Contemporary American Literature

An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

by Arezou Zalipour

Abstract of my PhD thesis that was completed in 2008. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested to know more about my PhD thesis. I am trying to publish it as a book. Your kind suggestions are most welcomed.

An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

Arezou Zalipour, PhD
more An Approach for the Study of Poetic Imagination

Arezou Zalipour, PhD
arezouzalipour@gmail.com


This study examines notions of poetic imagination towards exploring its contemporary representations. It takes its initial point of departure with a historical and conceptual survey that traces the concepts and theories of both imagination and poetic imagination. The literature survey demonstrates that poetic imagination has not been featured in the theories of modern and contemporary poetry, barring the Romantics who celebrated the creative nature of imagination. Therefore, the existing concepts, ideas and theories of poetic imagination are largely unstructured and incoherent concepts inherited by contemporary poets. However, there are some researches on the concept of imagination in poetry in modern and contemporary philosophy and psychology. In the twentieth century, the use of poetic image in philosophical studies as well as the relations between imagination and reality have provided some insights into modern conceptions of poetic imagination. This thesis examines, discusses and collates the principles and concepts relevant to imagination to discover whether these notions can explain and define the nature of poetic imagination in contemporary poetry. Fundamentally, the thesis develops an approach for the exploration of contemporary notions of poetic imagination. The approach is drawn from the existing concepts and theories of imagination and poetic imagination. The approach is constructed featuring the elements of types of images, features of poetic imagination and modes of imagination.

These three categories shape the components of the theoretical framework and also form the three levels of the analytical procedure of the approach. In level one, we look at types of images in a poem which leads us to draw conclusions about features of poetic imagination in level two. In level three, the findings in levels one and two will then help us to determine the apparent and dominant mode of imagination in the poem/text. What should emerge by the end of the analysis is a special opportunity to look at how (creative) imagination is manifested in a poem/text. The approach was applied to a corpus of contemporary poetry in order to show the application of the approach and the way analysis is carried put. The assessment of the approach on a corpus of contemporary poetry was also in an attempt to elucidate the dimensions of relationships between the imagined, the imaged, and the real.

The research identifies that imagination in contemporary poetry moves more towards imaging rather than poetic imagination. In other words, imagination shows greater affinity to imaging in contemporary poetry. The significant contribution of the thesis is that it offers a continuum called Imaginiuum with one end as imaging, and poetic imagination as the other. Imaginiuum is a paradigm that describes contemporary notions of imagination in poetry.

Future Tense

by Samuel Cohen

"I’ve been thinking some lately about why I‘m in the job I’m in. I don’t mean why I got my job (as a professor of... more "I’ve been thinking some lately about why I‘m in the job I’m in. I don’t mean why I got my job (as a professor of contemporary American literature) — that’s an endless mystery — but why I wanted to do this sort of thing in the first place."

The Pynchon Intertext of Lemprière's Dictionary

by Amy J. Elias

Elias, Amy J. “The Pynchon Intertext of Lempriere’s Dictionary.” Pynchon Notes 40-41 (Spring-Fall 1997): 28-40.

Elias_Pynchon&History

by Amy J. Elias

Elias, Amy J. "History." The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Ed. Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale. Cambridge UP, 2012. 123-135.

'A Novel in Dramatic Form': Metaphysical Tension in The Sunset LImited

by Ciarán Dowd

published in 'Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy: Borders and Crossings', ed. Nicholas Monk (Routledge, 2011). http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780203803806/

In May 2006, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company staged the premiere of Cormac McCarthy’s stage play 'The Sunset... more In May 2006, Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company staged the premiere of Cormac McCarthy’s stage play 'The Sunset Limited'. Five months later, Vintage published the play in paperback. The paperback’s textual content remains essentially the same as the staged production: in a run-down tenement, two men debate the nature of existence and the meaning of life, one trying to convince the other not to commit suicide. But while the content remains essentially the same on stage and in print, the published version of the play has one puzzling additional feature: it contains the subtitle, 'A Novel in Dramatic Form'. How are we to interpret this? One particular reading of the subtitle, and of the published version of the play as a whole, points beyond the play itself to a metaphysical tension present in all of McCarthy’s novels.

