The Poetics of the Limit Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry

by Woods, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780312293222
• ISBN10: 0312293224
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-04
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This book situates Louis Zukofsky's poetics, and the lineage of Objectivist poetics more broadly, within a set of fundamental ethical concerns in American poetic modernism. Tim Woods makes a strong case for Zukofsky as a missing key figure within this ethical matrix, viewing Zukofsky's poetry through the lens of the work of Theodor Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas. Building an ethical genealogy of American poetics leading from Zukofsky through the contemporary school of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, Woods brings together modernism and postmodernism, ethics and aesthetics, to shed new light on our understanding of this neglected strain of modernist poetics.

Author Biography

Tim Woods, Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, is co-editor Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, co-author of Literatures of Memory, and author of Beginning Postmodernism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Permissions	xiii
List of Abbreviated References	xv
Introduction: Ethics and Objectivist Poetics	1	(16)
The Emergence of ``Objectivist'' Poetics: Aesthetics and Politics in the United States, 1910 to 1930	17	(28)
``Words ranging forms'': The Crises of Modernism in ``A''--1 to ``A''--6	45	(24)
The ``Negative Dialectics'' of Louis Zukofsky's ``A''	69	(34)
``A''--9: A Labor of Love, or a Love of Labor?	103	(28)
Ethos or Ontos? Modes of Subjectivity in Levinas and Zukofsky	131	(36)
``Figuring it out'' and Doubling ``A''-gain: Language and Otherness in ``A''--12 to ``A''--23	167	(48)
``Things at the limits of reason'': George Oppen's Materialist Ethics	215	(20)
Conclusion: Reading Language Writing	235	(22)
Notes	257	(26)
Index	283