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
Echo and Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech

Echo and Critique: Poetry and the Clichés of Public Speech

Gargaillo, Florian

Hardcover

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 0807179353
ISBN13: 9780807179352
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: May 10 2023
Pages: 198
Weight: 0.88
Height: 0.56 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English

In Echo and Critique, Florian Gargaillo skillfully charts the ways that poets have responded to the clichés of public speech from the start of the Second World War to the present. Beginning around 1939, many public intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic lamented that the political lexicon had become saturated with bureaucratic stock phrases such as the fight for freedom, revenue enhancement, and service the target, designed for the mass media and used to euphemize, obfuscate, and evade.

Instead of ridding their writing of such language, many poets parroted these tropes as a means of exploring the implications of such expressions, weighing their effects, and identifying the realities they distort and suppress. With its attentiveness to linguistic particulars, poetry proved especially well-suited to this innovative mode of close listening and intertextual commentary. At the same time, postwar poets recognized their own susceptibility to dead language, so that co-opting political clichés obliged them to scrutinize their writing and accept the inevitability of cant while simultaneously pushing against it.

This innovative study blends close readings with historical context as it traces the development of echo and critique in the work of seven poets who expertly deployed the method throughout their careers: W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Robert Lowell, Josephine Miles, and Seamus Heaney. Gargaillo's analysis reveals that poetry can encourage us to listen diligently and critically to the insincerity ubiquitous in public discourse.

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