Donald Wesling – författare

Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn offers a comprehensive analysis of Edward Dorn's work, examining his distinctive poetic voice and his critique of American society. This volume presents Dorn as a poet who, through his nomadic and marginal lifestyle, engages with and challenges the socio-political and cultural narratives of his time. Central to Dorn’s work is his ability to weave historical and social contexts into his poetry, using humor, irony, and moral inquiry to dissect issues like capitalism, racism, and the myths of the American West. The title metaphor, "Internal Resistances," encapsulates Dorn's dual identity as both a critic of societal norms and an artist deeply entrenched in those very contradictions.The book spans Dorn’s career, covering major works such as Slinger, his magnum opus, alongside his shorter poems and essays. Contributors explore Dorn’s use of wit, song, and satire, illustrating his capacity to balance didacticism with poetic subtlety. Essays delve into his engagement with Native American themes, his satirical portrayal of capitalist figures, and his critique of institutional language and power. By framing Dorn as a modern Swiftian figure, the book highlights his refusal to conform to literary and cultural expectations, asserting his place as a significant, though often overlooked, voice in American poetry. This collection ultimately situates Dorn as a moral and innovative poet whose work challenges the boundaries of "postmodern" poetry, extending its reach into political and ethical discourse.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity explores the evolving role of rhyme in poetry within the context of modernity's emphasis on innovation. This book examines how rhyme, once synonymous with poetry itself, has transitioned from being an essential poetic device to one that is often questioned, distorted, or omitted. Through the lens of rhyme, the book investigates broader poetic conventions and their historical shifts, offering insights into how literary texts are crafted and received in an era where stylistic pluralism and avant-garde tendencies prevail. By analyzing rhyme as both a technical element and a cultural marker, the study illuminates its enduring power to evoke pleasure, even as it sparks suspicion and challenges contemporary poetic norms.Positioning rhyme as a gateway to larger discussions in poetics, the book delves into its duality—its mnemonic allure and its potential for solipsistic disruption. It considers how rhyme functions as a reflection of poetry's historical and structural evolution, marking the tension between tradition and innovation. Ultimately, this work is not just about rhyme but about the dynamic interplay between poetic devices and the broader aesthetic, historical, and cultural forces that shape modern literary expression. It invites readers to reflect on the enduring significance of rhyme as a technical and philosophical bridge between the old and the new in poetic craft.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn offers a comprehensive analysis of Edward Dorn's work, examining his distinctive poetic voice and his critique of American society. This volume presents Dorn as a poet who, through his nomadic and marginal lifestyle, engages with and challenges the socio-political and cultural narratives of his time. Central to Dorn’s work is his ability to weave historical and social contexts into his poetry, using humor, irony, and moral inquiry to dissect issues like capitalism, racism, and the myths of the American West. The title metaphor, "Internal Resistances," encapsulates Dorn's dual identity as both a critic of societal norms and an artist deeply entrenched in those very contradictions.The book spans Dorn’s career, covering major works such as Slinger, his magnum opus, alongside his shorter poems and essays. Contributors explore Dorn’s use of wit, song, and satire, illustrating his capacity to balance didacticism with poetic subtlety. Essays delve into his engagement with Native American themes, his satirical portrayal of capitalist figures, and his critique of institutional language and power. By framing Dorn as a modern Swiftian figure, the book highlights his refusal to conform to literary and cultural expectations, asserting his place as a significant, though often overlooked, voice in American poetry. This collection ultimately situates Dorn as a moral and innovative poet whose work challenges the boundaries of "postmodern" poetry, extending its reach into political and ethical discourse.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1985.

The Chances of Rhyme: Device and Modernity explores the evolving role of rhyme in poetry within the context of modernity's emphasis on innovation. This book examines how rhyme, once synonymous with poetry itself, has transitioned from being an essential poetic device to one that is often questioned, distorted, or omitted. Through the lens of rhyme, the book investigates broader poetic conventions and their historical shifts, offering insights into how literary texts are crafted and received in an era where stylistic pluralism and avant-garde tendencies prevail. By analyzing rhyme as both a technical element and a cultural marker, the study illuminates its enduring power to evoke pleasure, even as it sparks suspicion and challenges contemporary poetic norms.Positioning rhyme as a gateway to larger discussions in poetics, the book delves into its duality—its mnemonic allure and its potential for solipsistic disruption. It considers how rhyme functions as a reflection of poetry's historical and structural evolution, marking the tension between tradition and innovation. Ultimately, this work is not just about rhyme but about the dynamic interplay between poetic devices and the broader aesthetic, historical, and cultural forces that shape modern literary expression. It invites readers to reflect on the enduring significance of rhyme as a technical and philosophical bridge between the old and the new in poetic craft.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

This response to Derrida's critique of the spoken uses dozens of examples in four languages to explore the voice that is in writing.Jacques Derrida has ably analyzed the writing that is in speaking, but this reply to his work analyzes the speaking that is in writing. This book defends and illustrates literary voice against modern philosophy's critique of the spoken, and in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Henri Meschonnic's studies on subjectivity in rhythmic language. The authors find literary voice to be maximal in bardic speech, where the author speaks for the nation. This full voice stands between the two minimums of the body (grunts and sighs and birdsong), and the material text (loss of logic, narrative, and social tones in Nietzsche and in the American LANGUAGE poets).

First published in 1970, this stylistic and interpretative account of some of Wordsworth’s major poetry examines description and meditation in his landscape writing. It describes the integration of two kinds of thinking, and a variety of beauties and lapses that come from their separation. Although Wordsworth’s deepest affinity was with nature, the author argues the finest landscape writing of the poet’s late twenties and early thirties derives from his attempt to humanise his love of nature. This work therefore aims to examine the way in which Wordsworth strives in his poetry to extend his range of concern from love of nature to love of mankind.

First published in 1970, this stylistic and interpretative account of some of Wordsworth’s major poetry examines description and meditation in his landscape writing. It describes the integration of two kinds of thinking, and a variety of beauties and lapses that come from their separation. Although Wordsworth’s deepest affinity was with nature, the author argues the finest landscape writing of the poet’s late twenties and early thirties derives from his attempt to humanise his love of nature. This work therefore aims to examine the way in which Wordsworth strives in his poetry to extend his range of concern from love of nature to love of mankind.

Animal Perception and Literary Language shows that the perceptual content of reading and writing derives from our embodied minds.

Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons is a literary approach to consciousness where Donald Wesling denies that emotion is the scandal or handmaid of reason—rather emotion is the co-creator with reason of human life in the world. Discoveries in neuro-science in the 1990s Decade of the Brain have proven that thinking and feeling are wrapped with each other, and regulate and fulfill each other. Accepting this co-creative equality, we reveal a new role for literature, or a traditional role we’ve repressed: literature as a set of processes in time where we’ve thought feeling through stories about the lives of imaginary persons. We need these stories in order to practice emotions for when we return to the world from reading. Donald Wesling argues that to be more accurate in our dealings with stories, we require a grammar of this new recognition, where we build up traditional stylistics by a more careful tracking of emotion-states as these are set into writing.The first half of Joys and Sorrows of Imaginary Persons offers a creative stock-taking of the current state of scholarship on emotion, based on wide reading in several fields. The second half gives three focused studies, rich in examples, of emotion as cognition, as story, and as historical structure of feeling.