Description
Book SynopsisThe modernist poetry of Wallace Stevens is replete with moments of theorizing. Stevens regarded poetry as an abstract medium through which to think about and theorize not only philosophical concepts like metaphor and reality, but also a unifying thesis about the nature of poetry itself. At the same time, literary theorists and philosophers have often turned to Stevens as a canonical reference point and influence. In the centenary year of Wallace Stevens’s first collection Harmonium (1923), this collection asks what it means to theorize with Stevens today. Through a range of critical and theoretical perspectives, this book seeks to describe the myriad kinds of thinking sponsored by Stevens’s poetry and explores how contemporary literary theory might be invigorated through readings of Stevens.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Pure Good of Theory
Thomas Gould and Ian Tan
I Reading Stevens
Theorizing Almost Successfully
Lisa M. Steinman
The Reader In/Of Stevens
Ariane Mildenberg
The Event in Stevens as Poetic Justification: Alain Badiou, Poetic Performativity and the Implied Reader
Ian Tan
II Theory and Form
Stevens’s Queer Ecologies
Bart Eeckhout
The Pursuits of Philosophy and the Sounds of Poetry: Stevens and Heidegger
Wit Pietrzak
Stevens, Adorno and the Worldly Poetics of Lyric Unworlding
Zachary Tavlin
III Experience and Affect
Wider Than the Sky: Stevens, Consciousness and the Incipient Cosmos
Kathryn Mudgett
What Stevens’s Poetry can offer to Theorists of Consciousness
Charles Altieri
‘Emotionally We Arrive all the Time’: Stevens and Affect Theory
Marta Figlerowicz
IV Theology and Post-Theology
From Philosophy to Theology: Stevens’s Angel and the Real
Stephen Sicari
Two Cathedrals: Stevens and George Santayana's Sonnet Exchange
Kelly MacPhail
The The: Stevens’s Neighborliness
Thomas Gould
V Postures and Dispositions
‘A war between the mind and the sky’: Fictions, Fools, and the Consequences of Empire
Johanna Skibsrud
Damned Universal Cock: Stevens’s Ecstatic Present
Rachel Trousdale
A Collect of Style
Krzysztof Ziarek
