Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Modern & Contemporary Poetics)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.53 (990 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0817351515 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 262 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-05-13 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.. A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.
These complexities are exactly what make poetry interesting. "Middleton investigates the manifold events that are usually conglomerated together under the name of reading: interactions of voice and text, of phonology, physiology and psychology; the sociology of the poetry reading; the ways that contemporary technologies connect and disperse a poem's readership. Distant Reading promises to be a groundbreaking study of contemporary poetry—and it's a pleasure to read." —Bob Perelman, author of The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History
Celebrating a poem's 'distance' Paul A. Baker Peter Middleton proposes the concept of 'distant reading' as an antidote to the practice of 'close reading' which, he argues, is far out of date. That's because close readings involve narrowly conceived literary political debates and restricted canons of examples. Close readings limit the available languages and concepts for discuss