Susan Stewart – författare

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original sin, the Christian appropriation of the classical past, and images of decay in early modern allegory. Stewart looks in depth at the works of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, each of whom found in ruins a means of reinventing his art. Lively and engaging, The Ruins Lesson ultimately asks what can resist ruination—and finds in the self-transforming, ever-fleeting practices of language and thought a clue to what might truly endure.

How is poetry a living art? This is the question at the heart of Poetry's Nature. Although it is common to speak of "e;nature poetry,"e; Stewart contends that the essential nature of poetry is bound up with the natural world: by looking to nature, we can better understand poetry and, in turn, our own situation within nature. The study draws on contemporary physics and philosophy to argue that all beings, and all matter, are enmeshed in relations to one another, and that such processural relations can help us to think about poetry as an ever-arriving, ever unfinished art. Based on Stewart's 2023 Clarendon Lectures in English at the University of Oxford, the volume's four chapters explore four paradigms that illuminate poetry's relation to other natural phenomena: the ways poems draw on birdsong to veer between language and sound, and hence between semantic density and meaninglessness; the experience of seasonality as a paradigm for the lyric's recursive use of time; the flows and forms of water as an inspiration for the enactment and depiction of motion and rest in poems; and, finally, the vast domain of the imperceptible as a resource for the imagination. Her examples range from medieval lyrics to Modernism. Poems are events that are felt in time rather than being merely cognized; rewarding of our attention, like the natural world; experienced, like the weather, in our bodies. By reframing poetry in its relation to nature, Poetry's Nature hopes to reframe our relation to the world in which we live, a task that is of ever greater urgency.

How is poetry a living art? This is the question at the heart of Poetry's Nature. Although it is common to speak of "e;nature poetry,"e; Stewart contends that the essential nature of poetry is bound up with the natural world: by looking to nature, we can better understand poetry and, in turn, our own situation within nature. The study draws on contemporary physics and philosophy to argue that all beings, and all matter, are enmeshed in relations to one another, and that such processural relations can help us to think about poetry as an ever-arriving, ever unfinished art. Based on Stewart's 2023 Clarendon Lectures in English at the University of Oxford, the volume's four chapters explore four paradigms that illuminate poetry's relation to other natural phenomena: the ways poems draw on birdsong to veer between language and sound, and hence between semantic density and meaninglessness; the experience of seasonality as a paradigm for the lyric's recursive use of time; the flows and forms of water as an inspiration for the enactment and depiction of motion and rest in poems; and, finally, the vast domain of the imperceptible as a resource for the imagination. Her examples range from medieval lyrics to Modernism. Poems are events that are felt in time rather than being merely cognized; rewarding of our attention, like the natural world; experienced, like the weather, in our bodies. By reframing poetry in its relation to nature, Poetry's Nature hopes to reframe our relation to the world in which we live, a task that is of ever greater urgency.

Crimes of Writings examines questions surrounding subjectivity, authenticity, and writing. First, Stewart examines cases of forgery, literary imposture, pornography and graffiti, and the development, from the early eighteenth century onward, of the laws articulating such crimes. Second, she uses `crimes of writing' to connote the ways in which such practices are in fact inversions or negations of cultural rules. Finally, she claims that crimes of writing are delineated by law because they specifically undermine the status of the Law itself.

From the origins of modern copyright in early eighteenth-century culture to the efforts to represent nature and death in postmodern fiction, this pioneering book explores a series of problems regarding the containment of representation. Stewart focuses on specific cases of "crimes of writing"--the forgeries of George Psalmanazar, the production of "fakelore," the "ballad scandals" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the imposture of Thomas Chatterton, and contemporary legislation regarding graffiti and pornography. In this way, she emphasizes the issues which arise once language is seen as a matter of property and authorship is viewed as a matter of originality. Finally, Stewart demonstrates that crimes of writing are delineated by the law because they specifically undermine the status of the law itself: the crimes illuminate the irreducible fact that law is written and therefore subject to temporality and interpretation.

