Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Art of Breaking Worlds: On Contemporary Poetry and Public Language

The Art of Breaking Worlds: On Contemporary Poetry and Public Language

Jaussen, Paul

Paperback

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

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ISBN13: 9798899480898
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Pages: 264
Language: English

Showing how poetics provides a path for building new imagined possibilities

Drawing together a robust corpus of contemporary USAmerican poetry, The Art of Breaking Worlds explores social and political breaks: disasters, failures, and disruptions that simultaneously constitute and fracture the world. These breaks range from unsuccessful political movements and acts of resistance to mass incarceration and biopolitical violence, from anti-Black racism to the infrastructural catastrophes of climate collapse. Paul Jaussen shows how poetry responds to such disasters by incorporating public-facing genres and discourses into its literary practice, thereby rewriting into aesthetic form the public languages used to perpetuate or contain that rupture. This poetic integration of public language thus generates a third space, located between the rhetorical and the aesthetic, a literary practice of both world-breaking and world-making that transforms existing genres while also creating newly imagined modes of collectivity. Grounded in contemporary theory and close readings of works by poets such as Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, and Ilya Kaminsky, this book proposes that these dynamics require a distinctive critical poetics, one simultaneously attuned to discourses of struggle and discourses of art, modeling a fresh approach to the relationship between politics and literature.

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