Wallace Stevens And The Apocalyptic ModeWallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode focuses on Stevens’s doubled stance toward the apocalyptic past: his simultaneous use of and resistance to apocalyptic language, two contradictory forces that have generated two dominant and incompatible interpretations of his work. The book explores the often paradoxical roles of apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic rhetoric in modernist and postmodernist poetry and theory, particularly as these emerge in the poetry of Stevens and Jorie Graham. This study begins with an examination of the textual and generic issues surrounding apocalypse, culminating in the idea of apocalyptic language as a form of “discursive mastery” over the mayhem of events. Woodland provides an informative religious/historical discussion of apocalypse and, engaging with such critics as Parker, Derrida, and Fowler, sets forth the paradoxes and complexities that eventually challenge any clear dualities between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic thinking. Woodland then examines some of Stevens’s wartime essays and poems and describes Stevens’s efforts to salvage a sense of self and poetic vitality in a time of war, as well as his resistance to the possibility of cultural collapse. Woodland discusses the major postwar poems “Credences of Summer” and “The Auroras of Autumn” in separate chapters, examining the interaction of (anti)apocalyptic modes with, respectively, pastoral and elegy. The final chapter offers a perspective on Stevens’s place in literary history by examining the work of a contemporary poet, Jorie Graham, whose poetry quotes from Stevens’s oeuvre and shows other marks of his influence. Woodland focuses on Graham's 1997 collection The Errancy and shows that her antiapocalyptic poetry involves a very different attitude toward the possibility of a radical break with a particular cultural or aesthetic stance. Wallace Stevens and the Apocalyptic Mode, offering a new understanding of Stevens’s position in literary history, will greatly interest literary scholars and students. |
Contents
Stevens History Theory | 3 |
War Modernisms | 26 |
Meditation in | 69 |
Copyright | |
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aesthetic antiapocalyptic apoc apoca apocalyptic desire apocalyptic discourse apocalyptic mode aspects Auroras of Autumn Cadenza canto canto vii closure collapse creative Credences of Summer critics cultural Derrida discursive power double Dutch Graves elegiac elegy emerges Errancy eschatological essay example fact feminine fiction figures final force gender genre gesture Harold Bloom heroic Hutcheon imagination inscribed ironic irony James Longenbach John Ashbery Jorie Graham kind least literary logic Longenbach Mark Strand marks Martial Cadenza masculine mastery metaphor metonymic modernism modernist narrative nobility Noble Rider nostalgia offers parody passage past pastoral poem poem's poetic power political position possible postmodern poststructuralism poststructuralist present question reading reality realm relation relationship resistance Revelation seems sense shift situation speaker stance Stevens's poetry Stevensian Strand subject-position suggests teleology tension textual tion tradition tropes truth University Press Vendler violence virile poet Wallace Stevens Wallace Stevens Journal words World War II writes