The question of the relationship between aesthetics and history is reconsidered in this study of these postwar poets. Petterson argues that postwar French poetry is a critical poetry encompassing a vast poetic tradition from poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Francis Ponge and Paul Celan. The author also shows how the critical writings of Hegel, Heidegger, and Ricoeur (among others) suggest that what he calls postwar poetry's will-to-meaning and its attempt to develop a post-Romantic poetics necessarily questions poetry's ties to philosophical, historical, and political narratives.

This volume explores how poets use different kinds of formal experimentation to change the way we think, and to allow us to try out new ways of perceiving existence and positioning ourselves within the world. Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological Performance examines the affinities that exist between Bonnefoy's poetry and Nancy's philosophy. It analyses how Bonnefoy experiments with the poem's act of address, its material disposition, and sonorous performance. It scrutinises how he foregrounds the bodily and material forces that are at play within language in order to makes us feel the diverse worldly forces that are active within us and to make us perceive our own human existence in more interconnected ways. Exploring how Bonnefoy and Nancy share the desire to resist detached ways of perceiving existence, this book analyses how they present interaction as the generative dynamic that drives all existence and use the text's resonant play to make us aware of how all bodies—human, material, or poetic—emerge from a complex interplay of worldly forces.

"The poetic is an abiding yet elusive qualification within the discursive system of twentieth-century French literature. No longer amenable to formal assignment, its recurrences delimit a shifting, multi-layered practice of artistic and intellectual (self-) invention. This study attempts to outline certain durable properties of that practice by confronting it with the complex theoretical and spatial metaphor of utopia. Drawing, in particular, upon the oeuvres of Victor Segalen (1878-1919), Rene Daumal (1908-44) and Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923), it traces poetic work - work done in support of poetic difference - along the social, physical and textual axes of what is argued to be a sustained and radically inclusive utopian practice within the literary field. The complex utopian quality of poetic work is linked to the cultural persistence of the poetic as a simple attribute within literary practice. In uncovering this link, the study encourages revised understandings of both the poetic and the utopian in the modern French literary context."

In André du Bouchet: Poetic Forms of Attention, Emma Wagstaff presents the creative and critical writing of a major twentieth-century poet and shows how reading his work advances our understanding of attention.

The volume combines for the first time the fields of Classical Reception and World Literature in a pioneering collection of essays by world-leading scholars on modern poetry from various cultural and linguistics backgrounds (Arabic, Chinese, creole, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Spanish).

The most comprehensive history of literature written in French ever produced in English.

A selection of modern French poems with critical commentary, glossary of literary terms, biographies and bibliography.

American culture has been one of the most controversial exports of the United States: greeted with enthusiasm by some, with hostility by others. Yet, few societies escape its influence. However, not all changes should be interpreted simply as "Americanization." The shaping of the postwar world has been much more complex than this term implies as is shown in this volume that explores the links between Americanization and modernity in Western Europe and Japan. In considering the impact of products and images ranging from movies and music to fashion and architecture, a multi-disciplinary group of contributors asks how American culture has been employed internationally in the articulation of postwar identities - be they national or subnational,socially sanctioned or socially transgressive. Their essays on France, Italy, Germany and Japan move beyond the simple paradigms of colonization and democratic modernization, yet retain a sensitivity to the asymmetries in the postwar power relationships between these countries and the United States. An extensive introduction historically locates changing interpretations of American influences abroad and suggests the problems and promises of "Americanization" as an analytical tool. Its comparative focus and interdisciplinary scope will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of cold war and post-cold war history.

From an April 1996 colloquium, The American Cultural Impact on Germany, France, Italy, and Japan, 1945-1995: An International Comparison, 11 essays examine the reception and impact of American products and images. Most of the contributors are historians, but others from fields such as architecture and literature. They move beyond the standard model of cultural colonialism and democratic modernization, while never loosing sight of the asymmetry in power relations between the countries and the US. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From the earliest times, societies have been seduced by the temptation of unitary thinking. Recognizing the vulnerability of existence, people and cultures privilege regimes that confer authority on a single entity, a sovereign ruler, a transcendental deity, or an Event, which they embrace with unquestioned devotion. Such obsessions precipitate contempt for the worldliness of real bodies in real time and refusal of responsibility and agency. In The Perils of the One, Stathis Gourgouris offers a philosophical anthropology that confronts the legacy of “monarchical thinking”: the desire to subjugate oneself to unitary principles and structures, whether political, moral, theological, or secular. In wide-ranging essays that are at once poetic and polemical, intellectual and passionate, Gourgouris reads across politics and theology, literary and art criticism, psychoanalysis and feminism in a critique of both political theology and the metaphysics of secularism. He engages with a range of figures from the Apostle Paul and Trinitarian theologians, to La Boétie, Schmitt, and Freud, to contemporary thinkers such as Clastres, Said, Castoriadis, Žižek, Butler, and Irigaray. At once a broad perspective on human history and a detailed examination of our present moment, The Perils of the One offers glimpses of what a counterpolitics of autonomy would look like from anarchic subjectivities that refuse external ideals, resist the allure of command and obedience, and embrace otherness.