The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens - Couverture souple

Rosu, Anca

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0817358862 ISBN 13 : 9780817358860

Editeur : University Alabama Press, 2016

Synopsis

Where sound speaks louder than meaning—Stevens’s poetry as a metaphysical echo.

Wallace Stevens dedicated his poetry to challenging traditional notions about reality, truth, knowledge, and the role of language as a means of representation. Rosu demonstrates that Stevens's experimentation with sound is not only essential to his poetics but also profoundly linked to the pragmatist ideas that informed his way of thinking about language. Her readings of Stevens's poems focus on revealing the dynamic through which meaning emerges in language patterns—a dynamic she calls "images of sound."

Rosu argues that the formal aspects of poetry are deeply ingrained in cultural realities and are, in fact, generated by their context. The sound pattern pervading Stevens's poems at once addresses and violates the reader's assumptions about the functioning of language and, along with them, ideas about reality, knowledge, and subjectivity. Sound is thus the starting point of an argument concerned with Stevens's epistemology and poetics—the way his poems insist on a movement past or through a normal poetic representation of the world to gesture toward a reality that lies outside or beyond systems of representation.

The relationship between sound and meaning isolated and analyzed in The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens is firmly situated among critical debates concerning the poet's aesthetic and philosophical convictions. Rosu claims that Stevens's poetry is not ultimately about the powerlessness of language, nor is it a deconstructive enterprise of destabilizing culturally consecrated truths; rather it achieves meaning most frequently through patterns of sound. Sound helps Stevens make a deeply philosophical point in a language unavailable to philosophers.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Anca Rosu is a professor of literature and composition at DeVry University in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University Alabama Press
• Date d'édition: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0817358862
• ISBN 13: 9780817358860
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 198
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: non disponible