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Chapter 17 - Lyrical Ethics

from Part III - Revisionary Readings of Stevens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2021

Bart Eeckhout
Affiliation:
Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium
Gül Bilge Han
Affiliation:
Uppsala Universitet, Sweden
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Summary

In the concluding chapter, Skibsrud proposes to reactivate ethical questions implicit in Wallace Stevens’s work. Building on the work of scholars like Derek Attridge, William Waters, Rachel Cole, Mara Scanlon, and others, she argues for the lyric as an actual—rather than virtual—extension of subjectivity beyond a linear narrative frame. Skibsrud emphasizes Stevens’s interest in presenting poetry as an opportunity for engagement and interpretation, while simultaneously taking seriously his emphasis on the impasse of language and subjective perception. Through close readings of several poems taken from different moments in his career, this final chapter acts both as testament to and an argument for the capacity of lyric to express the nonlinear, fundamentally poetic, relation between language and truth, self and other.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Works cited

Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, 2006.Google Scholar
Cole, Rachel. “Rethinking the Value of Lyric Closure: Giorgio Agamben, Wallace Stevens, and the Ethics of Satisfaction.PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, March 2011, pp. 383–97.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, SUNY P, 2010.Google Scholar
Rovelli, Carlo. The Order of Time. Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell, Penguin, 2018.Google Scholar
Stevens, Wallace. Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Kermode, Frank and Richardson, Joan, Library of America, 1997.Google Scholar

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