Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American PoetryOxford University Press, 2006年9月21日 - 376 頁 Although it has long been commonplace to imagine the archetypal American poet singing a solitary "Song of Myself," much of the most enduring American poetry has actually been preoccupied with the drama of friendship. In this lucid and absorbing study, Andrew Epstein argues that an obsession with both the pleasures and problems of friendship erupts in the "New American Poetry" that emerges after the Second World War. By focusing on some of the most significant postmodernist American poets--the "New York School" poets John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and their close contemporary Amiri Baraka--Beautiful Enemies reveals a fundamental paradox at the heart of postwar American poetry and culture: the avant-garde's commitment to individualism and nonconformity runs directly counter to its own valorization of community and collaboration. In fact, Epstein demonstrates that the clash between friendship and nonconformity complicates the legendary alliances forged by postwar poets, becomes a predominant theme in the poetry they created, and leaves contemporary writers with a complicated legacy to negotiate. Rather than simply celebrating friendship and poetic community as nurturing and inspiring, these poets represent friendship as a kind of exhilarating, maddening contradiction, a site of attraction and repulsion, affinity and rivalry. Challenging both the reductive critiques of American individualism and the idealized, heavily biographical celebrations of literary camaraderie one finds in much critical discussion, this book provides a new interpretation of the peculiar dynamics of American avant-garde poetic communities and the role of the individual within them. By situating his extensive and revealing readings of these highly influential poets against the backdrop of Cold War cultural politics and within the context of American pragmatist thought, Epstein uncovers the collision between radical self-reliance and the siren call of the interpersonal at the core of postwar American poetry. |
搜尋書籍內容
第 1 到 5 筆結果,共 54 筆
第 3 頁
... tension between friendship (and the threat to independence and alterity it poses) and the primordial American ideal of self-reliance. This book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and nonconformity is ...
... tension between friendship (and the threat to independence and alterity it poses) and the primordial American ideal of self-reliance. This book argues that this troubling yet generative clash between friendship and nonconformity is ...
第 7 頁
... tensions between a group aesthetic and what used to be called “the individual talent.” This study will seek to extend this terrain by examining the very notion of community and friendship in terms of how the poets felt and wrote about ...
... tensions between a group aesthetic and what used to be called “the individual talent.” This study will seek to extend this terrain by examining the very notion of community and friendship in terms of how the poets felt and wrote about ...
第 12 頁
... tension between the individual and the collective is both a problematic and an indispens- able feature. In this, the model closely resembles the rhetoric and performance of jazz (perhaps the musical form that was of greatest importance ...
... tension between the individual and the collective is both a problematic and an indispens- able feature. In this, the model closely resembles the rhetoric and performance of jazz (perhaps the musical form that was of greatest importance ...
第 15 頁
... tension between motion and stasis and the conflict between the self and its com- panions. It is striking to see how often these two concerns are entwined within the poetry's rhetoric and metaphors. But why—what does a preoccupation with ...
... tension between motion and stasis and the conflict between the self and its com- panions. It is striking to see how often these two concerns are entwined within the poetry's rhetoric and metaphors. But why—what does a preoccupation with ...
第 18 頁
... tensions within American pragmatist thought. For my purposes, pragmatism refers to a distinctive, influential, and in some ways quintessentially American mode of thinking and of talking—a way of viewing the universe, human experience ...
... tensions within American pragmatist thought. For my purposes, pragmatism refers to a distinctive, influential, and in some ways quintessentially American mode of thinking and of talking—a way of viewing the universe, human experience ...
內容
3 | |
Community Individualism and Cold War Culture | 26 |
2 Emerson Pragmatism and the New American Poetry | 53 |
Selfhood and Friendship in Frank OHaras Poetry | 86 |
John Ashbery and the Interpersonal | 127 |
5 Amiri Baraka and the Poetics of Turning Away | 166 |
Barakas White Friend Blues | 194 |
OHara Ashbery and the Paradoxes of Friendship | 233 |
Conclusion | 275 |
Notes | 287 |
Works Cited | 331 |
Index | 345 |
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