Senses of Style

Poetry before Interpretation

Jeff Dolven

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226517254
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

In an age of interpretation, style eludes criticism. Yet it does so much tacit work: telling time, telling us apart, telling us who we are. What does style have to do with form, history, meaning, our moment's favored categories? What do we miss when we look right through it? Senses of Style essays an answer. An experiment in criticism, crossing four hundred years and composed of nearly four hundred brief, aphoristic remarks, it is a book of theory steeped in examples, drawn from the works and lives of two men: Sir Thomas Wyatt, poet and diplomat in the court of Henry VIII, and his admirer Frank O'Hara, the midcentury American poet, curator, and boulevardier. Starting with puzzle of why Wyatt's work spoke so powerfully to O'Hara across the centuries, Jeff Dolven ultimately explains what we talk about when we talk about style, whether in the sixteenth century, the twentieth, or the twenty-first.

INDEX

Proper names and concepts from the main text are indexed by page number. Substantial treatments of people or topics in the notes are treated the same way. Many section headings in the main text repeat; those that do are numbered (e.g. §114 the aspect of style (2)), and they are indexed here in bold by their section number (e.g. aspect of style, the, §84, §114) so that the reader who wishes to consider them as a sequence may easily do so.

aboutness, 11, 14, 37, 64, 124–25, 134, 179. See also likeness; substance

abstract expressionism, 51, 70, 76, 103, 140, 148, 164–65

action, 24, 26, 112–13, 126, 140, 145, 148, 158–59, 163, 172, 182. See also gesture

adjectives, 26, 64, 88, 140–43, 145

aesthetics, 84–97, 105, 118, 145, 169, 172, 225. See also beauty; form

against interpretation, §268, §271, §273, §274, §276, §278

Allen, Donald, 2, 3, 4, 75, 103; The New American Poetry, 6, 139

allusion, §373, §375

alreadyness, 3, 11, 19, 34, 36, 44, 94, 122, 128, 130–32, 143, 156, 158, 160, 167, 182–83. See also time

and so on, §24, §172, §311

anxiety of appropriation, the, §99, §159, §327

Apollinaire, Guillaume, 32, 73–74, 82, 117, 158

appropriation, 48, 76, 101–2, 117, 142, 154–55

Aquilina, Mario, 225

Arendt, Hannah, 172

Aretino, Pietro,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Continuing
• Part and Whole
• Style v. Substance
• Art and Nature
• Style v. Aesthetics
• Individual and Group
• Style v. Interpretation
• Description and Judgment
• Style v. Narrative
• Continuing
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index