Museum Mediations

Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry

Buch | Softcover

242 Seiten

2014
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-138-01172-4 (ISBN)

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This interdisciplinary study participates in the ongoing critical conversation about postwar American poetry and visual culture, while advancing that field into the arena of the museum. Turning to contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting, the book demonstrates the particular importance of the museum as a cultural site that is both inspiration and provocation for poets. The study uniquely bridges the dual canon in contemporary poetry (and calls the lyric/avant-garde distinction into question) by analyzing museum-sponsored anthologies as well as poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others. Through these case studies of poets with diverse affiliations, the author shows that the boom in ekphrasis in the past 20 years is not only an aesthetic but a critical phenomenon, a way that poets have come to terms with the critical dilemmas of our moment. Highlighting the importance of poets' peripheral vision-awareness of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with art-the author contend that a museum visit becomes a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. The study shows that ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impasses-a mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of site-specific feminist revision-in a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure.

Fisher, Barbara K.

List of Figures Permissions Acknowledgments INTRODUCTION : The Museum as Muse CHAPTER 1: Charisma and Critique: Interrogating Aesthetic Liminality in Museum-Sponsored Anthologies CHAPTER 2: Returned Again to the Exhibition: John Ashbery, Avant-Gardism, and Ekphrastic Risk CHAPTER 3: Daring to Wink: The Museum Comedies of Kenneth Koch and Richard Howard CHAPTER 4: Someone (A Woman) Watching: Site-Specific Ekphrasis by Three Feminist Innovators Epilogue Works Cited

Erscheint lt. Verlag	23.12.2014
Reihe/Serie	Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory
Zusatzinfo	2 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	340 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Informatik ► Grafik / Design ► Digitale Bildverarbeitung
	Medizin / Pharmazie ► Physiotherapie / Ergotherapie ► Orthopädie
	Technik ► Elektrotechnik / Energietechnik
	Technik ► Medizintechnik
	Technik ► Umwelttechnik / Biotechnologie
ISBN-10	1-138-01172-X / 113801172X
ISBN-13	978-1-138-01172-4 / 9781138011724
Zustand	Neuware