What’s new about the apocalypse? Revelation does not allow us to look back after the end and enumerate pivotal turning points. It happens in an immediate encounter with the transformatively new. John Milton’s and Andrew Marvell’s lyrics attempt to render the experience of such an apocalyptic change in the present. In this respect they take seriously the Reformation’s insistence that eschatology is a historical phenomenon. Yet these poets are also reacting to the Regicide, and, as a result, their works explore very modern questions about the nature of events, what it means for a significant historical occasion to happen. Lyric Apocalypse argues that Milton’s and Marvell’s lyrics challenge any retrospective understanding of events, including one built on a theory of revolution. Instead, these poems show that there is no “after” to the apocalypse, that if we are going to talk about change, we should do so in the present, when there is still time to do something about it. For both of these poets, lyric becomes a way to imagine an apocalyptic event that would be both hopeful and new.

New technologies and scientific imagination rearrange the boundary that we identify as the beginning and end of life. New techno-social constellations, such as the ever-increasing presence of digital avatars and genetic screenings, implore us to reconsider and transcend the existing definitions of life and death. Through a multidisciplinary approach, this volume explores how the limitations and perceived finality of life and death are reconstituted through engagements with modern technology.

Establishes Shakespeares plays as some of the periods most speculative political literature Shakespeares Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeares plays reveal there is always something more terrifying to the king than rebellion. The book seeks to move beyond the presumption that political evolution leads ineluctably away from autocracy and aristocracy toward republicanism and popular sovereignty. Instead, it argues for affirmative politics in Shakespeare the process of transforming scenes of negative affect into political resistance. Shakespeares Fugitive Politics makes the case that Shakespeares affirmative politics appears not in his dialectical opposition to sovereignty, absolutism, or tyranny; nor is his affirmative politics an inchoate form of republicanism on its way to becoming politically viable. Instead, this study claims that it is in the place of dissensus that the expression of the eventful condition of affirmative politics takes place a fugitive expression that the sovereign order always wishes to shut down. Key FeaturesPromotes a new understanding of 'fugitive democracy'Establishes the presence of a form of alternative politics in early modern drama, articulated through the contours of theories of sovereigntyExplores how the parameters of contemporary radical politics take shape in major Shakespeare plays, including Coriolanus, King John, Henry V, Titus Andronicus, The Winters Tale and Julius Caesar

Impossible Desire and the Limits of Knowledge in Renaissance Poetry examines the limits of embodiment, knowledge, and representation at a disregarded nexus: the erotic carpe diem poem in early modern England. These macabre seductions offer no compliments or promises, but instead focus on the lovers' anticipated decline, and--quite stunningly given the Reformation context--humanity's relegation not to a Christian afterlife but to a Marvellian 'desert of vast Eternity.' In this way, a poetic trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. Its ambitions were thus largely philosophical, and came to incorporate investigations into the nature of matter, time, and poetic representation. Renaissance seduction poets invited their auditors to participate in a dangerous intellectual game, one whose primary interest was expanding the limits of knowledge. The book theorizes how Renaissance lyric's own fragile relationship to materiality and time, and its self-conscious relationship to making, positioned it to grapple with these 'impossible' metaphysical and representational problems. Although attentive to poetics, the book also challenges the commonplace view that the erotic invitation is exclusively a lyrical mode. Carpe diem's revival in post-Reformation Europe portends its radicalization, as debates between man and maid are dramatized in disputes between abstractions like chastity and material facts like death. Offered here is thus a theoretical reconsideration of the generic parameters and aspirations of the carpe diem trope, wherein questions about embodiment and knowledge are also investigations into the potentialities of literary form.

This book shows how rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry. Intervening in recent debates over formalism, historicism, and poetics, the authors show how rhythm is at once a defamiliarizing aesthetic force and an unstable concept. Distinct from the related terms to which it’s often assimilated—scansion, prosody, meter—rhythm makes legible a range of ways poetry affects us that cannot be parsed through the traditional resources of poetic theory. Rhythm has rich but also problematic roots in still-lingering nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics. But there are reasons to understand and even embrace its seductions, including its resistance to lyrical voice and even identity. Through exploration of rhythm’s genealogies and present critical debates, the essays consistently warn against taking rhythm to be a given form offering ready-made resources for interpretation. Pressing beyond poetry handbooks’ isolated descriptions of technique or inductive declarations of what rhythm “is,” the essays ask what it means to think rhythm. Rhythm, the contributors show, happens relative to the body, on the one hand, and to language, on the other—two categories that are distinct from the literary, the mode through which poetics has tended to be analyzed. Beyond articulating what rhythm does to poetry, the contributors undertake a genealogical and theoretical analysis of how rhythm as a human experience has come to be articulated through poetry and poetics. The resulting work helps us better understand poetry both on its own terms and in its continuities with other experiences and other arts. Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy

This work is primarily a genre study, aiming both at enlarging the canon of pastoral texts and at theorizing generical development in a comparative context. Addressed to a general audience of poetry enthusiasts as well as students of genre theory and specialists in the field, the book takes as its examples the twin pastoral genres of funeral elegy and marriage hymns. Schenck establishes in her introduction that the strategies she isolates in elegies and epithalamia govern lyric processes more generally; that in fact every poem might be an epitaph if it pronounces an elegy upon a former poetic self and announces rebirth of the artist as a poet. All poems are genuinely epitaphic in their attempt to record verbally and lastingly the death and implied rebirth of the poet as poet each time he lifts his pen to begin a new poem. The specific forms explored in this book, elegy and epithalamium, serve precisely as model initiatory scenarios. Elegies tend to gesture toward the past, pronouncing an epitaph upon poetic apprenticeship and recovery voice by means of symbolic burial of a forebear. Marriage poems, alternatively, are future-directed, celebrating (as do elegies) passage from virgin to mature state. Both forms aim at circumventing mortality, by apotheosis and deification in the case of the elegy, and by the projection forth of &"issue&" at the end of the marriage poem. Investigation of the symbolic reciprocity of these seemingly distinct forms yields a surprising range of variant forms, extends provocatively Claudio Guillen's theory of genre and counter-genre, and initiates a poetics of pastoral ceremony that has implications for the general study of lyric modes.

After half a century exploring dialectical thought, renowned cultural critic Fredric Jameson presents a comprehensive study of a misunderstood yet vital strain in Western philosophy. The dialectic, the concept of the evolution of an idea through conflicts arising from its inherent contradictions, transformed two centuries of Western philosophy. To Hegel, who dominated nineteenth-century thought, it was a metaphysical system. In the works of Marx, the dialectic became a tool for materialist historical analysis. Jameson brings a theoretical scrutiny to bear on the questions that have arisen in the history of this philosophical tradition, contextualizing the debate in terms of commodification and globalization, and with reference to thinkers such as Rousseau, Lukcs, Heidegger, Sartre, Derrida, and Althusser. Through rigorous, erudite examination, Valences of the Dialectic charts a movement toward the innovation of a "spatial" dialectic. Jameson presents a new synthesis of thought that revitalizes dialectical thinking for the twenty-first century.

What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city? An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire’s evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder—the city’s version of a transcendent atmosphere—as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction. Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire’s disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann’s modernization of Paris influenced the poet’s work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment. Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire’s ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a “modern beauty” from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience.

Argues that if poems are to matter in American culture, they must be read rather than theorized over.