Logo image
Back
Writing It: Some Observations on the Poetics of Territoriality
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Writing It: Some Observations on the Poetics of Territoriality

Mark Levine
The Iowa review, Vol.32(1), pp.71-79
04/01/2002
DOI: 10.17077/0021-065X.5524
Appears in  Diamond Open Access
url
https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.5524View
Published (Version of record) Open Access

Abstract

“Presence” and “authorship” are constructs that have taken a far more severe spanking from literary critics than from poets, and I'm bound to report that I don't completely believe you when you deploy these words as if they were the raw materials of abomination, because I know that you write books yourselves, and some of those books must have consumed years of hard labor. Every author I know knows that “the author” as authorizing agent, as the sole possessor of his or her network of meaning, is dead—has never not 72 been dead. [...]popular culture—which I think we can agree tends to hollow out the imprints of individual “authorship” and to foreground, instead, the processes of social codification, thereby presenting rather stark and simplified evidence of the truths that theory proffers — made its appeal known to a new generation of scholars who were not only equipped with theory but who, like me, had grown up enamored of pop culture and who were tired of being made to feel guilty about their enthusiasms. [...]we could read Lacan in “The Terminator” and Kristeva in “Dallas” and before long the anti-canonical frenzy in English departments began to spatter syllabi with required reading of what we writers have no problem calling third rate novels and poems by what we writers have no 73 problem calling minor practitioners, or hacks.
 Authorship Books Creative writing Humanism Literary criticism Novels Poetics Poetry Poets Theory Writers Writing

Details

Metrics

10 Record Views
Logo image