SUNY series, Literature... in Theory – serie

Demonstrates the centrality of thinking about time to decolonial poetry and poetics.Revolutionary Poetics considers the role of politically engaged poetry during social revolutions and processes of decolonization. Javier Padilla argues that writers in Ireland, Central America, Africa, and the Caribbean sought to capture in their poetry the time of liberation—a moment conjoining the end of colonialism and imperialism and the dawn of a decolonized historical consciousness. The book thus analyzes key moments in the history of twentieth-century liberation movements through poetry and poetics, examining the work of W. B. Yeats, Ernesto Cardenal, Pedro Mir, René Depestre, and Roque Dalton alongside the decolonial theories of thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel. These poets reimagined and adapted modernist poetics of instantaneity in order to advance collective aims and bolster the prospects of liberation. While the poetics of temporal rupture can be traced back to earlier Anglo-European traditions, it is in peripheral regions that the revolutionary moment acquired not just aesthetic but also historical and political meaning.

An ambitious, in-depth reexamination of transnational Romanticism, from the late eighteenth century to the present—and into the future.Transcendental Poetics and the Futures of American Romanticism argues that Romanticism does not correspond to a specific archive or period but is rather a project—an effort to reconcile the material and the ideal and to disclose ultimate reality. The book spells out the contours of this project as formulated by its original European and American proponents and examines how it has been taken up and further developed by their twentieth- and twenty-first-century heirs in literature and philosophy. The book's range of engagement is vast as its author, Ridvan Askin, traces conceptual affinities and continuities among the Jena Romantics, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Gilles Deleuze, Charles Olson, E. L. Doctorow, Jennifer Egan, contemporary analytic philosophy of mind, the new materialisms, critical posthumanism, and more. Ultimately, the book calls for a wholesale re-Romanticization of thought, or, more accurately, given that the Romantics themselves did not think that Romanticism had been accomplished and remained a task for the future, the first proper implementation of Romanticism. It is about time that Romanticism finally gets off the ground.

Argues that Freud and a host of twentieth-century writers after him conceptualize mourning as a matter of "hypertranslation," an essentially linguistic endeavor.Mourning After Freud offers new insight into a much-discussed but not yet exhausted topic of twentieth-century discourse. Whereas contemporary trauma theorists have identified interiorization as the central feature of Freud's theory of loss, Birger Vanwesenbeeck argues that Freud above all conceptualizes mourning as a form of translation and, more precisely, of "hypertranslation"—a translation of an unavailable original. Foregrounding the role of language in Freud's thought, the book reveals, provocatively, that the true heirs of his model are to be found not in psychoanalysis or trauma theory but rather in contiguous fields such as deconstruction, African American writing, and second-generation US immigrant literature more broadly. Through a series of close readings of twentieth-century theorists, poets, and novelists—from W. E. B. Du Bois to Sylvia Plath, from Henry Roth to Jacques Derrida—Mourning After Freud reveals time and again that the question of mourning cannot be separated from that of language.