
George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism
Peter Nicholls(Author)
Oxford University Press
Published on 25. October 2007
Book
Hardback
236 pages
978-0-19-921826-4 (ISBN)
Description
Regard for George Oppen's poetry has been growing steadily over the last decade. Peter Nicholls's study offers a timely opportunity to engage with a body of work which can be both luminously simple and intriguingly opaque. Nicholls charts Oppen's commitment to Marxism and his later explorations of a 'poetics of being' inspired by Heidegger and Existentialism, providing detailed accounts of each of the poet's books. He is the first critic to draw extensively on the Oppen archive, with its thousands of pages of largely unpublished notes and drafts for poems; in doing so, he is able to map the distinctive contours of Oppen's poetic thinking and to investigate the complex origins of many of his poems. Oppen emerges from this study as a writer of mercurial intensities for whom every poem constitutes a 'beginning again', a freeing of the mind from thoughts known in advance. A strikingly innovative and challenging poetics results from Oppen's attempt to avoid what he regards as the errors of the modernist avant-garde and to create instead a designedly 'impoverished' aesthetic which keeps poetry close to the grain of experience and to the political and ethical dilemmas it constantly poses.
Reviews / Votes
...an important book...subtly probing book... * Edward Neill MLR * ...a fresh and engaging study of Oppen's work, his life and his relationship with the Objectivist movement...One of the strengths of this book is its extensive use of unpublished materials...It also provides a compelling rereading of Objectivism through Oppen's own continual reassessment of its usefulness as a term. * Emma Kimberly Journal of American Studies * a thoroughly researched and closely argued account * Jules Smith, Times Literary Supplement *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Oxford
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Illustrations
6 black-and-white halftones
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 161 mm
Thickness: 17 mm
Weight
523 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-19-921826-4 (9780199218264)
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Peter Nicholls
George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism
Book
03/2013
Oxford University Press
€56.80
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Peter Nicholls is Professor of English at New York University. His publications include Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics and Writing>, Modernisms: A Literary Guide, and many articles and essays on literature and theory. He recently co-edited with Laura Marcus The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature and is currently editor of the journal Textual Practice and co-director of The Centre for Modernist Studies at Sussex.
Content
Introduction ; 1. Beginning again ; 2. Materials ; 3. 'That it is', or This In Which ; 4. 'What it is': Of Being Numerous ; 5. From Avant-Garde to Hegel ; 6. A metaphysical edge': Seascape: Needle's Eye ; 7. 'Out of the whirl wind': Myth of the Blaze and Primitive ; Appendices