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Badiou and American Modernist Poetics

  • Book
  • © 2018

Overview

  • Applies continental philosophy to Modernist poetry
  • Considers modernity under a variety of lenses including literary theory, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy
  • Advances scholarship on poetry and poetics and key Modernist poets

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

Badiou and American Modernist Poetics explores the correspondence between Alain Badiou's thinking on art and that of the canonical modernists T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Ezra Pound. Utilizing a multidisciplinary approach, the text engages with themes of the void, mastery, and place present in both modernist poetry and in Badiou’s philosophy. Through an examination of classic modernist texts, Cameron MacKenzie reveals that where Badiou hopes to go, the modernists have already been.

Reviews

“The sharpest, most engaging, most perfect, and most revelatory Badiouvian study of literature that has appeared in English. It produces a tidal wave of insight in an incredibly short space by unfolding Badiou's thinking on poetry and art so as to build a continuous and stunning argument that unites the poetics of Mallarmé, Eliot, Stevens, and Pound in an endless process of comprehension. Reading this beautifully clear book, one does not wonder what it means. One wonders that one did not realize so much about Badiou, modernism, poetry, and the formation of the world.” (Sheldon Brivic, Professor Emeritus of English, Temple University, USA, and author of Revolutionary Damnation: Badiou and Irish Fiction from Joyce to Enright, 2016)

“Cameron MacKenzie makes a strong and convincing case for Alain Badiou's relevance to the project of understanding modernism as something other than a monolithic aesthetic  creed. In particular, MacKenzie provides insight into the way that modernist artdraws us  towards the void without capitulating to any absolutist voiding of human value.  This monograph is a very promising point of departure for anyone interested in acquiring a grasp of modernist poetics that is not already in the grip of pious “truths” about the autonomy of the text.  Here we are asked to see beyond the edifice of language to the evolving worlds that are portended therein.” (Alan Singer, Professor of English, Temple University, USA, and author of Posing Sex: Toward a Perceptual Ethics for Literary and Visual Art, 2018)

“Cameron MacKenzie, connecting canonical modernist poetry and poetics—the work of Eliot, Stevens, and Pound—with Alain Badiou’s latter-day philosophical writing, reveals the surprising continuity that subtends a century of meditations on aesthetics and Being. Students and seasoned scholars alike will find Mackenzie’s book a bracing contribution to current literary criticism.” (Robert L. Caserio, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University, USA)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Ferrum College, Ferrum, USA

    Cameron MacKenzie

About the author

Cameron MacKenzie is Adjunct Professor of English at Ferrum College, USA. His work has appeared in SubStance, symplokē, and The Cormac McCarthy Journal, and his essays have been collected in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective (2011) and Edward P. Jones: New Essays (2011).


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