Your search for: politics AND poetry

Olga Orozco, considered one of the most important contemporary women poets in Latin America, serves as the touchstone for Jill Kuhnheim's examination of the tension between literature and life - or, as Kuhnheim quotes a student, of the universal question "Why read poetry?" Born in 1920 in Argentina ...

Olga Orozco, considered one of the most important contemporary women poets in Latin America, serves as the touchstone for Jill Kuhnheim's examination of the tension between literature and life - or, as Kuhnheim quotes a student, of the universal question "Why read poetry?" Born in 1920 in Argentina, Orozco has produced nine volumes of poetry, a play, and a narrative work. As a member of the "lost generation" of the forties, she is prominent among a group of poets whose work reveals a range of responses to historical circumstances. Taking a feminist approach, and focusing on the specific history of Argentina, Kuhnheim relates Orozco's writing to that of T. S. Eliot, Oliverio Girondo, Alejandra Pizarnik, and more recent Argentine women poets such as Cristina Pina, Diana Bellessi, Ines Araoz, and Liliana Lukin. Though much of their work appears to be far removed from social reality, Kuhnheim's reading reveals how even the most apparently distant poetry is inevitably involved with the political processes of the,time. Her comparative approach offers a method for reading lyric poetry that connects the aesthetic strand, which views a poem as something distant from the world, to a social thread that marks a particular historical moment.

The Politics of Canonicity explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation and national literature that has characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the ...

The Politics of Canonicity explores the complex relations among the hegemonic triad of territory, nation and national literature that has characterized the modern European nation-state. In the case of Hebrew literature, this triad was unattainable and its components fiercely contested, hence the literary field itself was responsible for shaping the nation, preceding the nation-state itself.

The book sheds new light on the dynamics of modernist canon formation. The aesthetic paradigms, political ideologies, and social interests that privilege certain texts and literary modes are reexamined within the framework of the conscious and deliberate practices of Zionism to formulate a national discourse. As the author shows, the suppressed, the marginal, the undesired "other" of the nation demonstrate the limits of both the literary canon and society's own self-understanding.

The book combines the specific questions of Hebrew literature with a critical inquiry of the theoretical debates surrounding the notion of,canon. It begins by examining the formative debate in both Hebrew letters and European discourses of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century, which address the tension between writing the nation and writing the self. It moves on to the equally constitutive question within Jewish nationalism of the relation between diaspora and homeland in literary writing. While international modernism tends to glorify exile, Hebrew modernism demonstrated a fierce antagonism toward a "diaspora mentality."

In his analysis of the suppressed margins of the Hebrew literary canon, the author outlines the specific aesthetic fault lines of the new national community. In chapters devoted to thepoets David Fogel and Avot Yeshurun, and the poetics of a feminine voice in Rachel Bluwstein, Esther Raab and Anda Pinkerfeld, he analyzes the historical tensions between margin and canon, highlighting the ways in which these ma