Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of Modernist Autonomy presents a rethinking of modernist claims to autonomy by focusing on the work of Wallace Stevens, one of the most renowned poets of the twentieth century. By showing how multiple socio-political currents underlie and motivate Stevens' version of autonomy, the book challenges the commonly received accounts of the term as art and literature's escape from the world. It provides new and close readings of Stevens' work including poems from different stages of the poet's career. It re-energizes a tradition of historicist readings of Stevens from the 1980s and 1990s. The study of Stevens' work in this book is developed in constant dialogue with current studies in modernism and aesthetic theory, particularly those offered by Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou. The book explores the question of autonomy in Stevens' exploration of the aesthetic and social domains, and the vexed issue of his poetry's relation to philosophical thinking.
Author(s): Gül Bilge Han
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2019
Cover
Half-title
Title page
Copyright information
Epigraph
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
Committed Solitudes: Imagining Autonomy Otherwise
Stevens, Poetic Resistance, and Autonomy
Autonomy in Modernism and Beyond
Chapter 1 The Politics of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise
1.1 Lyric Distance and Intimacy
1.2 The Poet's Seclusion
1.3 The Plural in the Singular
Chapter 2 Spaces of Autonomy: Relational Place-Making
2.1 Aesthetic Interiors: ''What Manner of Building Shall We Build?''
2.2 Autonomy's Architectures
Chapter 3 Community and Autonomy: ''The Mode of Common Dreams''
3.1 The Collapse
3.2 Dance and a New Collective Life
3.3 The Poetic Imagination's Global Reach
3.4 Speaking to the Masses
Chapter 4 Autonomy and Philosophy: ''Reason's Constant Ruin''
4.1 Stevens' Wartime Inaesthetics
4.2 Logical Positivism and Resistance to Philosophy
Coda
Autonomy's ''New Beginnings'' and Spatiotemporal Expansions
Bibliography
Index