How is poetry a living art? This is the question at the heart of Poetry's Nature. Although it is common to speak of "nature poetry," Stewart contends that the essential nature of poetry is bound up with the natural world: by looking to nature, we can better understand poetry and, in turn, our own situation within nature. The study draws on contemporary physics and philosophy to argue that all beings, and all matter, are enmeshed in relations to one another, and that such processural relations can help us to think about poetry as an ever-arriving, ever unfinished art. Based on Stewart's 2023 Clarendon Lectures in English at the University of Oxford, the volume's four chapters explore four paradigms that illuminate poetry's relation to other natural phenomena: the ways poems draw on birdsong to veer between language and sound, and hence between semantic density and meaninglessness; the experience of seasonality as a paradigm for the lyric's recursive use of time; the flows and forms of water as an inspiration for the enactment and depiction of motion and rest in poems; and, finally, the vast domain of the imperceptible as a resource for the imagination. Her examples range from medieval lyrics to Modernism. Poems are events that are felt in time rather than being merely cognized; rewarding of our attention, like the natural world; experienced, like the weather, in our bodies. By reframing poetry in its relation to nature, Poetry's Nature hopes to reframe our relation to the world in which we live, a task that is of ever greater urgency.

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award–winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in The Poet’s Freedom. Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work.

Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets—Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources. She begins by considering the theme of making in the Hebrew Scriptures, examining their accountof a god who creates the world and leaves humans free to rearrange and reform the materials of nature. She goes on to follow the force of moods, sounds, rhythms, images, metrical rules, rhetorical traditions, the traps of the passions, and the nature of language in the cycle of making and remaking. Throughout the book she weaves the insight that the freedom to reverse any act of artistic making is as essential as the freedom to create.   A book about the pleasures of making and thinking as means of life, The Poet’s Freedom explores and celebrates the freedom of artists who, working under finite conditions, make considered choices and shape surprising consequences. This engaging and beautifully written notebook on making will attract anyone interested in the creation of art and literature.

Why do we need new art? How free is the artist in making? And why is the artist, and particularly the poet, a figure of freedom in Western culture? The MacArthur Award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart ponders these questions in "The Poet's Freedom". Through a series of evocative essays, she not only argues that freedom is necessary to making and is itself something made, but also shows how artists give rules to their practices and model a self-determination that might serve in other spheres of work. Stewart traces the ideas of freedom and making through insightful readings of an array of Western philosophers and poets - Plato, Homer, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Dante, and Coleridge are among her key sources. She begins by considering the theme of making in the "Hebrew Scriptures", examining their account of a god who creates the world and leaves humans free to rearrange and re-form the materials of nature. She goes on to follow the force of moods, sounds, rhythms, images, metrical rules, rhetorical traditions, the traps of the passions, and the nature of language in the cycle of making and remaking.Throughout the book she weaves the insight that the freedom to reverse any act of artistic making is as essential as the freedom to create. A book about the pleasures of making and thinking as means of life, "The Poet's Freedom" explores and celebrates the freedom of artists who, working under finite conditions, make considered choices and shape surprising consequences. This engaging and beautifully written notebook on making will attract anyone interested in the creation of art and literature.

Susan Stewart plumbs human history in an attempt to articulate the way language, memory, and art join in evoking consciousness. The Forest is about violence and memory: the violence we do to our surroundings and to ourselves; and the propensity of the human mind to exploit and rationalize in its longing for truth.

What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the aesthetic in search of an explanation for the role of poetry in our culture. The task of poetry, she tells us, is to counter the loneliness of the mind, or to help it glean, out of the darkness of solitude, the outline of others. Poetry, she contends, makes tangible, visible, and audible the contours of our shared humanity. It sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence.Herself an acclaimed poet, Stewart not only brings the intelligence of a critic to the question of poetry, but the insight of a practitioner as well. Her new study draws on reading from the ancient Greeks to the postmoderns to explain how poetry creates meanings between persons. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses includes close discussions of poems by Stevens, Hopkins, Keats, Hardy, Bishop, and Traherne, of the sense of vertigo in Baroque and Romantic works, and of the rich tradition of nocturnes in visual, musical, and verbal art. Ultimately, Stewart explores the pivotal role of poetry in contemporary culture. She argues that poetry can counter the denigration of the senses and can expand our imagination of the range of human expression.Poetry and the Fate of the Senses won the 2004 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, administered for the Truman Capote Estate by the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. It also won the Phi Beta Kappa Society's 2002 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism.

In Columbarium, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate this text. Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.

