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by Andrew M. Lakritz In a critically courageous and original reading, Andrew Lakritz reinterprets American poetic modernism by linking three unlikely avatars of modernism--Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore--and viewing them through the lens of theorist Walter Benjamin. Stevens, Frost, and Moore are often viewed as withdrawn from or unconcerned with social issues. This study, by contrast, shows how gender, class, and political issues influence the way these poets use language. Lakritz uses Benjamin's and Theodor Adorno's critical perspectives to reframe formal and aesthetic questions in terms of the cultural contexts of the modern moment in the United States. In Lakritz's view, the three poets struggle in their writing to break free of mythic thinking. Such thinking, and speaking, developed as a post-Enlightenment faith in technology and progress, invention and human ingenuity. Ultimately, Lakritz challenges as naive postmodernism's own faith in progress--in the explosion of technology in communication, computers, media. An anarchic attack on progress--the suspicion of systematic rationality--is one of the main elements that ties modernist poets together and also binds them to Benjamin and Adorno. For Lakritz, as for the poets he writes about, "It must be through language itself that one can shatter the alienating condition that is at the root of things as they are, the catastrophe of modern life." His book will appeal to critics interested in Marxist theory and in theoretical approaches to poetry generally and to specialists in American literary modernism and postmodernism.
1996. 232 pp. 6 X 9
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"A subtle and enlightening portrait of modern poetry and poetics. . . . Shows how reflections on poetic language count, not just formally, but socially and politically."--Michael Beeler, Montana State University
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