Remaking Myth in Yusef Komunyakaa's Talking Dirty to the Gods, Taboo, and Gilgamesh: An Interview

by Daniel Cross Turner

Leer a Cormac McCarthy

by Carlos Aníbal Alonso

Translation and Response Between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis

by Jonathan Evans

Forthcoming in TranscUlturAl 4.2

When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other... more When an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own.

Paul Auster

by David Coughlan

Published in "Twentieth Century American Fiction." Ed. Patrick O’Donnell, David W. Madden, and Justus Nieland. Oxford: Blackwell, 2011. 438-39. Vol. 2 of "The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction." Brian W Shaffer, gen. ed. 3 vols. 2011.

Paul Auster's Ghost Writers

by David Coughlan

Published in "Space, Haunting, Discourse." Ed. Maria Holmgren Troy and Elisabeth Wennö. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. 145-54.

Paul Auster has written of ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude, where he wrote of... more Paul Auster has written of ghosts and writers since his first major work, The Invention of Solitude, where he wrote of the dead father and of the writer son. His works, however, are not about writers and ghosts, but about writers as ghosts.

Auster’s writers haunt two locations, the city and the room, uncanny places. Alone in labyrinthine cities, Auster’s characters tend to lose themselves unless they follow others, shadowing their subjects in a doubling which is, initially, a reading of the other’s passage, but then, inevitably, a re-writing of a path which is their own. As Derrida describes in “Perjuries” (speaking of trying to be faithful to those writers he follows like an acolyte), writing about, or for, another person, ghost writing so to speak, means an inevitable betrayal. But what does this mean for those who follow in mourning, as Auster’s characters do? Alone in the room, as in their lives, Auster’s characters give themselves over to the text, and become ghosts writing, uncannily undead or buried alive.

This essay analyses the significance of ghostly writing, taking place in cities and rooms, as a recurring theme in Auster’s work, arguing that, through this, Auster theorises on the nature of reading and writing as ethical practices related to the past, to mourning, to betrayal, and responsibility.

Davis's Poetic Dialogue with Leiris's Autobiography

by Jonathan Evans

Published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.1

In his article "Davis's Poetic Dialogue with Leiris's Autobiography" Jonathan Evans analyzes Lydia Davis's... more In his article "Davis's Poetic Dialogue with Leiris's Autobiography" Jonathan Evans analyzes Lydia Davis's translation of the first two parts of Michel Leiris's autobiography, which shows an encounter between two writers. Davis has also written stories which reference Leiris and thus position him as a precursor. Evans proposes that Leiris is not only a source of influence for Davis, but that their texts can be read as a dialogue. Using a methodology that draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Evans shows how Leiris focuses on sound and graphological patterns in order to understand his own conscious and unconscious relationship with words. Davis, in her stories, forces the reader to question their own relationship to language and the symbolic order. Thus, Davis’s translation of Leiris's autobiography becomes a graft on her work as it offers her a chance to explore writing in a way which would be uncharacteristic in her own work.

Don DeLillo and the Harbingers of Mortality

by Gustavo Vargas Cohen

The aim of the present text is to
capture the signs and contingencies
that may hamper and prevent a... more The aim of the present text is to
capture the signs and contingencies
that may hamper and prevent a writer’s
progress. It acknowledges Don DeLillo’s
relevance to world literature,
corroborated by an informed listing of
the awards the author has received and
of the themes approached in his
individual novels. The text also
discusses DeLillo’s predecessors, the
historical roots of his kind of realistic
portrayal of contemporary society and
the seeds to his post-modern writing
style. The final part brings an outline of
the symptomatic evidence as shaped by
the arguments that critics offer for
consideration. The text concludes by
acknowledging the side-effects of
writing with such profusion, intensity
and diversity.

