Search
Close this search box.

Poetry

The Anti-Dictionary: Ferreira Gullar’s Non-Object Poems

Mariola V. Alvarez

Gullar gave primacy to the word as the locus of meaning of the non-object poem, and the visual, whether the materiality of language or the sculptural turn of his Neoconcrete art, opened up additional meanings contained in the word. According to Gullar the non-object as anti-dictionary cannot be reduced to one meaning or limited to only an arbitrary sign. Like the visual non-object, the verbal non-object avoids sameness or commonness and rejects the ability of language to only designate. And yet paradoxically, are not all words readymades themselves?

Do We Need Adorno?

Todd Cronan

In one of his last interviews Michel Foucault famously said “As far as I’m concerned, Marx doesn’t exist.” What he meant was that “Marx” as an author was something largely fabricated from concepts borrowed from the eighteenth century, in particular the writings of David Ricardo. From Ricardo he derived his most crucial idea: the labor theory of value. As Clune explains, neoliberalism has made that theory obsolete and with it, Marxist analysis. For Foucault there were several Marxisms in Marx.

London Calling: The Urban Chronotope of Romanticism

Walter L. Reed

London is alienated from itself in its artificial opposition to the otherness of nature. But it can also be rendered alien or other by its deep historical past, a past still visible within it. This is a temporal dislocation rather than the geographical and ontological one that Wordsworth envisions in The Prelude.

The Question of Poetic Meaning

John Gibson

[W]e frequently do not, strictly speaking, hear the meaning of a poem so much as we hear a poem as occasioning a question of meaning, a question we devote ourselves to answering if we are to make sense of the encounter with meaning a poem initiates. In the context of poetry, we usually take meaning to be a destination and not a point of departure.

The Motive for Metonymy (A Parochial Theme in Two Parts)

Jennifer Ashton

But how can one person actually feel another person’s a? More plausibly, we might think that the causal chain involves a proliferation of effects from the same a — not different subjects having the same feelings about a, but the same a producing different feelings in different subjects. But then we also have a different source of pathos — how can I tell if my a is the same as your a? Not how can I feel another person’s a, but how can I know another person’s a?

Confiance au Monde; or, The Poetry of Ease

Oren Izenberg

Just as “confidence” is hope cut free from its surrounding dangers, so too a “reminder” is an invitation cut free from a discursive environment of argument and persuasion. It is a performance of knowledge that causes anxiety to lapse, that opens our eyes to the obvious without insisting upon it. Or to put the point slightly differently, the idea of a reminder is the idea of a poetry of ease.

Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self

Elisabeth Camp

Narratives are indeed a crucial tool by which many of us make sense of our lives. The problem comes in identifying selves too directly with the lives they live. If we drop the insistence on life-long autobiographies in favor of many short overlapping stories, we can hew more closely to the role narratives typically play in everyday self-representations; but then we also stand in need of a new criterion for unifying those stories into a coherent self.

Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and the Reconstruction of the Everyday

Magdalena Ostas

The dominant question that has troubled readers of both Wordsworth and Wittgenstein on the topic of common language, its forms of expression, and its situatedness in the world consequently has been similar: Whose language shall count as the “real” or “everyday” one, and with what authority or under which criteria do I assert the commonality and commonness of this language? Put differently: Which words are to act as representative of real or everyday language, what is supposed to be, as Wordsworth has it, the very (the “empirical,” let’s say) or what J. L. Austin might have called the actual language of men?

Two Problems with a Neuroaesthetic Theory of Interpretation

Jennifer Ashton

…if we’re thinking like Mark Johnson, we can simply add these examples to our bucket of evidence that the human mind is structured by our bodily orientation in space, and hence so is our art. Put that way, the difference between having an account of the meaning of the work and having an account of its causes is not only easy to see, but, I would argue, an easy strike against the kinds of neuro approaches I’ve been describing thus far.

Browse By Section

Browse By Topic

Tags
Absorption and Theatricality Aesthetics Affect Anti-Racism Art Art and Objecthood Art History Autonomy Bertolt Brecht BLM Capitalism Class Clement Greenberg Daniel Patrick Moynihan Elizabeth Anscombe Film Form Identity Inequality Intentionality Interpretation Judith Stein Karl Marx Language Latin America Literary Criticism Michael Fried Modernism Neoliberalism Neuroscience Pablo Picasso Philosophy Photography Poetry Policing Political Economy Politics Race Racial Disparity Representation Stanley Cavell Subjectivity Theodor W. Adorno Visuality Walter Benn Michaels

Browse By Issue

nonsite.org is an online, open access, peer-reviewed quarterly journal of scholarship in the arts and humanities. nonsite.org is affiliated with Emory College of Arts and Sciences.

© 2020 all rights reserved. ISSN 2164-1668 Creative Commons License
nonsite.org is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.