The Testimonies of Russian and American Postmodern Poetry Reference, Trauma, and History

by Lutzkanova-Vassileva, Albena

• ISBN13: 9781628921878
• ISBN10: 1628921870
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-12-18
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order.

Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality.

Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight.

Author Biography

Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, USA.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry

PART 1: Post-Communist Traumas, Post-Modernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism
I. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism
II. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude
III. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry

PART 2: Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in American Postmodernism: The Testimonies of Language Poetry
I. The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry
II. Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry
III. The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments
IV. Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma
V. The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma
VI. Conclusion: Trauma and History

Bibliography
Index