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
My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

My Silver Planet: A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch

Tiffany, Daniel

Paperback

Series: Hopkins Studies in Modernism

Literary CriticismPoetry Criticism

ISBN10: 1421416980
ISBN13: 9781421416984
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: Nov 4 2014
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.01
Height: 0.70 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry's relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry-a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry's alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry's relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact-in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature-between elite and vernacular poetries. Tiffany argues that the ballad revival-the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture-sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist paradise inscribed in Ezra Pound's Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and plastic art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

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