[ePub] The Black Radical Tragic: Performance; Aesthetics; and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution (America and the Long 19th Century) by Jeremy Matthew Glick in Arts-Photography

Description

The shape; lineation; and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive; imbuing their form with as much meaning as their content. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present; Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy; linguistics; critical theory; and aesthetics; introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought.Beginning with Walter Benjamins explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art; Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers; theorists; and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson; Angus Fletcher; Roland Barthes; and Craig Owens; and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce; Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker; who; he argues; wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge; who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman; Lyn Hejinian; Myung Mi Kim; and the Language poets; Susan Howes "Pierce-Arrow;" which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope; Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind postwar American poetrys avant-garde achievements.