Description
Book SynopsisBy exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.
Trade ReviewTiffany is persuasive in arguing that the now ubiquitous idea of 'kitsch' originates in poetry, poetic language, and the articulated views of many players in the greater culture... The value of the book lies in application: understanding the origins of poetic 'kitsch' allows one to understand elite culture better and to use that knowledge as a link between elite culture and vernacular culture. Choice My Silver Planet offers a thrilling new way to read poetry from the past two hundred years. -- Mike Chaser Poetry Magazine A strength of Tiffany's book as a whole is that its history of the relationship of lyric poetry and kitsch from graveyard gothic to Pound reveals the pleasures and anxieties of an art forever seeking to justify its artifices in a natural authority, whether in the rhythms of labor, the rhythms of the sexual body, an essentialism of blood or land, or a totalitarian politics. -- John Wilkinson Modern Philology
Table of Contents1. Arresting Poetry
Unpopular Pop
Missing Verses
Bogus
Twice Made
Mass Ornament
2. Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
Dreams, Mottos, Gossip
Chatter and Virtuosity
Phraseology
Morbid Animation
3. Miscreant
Doppelgänger
Synthetic Vernaculars
Poetry vs. Literature
Commonplace
Lyric Fatality
Thieves' Latin
4. The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature
Balladry and the Burden of Popular Culture
Exploded Beings and After-Poets
Live Burial
5. Illiterature
Refrain
Lullaby Logic
The Cult of Simplicity
Pets, Trifles, Toys
Gothic Verse and Melodrama
Silver Proxy
6. Queer Idylls
Topologies of Privacy
Reliques
Poetaster
Kitsch, Camp, and Homo-fascism
1800 Words
Poison
7. Kitsching the Cantos
Vortex and Cream Puff
Contraband
The Kitsch of Apocalypse
Epic, Rhapsody, Seizure
Bad Infinity
Ethnofascist Souvenirs
8. Junk
Thermofax
Dada Kitsch
After After-Poets
Coterie and Melodrama
The Metaphysics of Kitsch
9. Inventing Clichés
Plastic Poetry
Liar, Liar
Afterword
In the Poisonous Candy Factory
Counterfeit Capital
Notes
Index