Karl Shapiro's Crusade against the Canon

by Marian Janssen

"Bye Bye Black Dahlia": Pynchon, Coover e il "vizio intrinseco" della detective fiction

by Paolo Simonetti

"Fictions. Studi sulla Narratività", Vol. X, Anno 2011, pp. 45-54

Attraverso il confronto tra due recenti romanzi di Thomas Pynchon e Robert Coover, l'articolo propone un'analisi delle... more Attraverso il confronto tra due recenti romanzi di Thomas Pynchon e Robert Coover, l'articolo propone un'analisi delle più recenti evoluzioni del romanzo poliziesco negli Stati Uniti, dopo la fine del postmoderno e l'avvento dei cosidetti "Police Procedural".
Pur privilegiando la dimensione metanarrativa e mettendo a nudo le convenzioni del genere, i due romanzi si possono (e si devono) leggere come piacevoli gialli provvisti di crimine e investigatore, poliziotti e colpevoli (anche se i ruoli non sempre sono stabili). Attraverso ripetizioni cicliche e trame labirintiche, ricalcate con stile caricaturale sui romanzi di Raymond Chandler e Dashiell Hammett, nonché sui più classici film noir, Pynchon e Coover mettono in scena, con modalità differenti ed esiti tutt’altro che scontati, le principali tappe dell’evoluzione della detective fiction, contribuendo ulteriormente al rinnovato successo del genere. È possibile, infatti, leggere i due romanzi come tentativi paralleli di trovare una via d’uscita all’impasse cuiil postmoderno ha condannato l’investigatore e in generale il poliziesco highbrow.

'Indianness' and Identity in the Novels and Short Stories of Sherman Alexie

by Loree Westron

Presented at the 'Framing the Self: Anxieties of Identity in Literature' conference at the University of Portsmouth, 21st May 2010.

‘Indianness’ has been a central theme in the work of Sherman Alexie since his first collection of short stories, The... more ‘Indianness’ has been a central theme in the work of Sherman Alexie since his first collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, was published in 1993, and until recently, race has been a concern shared by all of his characters (with the exception, perhaps, of Robert Johnson in Reservation Blues).

In his early work, in particular, Alexie never allows the reader to forget the race of his characters: when they are not directly identified by their ethnicity, their skin, hair and eye-colour are used as defining features. These references to race are so frequent in Alexie’s stories that I carried out a brief survey, selecting forty pages at random, from four of his books – two novels, Reservation Blues (1995) and Flight (2007), and two collections of short stories - Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and The Toughest Indian in the World (2001). I counted all direct references to race (ie Indian, White, Black) including tribal affiliation (Lakota, Spokane, Flathead), blood quantum (half-blood, quarter-blood), and slang (breed, skins, redskins). Using this method, I found an average of 2.2 overt references to race per page in Lone Ranger, 3.5 in Reservation Blues, 4.3 in Toughest Indian, and 2.6 in Flight.

In my paper, I will discuss Alexie’s view of ‘Indianness’ and Native-American identity, and how this view appears to have changed in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Cheyenne Madonna (review)

by Loree Westron

Published online at The Short Review, 2011.

We are all different people at different times in our lives, and the experiences we have and the lessons we take from... more We are all different people at different times in our lives, and the experiences we have and the lessons we take from them shape us into the people we become. In Eddie Chuculate’s debut collection, Cheyenne Madonna, we dip in and out of the life of Jordan Coolwater, glimpsing of some of his many identities: devoted son, runaway convict, gifted artist, and grief-ridden husband.

The Marginalization of Italian American Writers and Italian American Literature

by Michael Carosone

Another Side of Clare Savage’s Identity Crisis: A Queer Theoretical Analysis of Michelle Cliff’s Abeng

by Michael Carosone

"A Meaning Alliance": Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Lyn Hejinian's Poetics of Translation

by Jacob Edmond

Slavic and East European Journal 46.3 (2002): 551-63.

Locating Global Resistance: The Landscape Poetics of Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Lyn Hejinian and Yang Lian

by Jacob Edmond

AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian Universities Language & Literature Association 101 (2004): 71–98.