Includes bibliographical referencesspace (pages 275-290) and index.
Contents:
Introduction: Witnessing History: The Voice of Postmodern Poetry -- PART 1: Post-Communist Traumas, Post-Modernist Testimonies: Reference, History, and Memory in Russian Conceptualism and Metarealism -- 1. The Problem of Reference in Russian Conceptualism ; 2. Parallel Developments in Other Post-Communist Literatures: A Bulgarian Interlude ; 3. Toward a Meta Understanding of Reality: The Problem of Reference in Russian Metarealist Poetry -- PART 2: Trauma, Reference, and Media Technology in postmodern American poetry: The Testimonies of Language writing. 4. The Problem of Reference in Language Poetry ; 5. Rebelling against Poetic Standards: The Defiant Verbal Aesthetics of Language Poetry ; 6. The Emplacement of Language Poetry and Art in Information-Saturated Environments ; 7. Language Poetry as a Discourse of Trauma ; 8. The Corporeal Response to the Experience of Trauma ; Conclusion: Trauma and History -- Bibliography -- Index.
Summary:
"This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order. Albena Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality. Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.