Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry 1st Edition by Srikanth Reddy (PDF)

Description

Theoretical accounts of modern American poetry often regard literary texts as the expression of a subjectivity irremediably fractured by the dividing practices of power. In Changing Subjects, Srikanth Reddy seeks to redress our critical bias toward a fatalistic poetics of rupture and fragmentation by foregrounding a fluent tradition of writers from Walt Whitman to John Ashbery who explore digression, rather than disjunction, as a rhetorical strategy for the making of modern poetry. Mapping the ramifying topography of literary digression, Changing Subjects offers a wide-ranging anatomy of “the excursus” within twentieth-century American poetics. Moving from aesthetics to the archive to narratology to figures of identity, Reddy considers various spheres in which American writers revisit and revise our models of purposeful discourse by cultivating a poetics of digression in modern literature. In new readings of authors such as Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Frank O’Hara, and Lyn Hejinian, this study proposes that “changing the subject” offers a digressive method for negotiating the vexing complexities of art, knowledge, history, and subjectivity under the curious conditions of modernity. The book concludes with a survey of “Elliptical” strategies employed by a new generation of poets, writing in the wake of John Ashbery’s aleatory craft, who seek to extend the digressive project of American poetry into the twenty-first century.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Focusing on the related concepts of digression and drift, Reddy makes a deeply impressive case for a creative continuum among some of America’s most significant and challenging poets from Whitman through Stevens to Moore, Ashbery, O’Hara and Hejinian, among others. He grounds his project not only in certain writings of Foucault, but also in aspects of Enlightenment thought, and thereby illuminates an exploratory, constantly metamorphosing stance toward the world and experience, one that poetry is singularly equipped to offer.” –Michael Palmer, author of Thread”This is a book of supple and spirited engagements with modern American poetry. Reddy brilliantly illuminates Marianne Moore’s cross-disciplinary excursions, Lyn Hejinian’s narratological subversions, Frank O’Hara’s meandering dialogues, and other fascinating examples of the poetics of digression. He brings modern poetry into intricate and dazzling interplay with Foucault’s theories of the archive, historiography, and the subject.” –Jahan Ramazani, author of A Transnational Poetics”Changing Subjects allows modern and post-modern poetry to wander beyond the dialectic of system-making and system-breaking, into fresh air and new light. As a critic, Srikanth Reddy shares the virtues of the poems he treats: wide-ranging intelligence, an attentiveness at once passionate and subtle, and an unpredictable, purposeful wit.” –Oren Izenberg, author of Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life”True poetry goes where it will, and rarely by the shortest available path: Reddy’s remarkable study shows how modern and contemporary poets make way for digression, and how their digressions work against familiar categories and hierarchies, reorganizing–as well as disarranging–our senses of reality en route. Marianne Moore’s new model of education, Lyn Hejinian’s disordered anti-plots, Frank O’Hara’s casual conversations, and John Ashbery’s figures for drifts and flows all lead, in Reddy’s vivid arguments, not only into one another but into a high tide of twenty-first century work. This first book of criticism from a significant poet can both instruct and delight: it might even change a number of critical minds.” –Stephen Burt, author of Close Calls with Nonsense”This study gives delight along with rich study and analysis…. Highly recommended.” –CHOICE”Dazzling, erudite, and original, Changing Subjects provides us with a powerful new way of understanding the work of Wallace Stevens and twentieth-century American poetry as a whole.” –The Wallace Stevens Journal”Reddy’s account is a rich one because of how he engages digressiveness as a means of exposition within this study. Reddy recounts multiple eighteenth-century texts with much specificity in order to ferret out their Enlightenment logics and the disruption of these. His overall query into how modern poets challenge Enlightenment knowledge through digressive modes provides much insight into knowledge formation itself.” –American Literature About the Author Srikanth Reddy is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago and the author of two books of poetry, Facts for Visitors and Voyager.

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