Winner of the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in the category of poetry. In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics. Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the elements-to their destructive and creative aspects and to their roles in the human and more than human worlds. Both nest and crypt, the book''s center holds an alphabet of "shadow georgics," poems of instruction and doubt that link knowledge and the unconscious. Questions of mortality, of goodness and suffering, and of the fragility and power of memory animate these poems. In one poem an apple calls the narrator back from the dead to savor the echoes of its varieties in myth and literature. In another, the seeds of a pear tree reveal the essential unity that makes the diversity of existence possible. Stewart''s Columbarium is both a memorial to the dead and a testament to life.

Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art.Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art—long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections—The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics.The Open Studio will be read eagerly by scholars of art, poetry, and visual theory; by historians interested in the links between contemporary and classic literature and art; and by teachers, students, and practitioners of the visual arts.

Poets often have responded vitally to the art of their time, and ever since Susan Stewart began writing about art in the early 1980s, her work has resonated with practicing artists, curators, art historians, and art critics. Rooted in a broad and learned range of references, Stewart's fresh and independent essays bridge the fields of literature, aesthetics, and contemporary art.Gathering most of Stewart's writing on contemporary art—long and short pieces first published in small magazines, museum and gallery publications, and edited collections—The Open Studio illuminates work ranging from the installation art of Ann Hamilton to the sculptures and watercolors of Thomas Schütte, the prints and animations of William Kentridge to the films of Tacita Dean. Stewart's essays are often the record of studio conversations with living artists and curators, and of the afterlife of those experiences in the solitude of her own study. Considering a wide variety of art forms, Stewart finds pathbreaking ways to explore them. Whether she is following central traditions of painting, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, and printmaking or exploring the less well-known realms of portrait miniatures, collecting practices, doll-making, music boxes, and gardening, Stewart speaks to the creative process in general and to the relation between art and ethics.The Open Studio will be read eagerly by scholars of art, poetry, and visual theory; by historians interested in the links between contemporary and classic literature and art; and by teachers, students, and practitioners of the visual arts.

Red Rover is both the name of a children's game and a formless spirit, a god of release and permission, called upon in the course of that game. The "red rover" is also a thread of desire, and a clue to the forces of love and antipathy that shape our fate. In her most innovative work to date, award-winning poet and critic Susan Stewart remembers the antithetical forces - falling and rising, coming and going, circling and centering - revealed in such games and traces them out to many other cycles. Ranging among traditional, open, and newly invented forms, and including a series of free translations of medieval dream visions and love poems, "Red Rover" begins as a historical meditation on our fall and grows into a song of praise for the green and turning world.

This seventh collection by acclaimed poet Susan Stewart offers a meditation on difficulty and the powers of nature. In the biblical book of Judges, the bramble is a figure of destructive leadership, thwarting the lives of trees. In ballads and fairy tales, roses grow “‘round the briar” in tragic contrast to heroines who are enveloped by the thorns. One of the oldest English words and an even older symbol, “bramble” reminds us of the entangled and unending struggle that comes with living in time and searching beyond appearances. The rough thicket presents impediments, yet it also bears fruit and delicate flowers. With Bramble, Susan Stewart has composed a book of many forms, including satires, elegies, meditations, and songs. Bramble is also an exploration of the act of making such forms. The book’s three sections—“Mirror,” “Briar,” and “Channel”—link lyric time to our lives as they are situated in history and nature. Reflecting upon illness, grief, and change, the poems follow the progress of day and night, the movement of the seasons, and the path of water from springs to the sea.

Lamanna/Riedmann/Stewart's bestselling MARRIAGES, FAMILIES, AND RELATIONSHIPS: MAKING CHOICES IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY, 14th edition, emphasizes a theme that is especially relevant in our modern and global world: making choices in a diverse society. Combining various theoretical perspectives with relevant examples, the text will help you understand how people are influenced by the society around them, how social conditions change in ways that affect family life, the interplay between families and the larger society, and the family-related choices that individuals make throughout adulthood. You'll gain insightful perspectives on different ethnic traditions and family forms. You will also be empowered to question assumptions and reconcile conflicting ideas and values as you make informed choices in your own life. In addition, MindTap digital learning solution helps you learn on your own terms.

Lamanna/Riedmann/Stewart's bestselling MARRIAGES, FAMILIES, AND RELATIONSHIPS: MAKING CHOICES IN A DIVERSE SOCIETY, 15th Edition, emphasizes making choices in an increasingly diverse society. Combining various theoretical perspectives with current and relevant examples, the text helps students better understand themselves and their family situations, making them aware of the personal decisions they will make throughout their lives, societal influences, help them appreciate the variety and diversity among families today and encourage them to recognize the importance of structural, social policy support for families. In addition, the MindTap digital learning solution supports students as they learn on their own terms.

