‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)
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Philipp Löffler
Abstract
This article discusses the political dimension of post-war American Poetry from around 1950-1980. The underlying argument is that the antirepresentationalist poetry produced in and around the LANGUAGE-school in the 1970s is the necessary continuation of the political and social activism initially opted for by the Beat Generation. I assert that the kind of language-centeredness typical for many works of the LANGUAGE- school was already entailed in central texts of the 1950s and 1960s, as writers began to examine processes of meaning production/construction in the social sphere. Looking at selected poems by Allen Ginsberg (“A Supermarket in California”, “Wichita Vortex Sutra”), Denise Levertov (the text collection To Stay Alive) and Bruce Andrews (“I Guess Work the Time Up”), the article traces a specific feature of postmodern poetry, spotlighting the growing ambivalence inherent in the search for an alternative cultural politics instigated by post-war American poets. I point out how the increased interest in the (linguistic) constructedness of political realities resulted in a poetics of “nonnarrativity” and hermetic closure that began gradually to jeopardize the communicative foundation of their collective political goals. My article concludes by suggesting a conceptual link between the projects of multiauthorship engaged in by several LANGUAGE-poets and the Habermasian notion of “communicative rationality.”
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co.
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Variations on Dickens’s Great Expectations: Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip
- ‘Race’ and Realism: Vision, Textuality, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
- ‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)
- “A Prophet out of Gwalia:” The Poetry of Idris Davies and Postcolonial Wales
- “I Get My Culture Where I Can:” Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Inhalt
- Editorial
- Variations on Dickens’s Great Expectations: Lloyd Jones’s Mr. Pip
- ‘Race’ and Realism: Vision, Textuality, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
- ‘Language is the House We Live in:’ Language-Centeredness and the Limits of Political Activism in Post-War American Poetry (1950-1980)
- “A Prophet out of Gwalia:” The Poetry of Idris Davies and Postcolonial Wales
- “I Get My Culture Where I Can:” Functions of Intertextuality in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty
- Buchbesprechungen
- Bucheingänge
- Die Autoren dieses Heftes
