Jennison The Zukofsky Era

Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4214-0611-4
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 0 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Hopkins Studies in Modernism

Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker wrote with a diversity of formal strategies but a singularity of purpose: the crafting of an anticapitalist poetics.

Inaugurated in 1931 by Louis Zukofsky, Objectivist poetry gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. This study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates the dialectic between the formal experimental features of their poetry and their progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity.

Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, Ruth Jennison shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, Jennison offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists’ paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall terms in which poetic modernism is described, she identifies and assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde, including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures, its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy. The resulting narrative is a historically sensitive, thorough, and innovative account of Objectivism’s Depression-era modernism.

A rich analysis of American avant-garde poetic forms and politics, The Zukofsky Era convincingly situates Objectivist poetry as a politically radical movement comprising a crucial chapter in American literary history. Scholars and students of modernism will find much to discuss in Jennison’s theoretical study.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jennison, Ruth

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Uneven Poetics of Radical Parataxis
Chapter 1. Zukofsky: The Political Economy of Revolutionary Modernism
Chapter 2. G. Oppen, Materialiste: Cinematic Capitalism
Part II: The Commodity's Inscape
Chapter 3. Zukofsky: The Voice of the Fetish
Chapter 4. Niedecker: The Interior Voice Commodified
Part III: The Objectivist Reflex
Chapter 5. Zukofsky: Counterfetishistic Literacy
Appendix
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Jennison, Ruth
Ruth Jennison is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.