Agorapoetics: Poetics After Postmodernism (Thinking European Worlds)

This collection of nine papers explores the possibilities of a poetics which, after three decades of postmodernist experiments, wishes to refocus on the social and political dimension of the creative enterprise. In the latter years of the twentieth century, poetics has seen a variety of styles and modalities that have both called into question the very nature and need of poetry, and put forth a number of hypotheses. Among these we can list performance art, hybridity with pop and rap music, parody and collage, multilingualism, and an apparently acritical recycling of older or traditional forms. The lyric tradition seems to have continued unperturbed, especially in university settings. What seems to have disappeared from the scene is a poetics of the public sphere, one which is more in tune with broader movements that grew from the smoking debris of the Twin Towers in 2001. In a way, suddenly even postmodernism collapsed. Within a few short years, new poetics emerge (clearly some had been in gestation for decades), such as immigrant poetry, hyphenated poetry, poetry in translation, prose poems, computer-generated textualities, memorialism, technoallegories, and in general political poetry after the void left behind by the Beat generation and European committed writings of the 1970s and the 1980s. The questions the critic and the philosopher ask themselves are: what is the meaning of this transition? What carries over, what is gone for good? And what prospects lie before us? This collection addresses the necessity, in the context of this problematic set of issues, of whether new critical models need to be devised in order to better recognize, describe and relaunch a poetics for the twenty–first century. Read more