, but they also make meaning and craft a kind of learned and
creative ignorance as they provide infinitely revisable answers to
the question of what poetry is. That question of poetry's
definition invites broader ones about the relationship of poetry to
other lived experience. Poetry thus implies something like a way of
life that is resistant to definitive statements and conclusions,
and the creation of communities of readers and writers that live in
ever-renewed questioning. To resist concluding is to embrace a kind
of productive ignorance, a knowledge that is first and foremost
aware of poetic knowledge's own limits. Poetry's Knowing Ignorance
shows, through an examination of French poetry, how it is this
dialogue in response to a constant questioning, to an
answer-turned-question, that continues to blur the boundary between
poetry and writing about poetry, between poetry and criticism, and
between poetry and other kinds of experience.
Joseph Acquisto examines literary writers and critical theorists
who employ theological frameworks, but who divorce that framework
from questions of belief and thereby remove the doctrine of
salvation from their considerations. Acquisto claims that
Baudelaire inaugurates a new kind of amodern modernity by canceling
the notion of salvation in his writing while also refusing to
embrace any of its secular equivalents, such as historical progress
or redemption through art. Through a series of "interhistorical"
readings that put literary and critical writers from the last 150
years in dialogue, Acquisto shows how these authors struggle to
articulate both the metaphysical and esthetic consequences of
attempting to move beyond a logic of salvation. Putting these
writers into dialogue with Baudelaire highlights the way both
literary and critical approaches attempt to articulate a third
option between theism and atheism that also steers clear of
political utopianism and Nietzschean estheticism. In the concluding
section, Acquisto expands metaphysical and esthetic concerns to
account also for the ethics inherent in the refusal of the logic of
salvation, an ethics which emerges from, rather than seeking to
redeem or cancel, a certain kind of nihilism.
|
|