A Certain Amount of the Unknown - The Argument of the Bodily in Don DeLillo

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

Change and the Poetics of Plenitude in Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery

The essay attends to a paradox found in some crucial poetic efforts by Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery. In some of their most important poetic works Stevens and Ashbery take on the task of positioning the poem toward the plurality of reality, the plurality that is concentrated in the phenomenon of change. As they do so, they invariably encounter a tension within the poem itself: as the poem merges with the flow of changes in the external world-the physical changes in time and space-it also calls up permanent forms of imaginative purposive capability of attending to change, envisioning it, or, indeed, of installing it. These forms must be more permanent than it is postulated by some theories of the poetics of transitiveness, which are polemically discussed in the text. The tension between the element of change and permanence is what allows the poems of Stevens and Ashbery-each poet finding his own aesthetic and epistemic strategy-to put the poem forward not as an external “representation” of change, but as the very source of the abundant possibilities of producing world descriptions in which the notion of change may be meaningful. Such positioning of the poem is what I am calling “the poetics of plenitude.” This poetic strategy makes the poem an aesthetic counterpart to the epistemic action of developing an inquiry, and I am building a definition of this term by reference to the classical pragmatist theory of inquiry. This move is related to my treating Stevens and Ashbery as the poets belonging to the Emersonian-pragmatist intellectual and aesthetic tradition. The paradoxes of change and permanence discussed in the text are treated as inherent in this tradition

Polubić ten wątły obrys — dwie próbki z Roberta Creeleya

The present sketch discusses two poems written by R. Creeley, a poet initially associated with the Black Mountain College group, who later worked out his own idiosyncratic style, often referred to as minimalistic. Focusing on the two poems of the poet, one early poem and the other written towards the end of the poet’s life, the author of the article attempts to show how Creeley’s poetical technique, being remarkably disciplined and innerly organized variety of free verse, became his answer to the problem of contingency. Contingency, i.e. a lack of metaphysical protection, forms now the basic element of the poet in the democratic world. To facilitate this new modern understanding of the relationships between poetry and democracy, the author juxtaposes Creeley with Whitman in an attempt to outline post-religious spirituality close at hand for the poet who has no illusions as to human condition and who, at the same time, retains his creative power and drive that Creeley inherits from Whitman and Emerson

Pragmatystyczne napięcie w amerykańskiej poezji modernistycznej: przypadek Willliamsa

The author of the article focuses on the selected short lyrics by William Carlos Williams and simultaneously draws readers attention the tension, existing in the American modernist poetry, between a modernist postulate of the autonomy of an aesthetic object and the pursuit—resulting from the tradition of American pragmatism—to treat this object as an intelligent commentary to customary activities in the environment of human communities. The author’s point of departure is the thesis by Marjorie Perloff. It claims that for modernist writing absolutely “pivotal” is the separation of the realities of the work from the event taking place in real life. Next, he demonstrates why this division cannot be maintained by such poets as Williams and Stevens. This inability is the result of a complex, non-European, pragmatistic admixture feeding the poetics of both poets. The main focus in the article, however, is placed on Williams