What is 'postirony'? Foremost, it is a response to the ironic zeitgeist. Moreover, it is the key to understanding a specific form of literature. The contemporary reader is familiar with and - ...unfortunately - used to postmodernism's ironic, self-reflexive metafiction. Authors like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers chose a different path: Despite the reign of contemporary irony, they strive to reach the reader on a level beyond, cognitively as well as emotionally - they claim to be sincere and true. Focusing largely on nonfiction by said authors, Lukas Hoffmann explores the means the texts use to achieve something new - namely, a new form of sincerity.
This book presents not just the Romantic Wordsworth, but Wordsworth as part of a large historical movement in poetry, beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing to the present day. It ...concentrates on the difficult, much discussed, but little analyzed problem of "sincerity" in poetry, which it treats both critically and historically, as a demand relatively new in Wordsworth's time and still with us.
Die Buchreihe Frühe Neuzeit - begründet 1987 von Jörg Jochen Berns, Gotthard Frühsorge, Klaus Garber, Wilhelm Kühlmann und Jan-Dirk Müller - dient der Grundlagenforschung in Editionen, Monographien ...und Sammelbänden. Dabei strebt sie nicht die großräumige Überschau an, die vorschnelle Synthese oder prätentiöse Konstruktion, sondern nimmt den Umweg über die Arbeit am Detail und die Erkundung verschütteter Traditionszusammenhänge.
In a work of surprising range and authority, Deborah Forbes
refocuses critical discussion of both Romantic and modern poetry.
Sincerity's Shadow is a versatile conceptual toolkit for
reading poetry.
...Ever since Wordsworth redefined poetry as "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings," poets in English have sought to
represent a "sincere" self-consciousness through their work.
Forbes's generative insight is that this project can only succeed
by staging its own failures. Self-representation never achieves
final sincerity, but rather produces an array of "sincerity
effects" that give form to poetry's exploration of self. In essays
comparing poets as seemingly different in context and temperament
as Wordsworth and Adrienne Rich, Lord Byron and Anne Sexton, John
Keats and Elizabeth Bishop, Forbes reveals unexpected convergences
of poetic strategy. A lively and convincing dialectic is sustained
through detailed readings of individual poems. By preserving the
possible claims of sincerity longer than postmodern criticism has
tended to, while understanding sincerity in the strictest sense
possible, Forbes establishes a new vantage on the purposes of
poetry.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1. The Personal Universal Sincerity as
Integrity in the Poetry of Wordsworth and Rich 2. Before
and After Sincerity as Form in the Poetry of Wordsworth,
Lowell, Rich, and Plath 3. Sincerity and the Staged
Confession The Monologues of Browning, Eliot, Berryman,
and Plath 4. The Drama of Breakdown and the Breakdown of
Drama The Charismatic Poetry of Byron and Sexton
5. Agnostic Sincerity The Poet as Observer in the
Work of Keats, Bishop, and Merrill
Conclusion Notes Index
From the Conclusion
"In spite of modern experiments in communal authorship, writing
poetry remains one of the most individual of acts, and yet, because
it provides the ground upon which the paradoxes of
self-consciousness can move most freely, one of the acts most
skeptical about the authority of any individual claim to
self-understanding. . . . In undertaking its experiments, poetry
may separate itself from certain contexts (economic, political,
historical), but is itself as local and concrete as these contexts,
an experience as well as a meditation on our experiences. In its
particularity, its flexibility, its sensual and sonic complexity,
its consideration of the extra-rational experiences of pleasure and
desire, and above all in the ways in which it speaks with both more
and less authority, more and less presence than an actual human
voice, poetry offers us the experience of the unknown at the core
of proposed self-knowledge. This is lyric poetry's enduring --
though not sole -- claim on us."
Trilling is concerned with the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life--and the further shift ...which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.
