Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word - Paperback

by Michael Davidson (Author)

Why do modern poets quote from dictionaries in their poems? How has the tape recorder changed the poet's voice? What has shopping to do with Gertrude Stein's aesthetics? These and other questions form the core of Ghostlier Demarcations, a study of modern poetry as a material medium. One of today's most respected critics of twentieth-century poetry and poetics, Michael Davidson argues that literary materiality has been dominated by an ideology of modernism, based on the ideal of the autonomous work of art, which has hindered our ability to read poetry as a socially critical medium. By focusing on writing as a palimpsest involving numerous layers of materiality--from the holograph manuscript to the printed book--Davidson exposes modern poetry's engagement with larger historical forces. The palimpsest that results is less a poem than an arrested stage of writing in whose layers can be discerned ghostly traces of other texts.

Back Jacket

This groundbreaking and fascinating book has a double value: it provides us with a host of genuinely new readings--of Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen and Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser and Laurie Anderson--but it also provides us with the theoretical and cultural tools whereby recent verbal experiments--whether graphemic, morphemic, or generic--may be understood. A terrific accomplishment!--Marjorie Perloff, author of Wittgenstein's Ladder

Author Biography

Michael Davidson is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (1991) and several books of poetry.