Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writing

by Eeckhout, Bart

• ISBN13: 9780826214270
• ISBN10: 0826214274
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-11-01
• Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr

Summary

Often considered Americars"s greatest twentieth-century poet, Wallace Stevens is without a doubt the Anglo-modernist poet whose work has been most scrutinized from a philosophical perspective.Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writingboth synthesizes and extends the critical understanding of Stevensrs"s poetry in this respect. Arguing that a concern with the establishment and transgression of limits goes to the heart of this poetrs"s work, Bart Eeckhout traces both the limits of Stevensrs"s poetry and the limits of writing as they are explored by that poetry. Stevensrs"s work has been interpreted so variously and contradictorily that critics must first address the question of limits to the poetryrs"s signifying potential before they can attempt to deepen our appreciation of it. In the first half of this book, the limits of appropriating and contextualizing Stevensrs"s "The Snow Man," in particular, are investigated. Eeckhout does not undertake this reading with the negative purpose of disputing earlier interpretations but with the more positive intention of identifying the intrinsic qualities of the poetry that have been responsible for the remarkable amount of critical attention it has received. Having identified the major sources of Stevensrs"s polysemy and of the seeming free-for-all of his critical afterlife, Eeckhout then deals with ten of the poetrs"s shorter works, including "The Idea of Order at Key West," and proceeds to analyze some of the important limits of writing explored by the poetry. These limits all revolve around the nexus of perception, thought, and language that constitutes the core dynamic out of which Stevensrs"s poetry is generated and to which it continually returns. Stevensrs"s work presents one of the most poignant opportunities for letting the reader feel the ever-problematic relationship between specificity and generality that is at the heart of all literary writing. By negotiating between the particularity of poetic detail and the universality of philosophical ideas,Wallace Stevens and the Limits of Reading and Writingseeks to contribute both to the study of Stevens and to the fields of literary theory and philosophy.

Author Biography

Bart Eeckhout is Assistant Professor of English at Ghent University in Belgium.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
List of Abbreviations	xi
Introduction. An Impossible Possible Philosophers' Poetry	1	(12)
PART ONE The Limits of Appropriation and Contextualization
Reading Stevens	13	(10)
It Must Resist the Intelligence Almost Successfully	23	(12)
It Must Be Served like Sukiyaki	35	(9)
It Must Be Intertextualized	44	(12)
It Must Be Made of Snow: A Case Study	56	(60)
Triangulating Pleasure, Doubt, and Irritation	116	(19)
PART TWO The Limits of Perception, Thought, and Language
Infuriating Philosophers	135	(22)
Between Matter and Mind	157	(27)
Between the Senses of Sense	184	(20)
Between Mimesis and Music	204	(27)
Between Metaphor and X	231	(31)
Poeticizing Epistemology	262	(9)
Works Cited	271	(24)
Index	295