Author Description

Wallace Stevens And The Poetics Of Modernist Autonomy Presents A Rethinking Of Modernist Claims To Autonomy By Focusing On The Work Of Wallace Stevens, One Of The Most Renowned Poets Of The Twentieth-century. By Showing How Multiple Socio-political Currents Underlie And Motivate Stevens' Version Of Autonomy, The Book Challenges The Commonly Received Accounts Of The Term As Art And Literature's Escape From The World. It Provides New And Close Readings Of Stevens' Work Including Poems From Different Stages Of The Poet's Career. It Re-energizes A Tradition Of Historicist Readings Of Stevens From The 1980s And 1990s. The Study Of Stevens' Work In This Book Is Developed In Constant Dialogue With Current Studies In Modernism And Aesthetic Theory, Particularly Those Offered By Jacques Rancière And Alain Badiou. The Book Explores The Question Of Autonomy In Stevens' Exploration Of The Aesthetic And Social Domains, And The Vexed Issue Of His Poetry's Relation To Philosophical Thinking-- Introduction. Committed Solitudes: Imagining Autonomy Otherwise; Stevens, Poetic Resistance, And Autonomy; Autonomy In Modernism And Beyond -- 1. The Politics Of Aesthetic Separation: No Private Paradise. Lyric Distance And Intimacy; The Poet's Seclusion; The Plural In The Singular -- 2. Spaces Of Autonomy: Relational Place-making. Aesthetic Interiors: What Manner Of Building Shall We Build?; Autonomy's Architectures -- 3. Community And Autonomy: The Mode Of Common Dreams. The Collapse; Dance And A New Collective Life; The Poetic Imagination's Global Reach; Speaking To The Masses -- 4. Autonomy And Philosophy: Reason's Constant Ruin. Stevens' Wartime Inaesthetics; Logical Positivism And Resistance To Philosophy -- Coda. Autonomy's New Beginnings And Spatiotemporal Expansions. Gül Bilge Han. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.