W.H. Auden: Towards A Postmodern Poetics 2000th Edition by R. Emig (PDF)

Description

This study reads Auden’s poetry and plays through the shifts from modernism to postmodernism. It analyses the experiments in Auden’s writings for their engagement with crucial contemporary problems: that of the individual in relation to others, loved ones, community, society, but also transcendental truths. It shows that rather than providing firm answers, Auden’s poetry emphasises the absence of certainties. Yet far from becoming nihilistic, it generates hope, affection, and most importantly an ethical challenge of responsibility out of its discoveries.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author RAINER EMIG is Lecturer in English Literature and a Member of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at the University of Wales, Cardiff. His publications include a study of modernism in poetry and essays on 19th- and 20th-century literature, as well as critical and cultural theory.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Emig’s book, published in 2000, circa. 240pp is very interesting, leaning toward theory (no bio references at all), he finds in Auden much that prefigures postmodernism, refusing some of the standard patterns (”ás well trodden as it is generally useless”) Auden tends to be prefitted with. If read with John Boly’s book ‘Reading Auden, the Returns of Caliban’, you could start to get a handle on the theoretical aspects of Auden’s work, something occluded by the more flamboyant and better documented aspects of the poet’s life and work. As late as 1975 (Auden died in 1973) John G. Blair complained that the ‘biggest failing” of Auden studies was its failure to focus on the art of the poetry and not on the ideas it implies (a paraphrase from memory) so a purely theoretical approach to the poet is welcome, surely.Emig’s approach is metaphysical the whole way, a nice response to the more coffee table approach to Auden, his popular image as spokesman for a generation, etc. In chapters addressing Saussure, Auden’s dramatic writings, Authority, History, Voices, Philosophy of the later works, Emig sees Auden’s work as exemplifying, before the fact, some key tenets of postmodernism. (I happen to strongly agree but this, one of Auden’s strongest suits, gets lost somehow. -Auden the personality, not for the first time, occludes the study of his own poems, ‘news of his death was kept from his poems..’).Poets and theorists might better/best understand this work. There’s quite a bit of Berkeley in Emig (and that’s meant as a compliment). Emig’s essay in the Cambridge Companion, confined to the rear, focuses on Ecology, his assigned topic, presumably, but the same metaphysical interest prevails. Not a pictureframe or an adjective in sight, and (in my view) the better for it (as there has been an imbalance in coverage, imo).Rainer Emig writes a little like Randall Jarrell; he understands poetry from the inside.Auden: An early avatar for the postmodern.

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