The testimonies of Russian and American postmodern poetry
Subtitle: reference, trauma, and history
By: Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2015
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9781628921878; 9781501322662
Subjects: Psychic trauma in literature; Postmodernism (Literature); History and criticism; Russian poetry; Language poetry; American poetry; Avant-garde (Aesthetics); Modern Poetry
Description: "This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order. Albena Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality. Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-290) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry; title: PART 1: Post-Communist Traumas, Post-Modernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism; title: 1. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism ; 2. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude ; 3. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry; title: PART 2: Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in postmodern American poetry: The Testimonies of Language writing. 4. The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry ; 5. Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry ; 6. The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments ; 7. Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma ; 8. The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma ; Conclusion: Trauma and History.