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

by Tim Woods

Overview

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 LANGUAGE 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 is Senior Lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, is co-editor Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility, The Ethics in Literature, and author of Beginning Postmodernism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312293222
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan US
Publication date:	05/02/2003
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	287
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

TIM WOODS has taught at King Alfred's College, Winchester, and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he is currently senior lecturer in English and American Studies. He has co-edited 'I'm telling you stories': Jeanette Winterson and the Politics of Reading (Rodopi, 1998), Critical Ethics: Text, Theory and Responsibility (Macmillan, 1999), The Ethics in Literature (Macmillan, 2000), and authored Beginning Postmodernism (Manchester, 1999) and Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Fiction (Routledge, 2001). Articles have appeared in Parataxis, English, Rethinking History, The Poet's Voice, and Textual Practice. He is currently completing a monograph on African Literatures in English

Table of Contents

Introduction: Ethics and Objectivist Poetics The Emergence of 'Objectivist' Poetics: Aesthetics and Politics in the USA, 1910-1930 'Words ranging forms': The Crises of Modernism in 'A'-1 to 'A'-6 The 'Negative Dialectics' of Louis Zukofsky's 'A' 'A'-9: A Labor of Love, or a Love of Labor? Ethos or Ontos? Modes of Subjectivity in Levinas and Zukofsky 'Figuring it out' and Doubling 'A'-gain: Language and Otherness in 'A'-12 to 'A'-23 'Things at the limits of reason': George Oppen's Materialist Ethics Conclusion: Reading Language Writing

Editorial Reviews

It is extremely well written, authoritative, and original.

Marjorie Perloff

The Poetics of the Limit...does a stellar job of presenting Zukofsky's work as a living body of art in which the ethics, politics, art, and science of the century coalesce.' - Codrina Cozma, Journal of American Studies

From the Publisher