Unmarried at 40—could there be anything worse? Our culture dictates that women who have failed to catch or hold the golden ring of marriage are destined to be deprived and depressed, perhaps even dangerous. Add the burden of age and you have a woman headed for disaster. Not necessarily so, say the authors of Flying Solo, who talked with never-married, divorced, and widowed women in midlife across the country. These women's stories offer blueprints for living, as well as inspiration, for other women "flying solo."Most of these women did not intend to be single at midlife. Yet they have given up the dream of "happily ever after" to create lives on their own that are rich and rewarding. The authors share these women's stories as well as their practical advice on managing the mechanics of being single, transforming loneliness, redefining the place of work, developing friendship and support networks, living with and without intimacy and sex with men, and choosing to have and raise children. In the process they define not just a new American lifestyle but a new American Dream.

This book reviews the interplay between domestic contexts and democracy promotion efforts in selected countries of the former Soviet Union and the Western Balkans. The idea behind the six case studies is twofold. In the three cases where ‘colour revolutions’ occurred (Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine), the authors explore the extent to which external democracy promoters adapted their strategies to respond to new domestic contexts. In the other three cases (Azerbaijan, Belarus, Russia) the authors investigate how the political leadership has reacted to ‘colour revolutions’ elsewhere and which consequences their reactions have had for democracy promotion. In all cases an assessment of democratization processes in the country is provided as a basis for drawing conclusions about the potential for domestic and foreign actors to promote democratic development. An introduction and conclusion embed the case studies in the existing literature on democracy promotion and generalize the findings across the countries studied.On the practical level, the volume offers suggestions for improving democracy promotion endeavours, proposing in particular a more balanced approach which goes beyond supporting specific individuals and organizations to include addressing the structural level.This book was published as a special issue of Democratization.

From a sequence, "The Countries Surrounding the Garden of Eden": Gihon, that compasseth the whole land At the first frost we found our sheep with strangled hearts, lying on their backs in the frozen clover, their eyes wide open as if they were surprised by a constellation of drought or endless winter. The wolves walked into the snow, like men who have given up living without love; cows would no longer let go of their calves, hiding them deep in the birch groves. Everywhere the roads gave off their wild animal cries, running toward the edge of what we had thought was the world. And the names of things as we knew them would no longer bring them to us.

Cosmetics and perfumes were a familiar feature of everyday life in Roman times. A large variety of beauty products were sold across the Roman world and a significant proportion of the population used these products. The display of self, the expression of identity, of gender, of social belonging, of ethnicity and power, all of which have been interpreted through clothing worn in Roman times, can also be seen in the use of make-up and scent. However, research specifically into cosmetics and perfumes and the nature of their use in antiquity has been sparse to date.In this pioneering work the author draws on literary, visual and archaeological evidence to show the importance of cosmetics and perfumes for health, ideas of beauty, social status, as a demonstration of wealth and luxury and as an expression of gender. This survey of the perception and reality of the use of cosmetics and perfumes under the Roman Empire covers the 300 years from the writings of Ovid to the Price Edict of Diocletian in AD 301.The work forms a natural companion volume to A.T. Croom's Roman Clothing and Fashion (Tempus 2000).

The Hive, Susan Stewart’s second collection of poetry, brings together new work into three sections that telescope out from private speech to the public and more deeply historical language of the witness. Recurring poems explore the possibilities of language as ceremony while others are rewritings of romanticism and its places. Of Susan Stewart’s first collection, Yellow Stars and Ice, James Cory wrote in the Philadelphia Inquirer that it is “a reading experience to exult in,” and Library Journal stated that “there is magic as well as finesse in this beautiful collection.”

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space.

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated to animate or realize certain versions of the world. Originally published in 1984 (Johns Hopkins University Press), and now available in paperback for the first time, this highly original book draws on insights from semiotics and from psychoanalytic, feminist, and Marxist criticism. Addressing the relations of language to experience, the body to scale, and narratives to objects, Susan Stewart looks at the "miniature" as a metaphor for interiority and at the "gigantic" as an exaggeration of aspects of the exterior. In the final part of her essay Stewart examines the ways in which the "souvenir" and the "collection" are objects mediating experience in time and space.

Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing.The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. It invites the reader to take a position – it seeks engagement over agreement.