The Poetics Of The Occasion

"Although Mallarme is commonly viewed as the high priest of the autonomous work of art, by far the bulk of his actual poetic writing was occasional verse. With few exceptions the works written after 1873 manifest a reinvestment in the world subsequent to the metaphysical crises of the 1860's. In addition to the "Tombeaux," the toasts, and certain of the "Eventails," Mallarme composed the Vers de circonstance, more than 450 quatrains and distichs inscribed on envelopes, postcards, calling cards, Easter eggs, small stones, photographs, and jugs of Calvados. This is the first comprehensive reading and analysis of the neglected late poetry, heretofore dismissed as of marginal interest." "This book has a dual purpose. By exploring the occasional verse of Mallarme, which itself thematizes the problematics of the occasion, the author seeks to rehabilitate such writing for critical study. She does this not by proclaiming its high seriousness, but by insisting on its casual, amenable, public nature. Unlike previous critics, who have often apologized for straying into the fringes of the canon, the author delights in the marginal, insisting that in a poetics of the occasion, traditional oppositions such as center/margin become skewed and break down." "The author's second purpose is to come to a better understanding of Mallarme in light of what he actually wrote, rather than the work projected in his correspondence and prose articles, which has claimed so much critical attention. Each of the chapters of the book highlights one aspect of occasional poetry through an investigation of representative texts, both canonical and occasional. The author also discusses the relationship between Mallarme's poetics and the plastic arts, tracing the changing conception of the representation of the monument from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, as well as the correspondences between the more radical aspects of Mallarme's practice of writing and the contemporary arts." "Far more than a study of a single writer, this book is the first to propose a pragmatic definition of occasional literature, to undertake a broad study of the problem of occasion in literature, and to trace the historical trajectory of occasional writing as a specific discourse. The book is illustrated with 27 halftones."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Of all the writings on theory and aesthetics - ancient, medieval, or modern - the most important is indisputably Aristotle's "Poetics", the first philosophical treatise to propound a theory of literature. The author offers a fresh interpretation of the lost second book of Aristotle's "Poetics".

"From its opening lines, Daniel Brown's Taking the Occasion sounds a new note in poetry. In poem after poem, Mr. Brown plays urban speech rhythms across the back-beat of meter and rhyme. Distinctive in matter as well as in manner, Taking the Occasion addresses topics ranging from baseball to the birth of God. In a time when subjects are viewed by many poets as suspect, Mr. Brown demonstrates the abiding power of an arresting premise. His work repeatedly sounds emotional or philosophical depths yet isn't above eliciting a laugh in the process. If contemporary poetry has lost the large and enthusiastic audience a vital art requires, the pleasure-giving profundity of Taking the Occasion just may help forge a reconnection."--BOOK JACKET.

This is the first book-length examination of the work of an important contemporary thinker in the continental tradition, William Desmond. His thought is a new, post-modern way of articulating what he calls the ’between’. Rooted in Plato and Augustine, and advancing through a confrontation with Hegel and Nietzsche, Desmond rejects facile scepticism and wins through to a strikingly original and powerfully searching articulation of the human. The present volume contains essays on Desmond’s work both by emerging scholars and by well-established thinkers. It also contains a specially written essay on the practices of philosophy by Desmond himself.

The Politics and Poetics of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz examines the role of occasional verse in the works of the celebrated colonial Mexican nun. The poems that Sor Juana wrote for special occasions (birthdays, funerals, religious feasts, coronations, and the like) have been considered inconsequential by literary historians; but from a socio-historical perspective, George Antony Thomas argues they hold a particular interest for scholars of colonial Latin American literature. For Thomas, these compositions establish a particular set of rhetorical strategies, which he labels the author's 'political aesthetics.' He demonstrates how this body of the famous nun's writings, previously overlooked by scholars, sheds new light on Sor Juana's interactions with individuals in colonial society and throughout the Spanish Empire.

Chinese Buddhist monks of the Song dynasty (960–1279) called the irresistible urge to compose poetry “the poetry demon.” In this ambitious study, Jason Protass seeks to bridge the fields of Buddhist studies and Chinese literature to examine the place of poetry in the lives of Song monks. Although much has been written about verses in the gong’an (Jpn. kōan) tradition, very little is known about the large corpora—roughly 30,000 extant poems—composed by these monastics. Protass addresses the oversight by using strategies associated with religious studies, literary studies, and sociology. He weaves together poetry with a wide range of monastic sources and in doing so argues against positing a “literary Chan” movement that wrote poetry as a path to awakening; he instead presents an understanding of monks’ poetry grounded in the Song discourse of monks themselves. The work begins by examining how monks fashioned new genres, created their own books, and fueled a monastic audience for monks’ poetry. It traces the evolution of gāthā from hymns found in Buddhist scripture to an independent genre for poems associated with Chan masters as living buddhas. While Song monastic culture produced a prodigious amount of verse, at the same time it promoted prohibitions against monks’ participation in poetry as a worldly or Confucian art: This constructive tension was an animating force. The Poetry Demon highlights this and other intersections of Buddhist doctrine with literary sociality and charts productive pathways through numerous materials, including collections of Chan “recorded sayings,” monastic rulebooks, “eminent monk” and “flame record” hagiographies, manuscripts of poetry, Buddhist encyclopedia, primers, and sūtra commentary. Two chapter-length case studies illustrate how Song monks participated in two of the most prominent and conservative modes of poetry of the time, those of parting and mourning. Protass reveals how monks used Chan humor with reference to emptiness to transform acts of separation into Buddhist teachings. In another chapter, monks in mourning expressed their grief and dharma through poetry. The Poetry Demon impressively uncovers new and creative ways to study Chinese Buddhist monks’ poetry while contributing to the broader study of Chinese religion and literature.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.

The Poetics of Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making, that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.

Recent scholarship on early Greek lyric has been primarily concerned with the immediate contexts of its first performance. This volume instead turns its attention to the rhetoric and realities of poetic permanence. Taking Pindar and archaic Greek literary culture as its focus, it offers a new reading of Pindar's victory odes which explores not only how they were received by those who first experienced them, but also what they can mean to later audiences. Part One of the discussion investigates Pindar's relationship to both of these audiences, demonstrating how his epinicia address the listeners present at their premiere performance and also a broader secondary audience across space and time. It argues that a full appreciation of these texts involves taking both perspectives into account. Part Two describes how Pindar engages with a wide variety of other poetry, particularly earlier lyric, in order to situate his work both within an immanent poetic history and a contemporary poetic culture. It shows how Pindar's vision of the world shaped the meaning of his work and illuminates the context within which he anticipated its permanence. The book offers new insights into the texts themselves and invites us to rethink early Greek poetic culture through a combination of historical and literary perspectives.