Poetics Today

Journal Article

What Science Can't Know: On Scientific Objectivity and the Human Subject

2024 Poetics Today

The humanities are centrally concerned with such human subjectivity—such thinking, feeling, and wondering—as goes into the appreciation of a painting or the absorbed and responsive reading of a novel. It is often argued that the intrinsic subjectivity of these experiences renders them...

LitStream

Journal Article

Rhetorical Narrative Theory and the Act of Telling: Reflections on the Search for a New Paradigm

Edholm, Roger

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938592

James Phelan presents his rhetorical approach to narrative in opposition to the existing paradigm in contemporary narrative theory. His rhetorical poetics is therefore described as a search for a new paradigm. This article argues, however, that Phelan's view of narrative does not challenge the...

LitStream

Journal Article

Do Poems about Guns Make Guns Poetic?

Savage, Elizabeth

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938605

Poems by Dean Rader, Montana Ray, Danez Smith, Brian Turner, and Elizabeth Willis register a perplexing trend in American poetry: the use of gun and bullet tropes in poems indirectly or not at all about guns. Many of the poets employing these tropes publicly oppose gun violence and promote poetry...

LitStream

Journal Article

Assessing Narrative Space: From Setting to Narrative Environments

Puxan-Oliva, Marta

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938618

This essay addresses the insufficient attention paid in narrative theory to the reformulated concept of space resulting from the spatial turn in the analysis of narrative space. To address this lack of attention, the essay proposes the concept of “narrative environments” as a new lens for...

LitStream

Journal Article

Reversing the Oedipal Reading Practice: Interpellation, Enigmas of Reading, and John Barth's The Floating Opera

Edelsburg, Chen

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938631

This article examines the author-reader relationship as it is shaped by an “enigma of reading.” Evident in texts that directly address their readers, this enigma attempts to interpellate those readers into a specific role. Using two different models of interpellation created by Slavoj Žižek and...

LitStream

Journal Article

Making Known Again: The Rhetorical Function of Anagnorisis in Georges Perec's La disparition

Picherit, Hervé; Thompson, Jason C.

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938644

This article proposes that the main trope of Georges Perec's novel, La disparition (1969), is anagnorisis, or a scene of literary recognition. Though Perec borrows a classical trope described by Aristotle, his novel stands out in that it is not a character that the reader must recognize but an...

LitStream

Journal Article

Forms of Poetic AttentionPoetics and the Gift: Reading Poetry from Homer to Derrida

Lindstrom, Eric

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938657

LitStream

Journal Article

The Blossom Which We Are: The Novel and the Transience of Cultural Worlds

Trumpener, Katie

2024 Poetics Today

doi:10.1215/03335372-10938670