Bakhtin and the Social Moorings of Poetry

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Bucknell University Press, 2003 - 170 páginas
First and last, what moors poetry to society is speech: the speech that gets into writing. So why do most political readings of literature neglect this fundamental orientation? Mikhail Bakhtin never forgets the central role of utterance: his philosophy of literary dialogism is based on the idea of fighting out social issues on the ground of the spoken word. Accordingly, conflict-in-language is the theme of this book's introduction as if it is of the whole volume. In this book, Donald Wesling offers an organized reading of Bakhtin's thought, to achieve an account of why Bakhtin scamped poetry; and an account of how a poetics of utterance is a major achievemnt, if we employ in the dialogic reading of poetry many of the powerful terms Bakhtin developed for the novel. After an Introductory chapter that is polemical and pedagogical, this book contains chapters on the social poetics of dialect writing, on the clash of inner and outer speech, on the problem of rhythm, and on broader conflicts of types of discourse in English Romanticism and in the American 1990s. Examples come from England and Scotland, Russia, and the USA. Traveling with and beyond Bakhtin, this book extends to Anglo-Ame

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The Social Moorings of Poetry
17
Bakhtin and the Social Poetics of Dialect
61
Easier to Die than to Remember Inner Speech in Basil Bunting
77
Rhythmic Cognition in the Reader Bakhtin Tsvetaeva and the Social Moorings of Rhythm
97
Clash of Discourses in English Romanticism and the American 1990s
118
One More Thing I Know about Bakhtin
148
Notes
150
Bibliography
165
Index
168
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Página 56 - If the subject making the novel specifically a novel is defined as a speaking person and his discourse, striving for social significance and a wider general application as one distinctive language in a heteroglot world — then the central problem for a stylistics of the novel may be formulated as the problem of artistically representing language, the problem of representing the image of a language.
Página 62 - ... widny thingk it wuz troo. jist wanna yoo scruff tokn. thirza right way ti spell ana right way ti tok it. this is me tokn yir right way a spellin.
Página 135 - Who knew, to sooth the slave's distress Was gentle Anna's dearest joy. And thence, an earnest suit to press, To Anna flew the Negro boy. 'Missa,' poor Zambo cried, 'sweet land Dey tell me dat you go to see, Vere, soon as on de shore he stand, De helpless Negro slave be free. ' Ah ! dearest missa, you so kind, Do take me to dat blessed shore, Dat I mine own dear land may find, And dose who love me see once more. ' Oh ! ven no slave, a boat I buy. For me a letel boat vould do, And over wave again I...
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Página 77 - My love is young but wise. Oak, applewood, her fire is banked with ashes till day. The fells reek of her hearth's scent, her girdle is greased with lard; hunger is stayed on her settle, lust in her bed. Light as spider floss her hair on my cheek which a puff scatters, light as a moth her fingers on my thigh. We have eaten and loved and the sun is up, we have only to sing before parting : Goodbye, dear love. Her scones are greased with fat of fried bacon, her blanket comforts my belly like the south.
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