Contentious Figuration in the Poetry of Plath, Stevens, and Dickinson: Dialectics and Poststructuralism

In Contentious Figuration in the Poetry of Plath, Stevens, and Dickinson, Colleen Shuching Wu challenges the recent literary critical practice of contextualizing works, arguing that context is a double-edged sword when it comes to understanding the work as it’s presented. On the one hand, context places a literary text in an interpretive paradigm or moment in time that aids in discovering its meanings and values; on the other hand, it disregards how a work can develop an internal force or c...