While cleaning the stove I came up with some thoughts on love which I don’t know where to put in my proposal. So for now they are going up on the blog until I can figure out where to put them:
Love can be either erotic (self-centered) or Sacrificial (other centered). In the first [...]
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Thoughts on love
Posted in Uncategorized on July 5, 2009 | 2 Comments »
I Love Terry Eagleton…part deux
Posted in Uncategorized on June 14, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Terry Eagleton has once again saved my ample grad-student behind. This guy really merits at least a fan-club. After all, how many Christian Marxist literary critics are there?
In exploring the concept of political poetry, I keep running into the Latin American equivalent of the Brecht Lukacs debate over the nature and aesthetics [...]
More on Adorno
Posted in Uncategorized on April 23, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The key passage from Adorno’s article “On Lyric Poetry and Society” which I cited in the previous blog post brings up a lot of related issues around language itself and its relationship between subjective and objective realities. Adorno refers to the sublime lyric as “the subject intoning itself in language until the voice of [...]
Avant-Garde Poetry and Politics
Posted in Uncategorized on April 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
It seems that not a few of the critics who try to characterize the major themes of 20th century Latin American poetry are fond of dividing poets into two separate groups, or what Enrique Foffani calls a “regimen bipolar” : teh avant-garde poets who explored art as itself, and the socially committed poets who wrote poems about political issues [...]
On Subjectivity and Poetry
Posted in Uncategorized on March 28, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Reading Hugh Friedrich’s book on modern poetry pushes me to re-think the question of what exactly is subjectivity and how it relates to poetry. Up until now I have pretty much taken it for granted that with the advent of modernity poetry in general and lyric poetry in particular became more closely attuned to subjective realities than objective ones. [...]
Subjectivity
Posted in Uncategorized on February 12, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I am well into Josefina Saldaña Portillo’s book The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development. This is a fascinating study, it lays the groundwork for exactly what I would like to discuss in my thesis with regards to the idea of revolution and love. Saldaña-Portillo discusses the underlying thread of subjectivism in both the [...]
Why Poetry? Why?
Posted in Uncategorized on February 6, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Is poetry a useful medium for expressing political and social realities? This was one of the questions on the exam which I am still trying to find an adequate and satisfying answer for. I get the feeling that my dissertation will end up being an attempt to “salvage” the reputation of socially committed poetry by [...]
Poetry as an act of service
Posted in Uncategorized on November 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Leopoldo Lugones’ prologue to Lunario Sentimental provides a strong focal point with which to link the various diverse poetries of the 20th Century. In spite of their different aesthetic approaches and themes, each of these poets in his own way views poetry as an act of service to aesthetics, to language, to society, to humanity [...]
From 1969…
Posted in Uncategorized on November 12, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A little bit of everything…
José Emilio Pacheco: No me preguntes como pasa el tiempo.
Pacheco’s text fits very well on either list, and initially he was on the second list dealing with political poetry but got shuffled around. Much of the poems in this work are comments on and reflections of history and the role of [...]
Brazilian Poetry 2: Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Posted in Uncategorized on November 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, although considered one of the later figures of Brazilian Modernism also fits quite well into the much broader tradition of “populist poetry” comparable to figures such as Walt Whitman. Thomas Colchie, who edits a collection of English translations of Drummond’s work also makes the comparison between the Brazilian poet and Pablo [...]
