The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Modern & Contemporary Poetics) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081730973X ISBN 13: 9780817309732

Publisher: University of Alabama Press, 1999

Synopsis

This volume presents cultural readings of the objectivist poets, a group characterized by a historical, realist, antimythological view. The essays analyze and evaluate objectivist politics, and focus on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised by objectivist affiliations with Judaism.

About this title

Review:

"The critics and poets in this important collection create new paradigms for the study of poetry and culture. . . . This book will be important to any reader of modern and contemporary American poetry." --Susan M. Schultz

"Editors DuPlessis and Quartermain have done a valuable service in collecting these essays which confirm and extend the importance of Objectivist poetics in American poetry....This collection of essays serves to flesh out the many paradoxes inherent in these oftentimes unlike and cantankerous poets. It elucidates relationships between the cultural milieu and this group of writers whose work frequently engages in social, political, and cultural criticism. It connects the reader to the core aesthetics which enabled for such a destabilizing, avant-garde poetics. DuPlessis and Quartermain suggest the term "nexus" for its un-limiting quality--defining a movement in which the poets' differences and changing concerns orbit around each other, retaining relationship, but allowing contradiction. This valuable anthology furthers the fine work began in Quartermain's Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press. The Objectivist Nexus is an essential tool to understanding a complicated, lively, and enlightened poetic movement of the last century, which will continue to exercise considerable influence in this one." --Jeffrey Beam, Oyster Boy Review

"Rachel Blau DuPlessis's and Peter Quartermain's The Objectivist Nexus [is] not only useful but downright necessary. This volume, which collects essays by Charles Altieri, Alan Golding, Peter Middleton, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Fredman, and others, establishes the canon of so-called Objectivist poets, situates them in their composition and reception contexts, reads them through the interpretive filters of politics, ethics, and religion, and argues for their significance in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. This major set of objectives is admirably met, and the book should help to redefine 'Objectivist.'"--Michael Thurston, Yale University, in Modernism/modernity

About the Author:

Rachel Blau DuPlessis is Professor of English at Temple University. Peter Quartermain is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 081730973X
• ISBN 13: 9780817309732
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 376
• Editor: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Peter Quartermain