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"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things
that cannot be gotten over--like this world, and some of the people
in it." In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would
become known as the Great Odes. Some of them--"Ode to a
Nightingale," "To Autumn"--are among the most celebrated poems in
the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and
elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay
in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much
to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her
Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life--of capitalism,
of the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet--as well as
a passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book
emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry;
but more, it "is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just
Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian
celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own
losses--and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of
the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore
the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved.
Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the
personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's
enduring work.
"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things
that cannot be gotten over-like this world, and some of the people
in it." In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would
become known as the Great Odes. Some of them-"Ode to a
Nightingale," "To Autumn"-are among the most celebrated poems in
the English language. Anahid Nersessian here collects and
elucidates each of the odes and offers a meditative, personal essay
in response to each, revealing why these poems still have so much
to say to us, especially in a time of ongoing political crisis. Her
Keats is an unflinching antagonist of modern life-of capitalism, of
the British Empire, of the destruction of the planet-as well as a
passionate idealist for whom every poem is a love poem. The book
emerges from Nersessian's lifelong attachment to Keats's poetry;
but more, it "is a love story: between me and Keats, and not just
Keats." Drawing on experiences from her own life, Nersessian
celebrates Keats even as she grieves him and counts her own
losses-and Nersessian, like Keats, has a passionate awareness of
the reality of human suffering, but also a willingness to explore
the possibility that the world, at least, could still be saved.
Intimate and speculative, this brilliant mix of the poetic and the
personal will find its home among the numerous fans of Keats's
enduring work.
Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the
Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our
relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate.
Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form
shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of
rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure
to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian
explores works by Friedrich Hoelderlin, William Wordsworth, John
Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs
of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal
strategies-among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by
side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and
apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural
environment-as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of
capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their
bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing,
reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act.
Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see
literature as a source of information on par with historical or
scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic
knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of
their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes
the nature of poetry's relationship to capital-and capital's
ability to hide how it works.
What is utopia if not a perfect world, impossible to achieve?
Anahid Nersessian reveals a basic misunderstanding lurking behind
that ideal. In Utopia, Limited she enlists William Blake, William
Wordsworth, John Keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a
positive investment in limitations. Linking the ecological
imperative to live within our means to the aesthetic philosophy of
the Romantic period, Nersessian's theory of utopia promises not an
unconditionally perfect world but a better world where we get less
than we hoped, but more than we had. For the Romantic writers, the
project of utopia and the project of art were identical. Blake
believed that without limits, a work of art would be no more than a
set of squiggles on a page, or a string of nonsensical letters and
sounds. And without boundaries, utopia is merely an extension of
the world as we know it, but blighted by a hunger for having it
all. Nersessian proposes that we think about utopia as the
Romantics thought about aesthetics-as a way to bind and thereby
emancipate human political potential within a finite space.
Grounded in an intellectual tradition that begins with Immanuel
Kant and includes Theodor Adorno and Northrop Frye, Utopia, Limited
lays out a program of "adjustment" that applies the lessons of art
to the rigors of life on an imperiled planet. It is a sincere
response to environmental devastation, offering us a road map
through a restricted future.
Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the
Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our
relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate.
Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, The Calamity Form
shines new light on Romantic poetry, identifying a number of
rhetorical tropes used by writers to underscore their very failure
to make sense of our move to industrialization. Anahid Nersessian
explores works by Friedrich Hoelderlin, William Wordsworth, John
Keats, and others to argue that as the human and ecological costs
of industry became clear, Romantic poetry adopted formal
strategies-among them parataxis, the setting of elements side by
side in a manner suggestive of postindustrial dissonance, and
apostrophe, here an address to an absent or vanishing natural
environment-as it tried and failed to narrate the calamities of
capitalism. These tropes reflect how Romantic authors took their
bewilderment and turned it into a poetics: a theory of writing,
reading, and understanding poetry as an eminently critical act.
Throughout, Nersessian pushes back against recent attempts to see
literature as a source of information on par with historical or
scientific data, arguing instead for an irreducibility of poetic
knowledge. Revealing the ways in which these Romantic works are of
their time but not about it, The Calamity Form ultimately exposes
the nature of poetry's relationship to capital-and capital's
ability to hide how it works.
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