Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry

Determined Negations

Jason Lagapa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783319552842
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This book explores the utopian imagination in contemporary American poetry and the ways in which experimental poets formulate a utopian poetics by adopting the rhetorical principles of negative theology, which proposes using negative statements as a means of attesting to the superior, unrepresentable being of God. With individual chapters on works by such poets as Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Charles Bernstein, and Alice Notley, this book illustrates how a strategy of negation similarly proves optimal for depicting the subject of utopia in literary works.

Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry: Determined Negations contends that negative statements in experimental poetry illustrate the potential for utopian social change, not by portraying an ideal world itself but by revealing the very challenge of representing utopia directly.

Table of contents

• Negative Theology and Utopian Thought in Contemporary American Poetry
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Our Message Was Electric: Susan Howe and the Resuscitation of Failed Utopian Projects
• 3 And Be Whole Again: Antiphony, Deprivation, and the “Not-Yet” Place of Utopia in Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem
• 4 Leave Us the World: Apophasis, Dissent and the Pluralist Politics of Charles Bernstein’s Poetry
• 5 Pages to Come: Utopian Longing and the Merging of the Detective Story with the Artist’s Novel in Alice Notley’s Disobedience
• 6 Afterword—Not Yet the End: the Resistance to Closure in Bloch’s Anticipatory Consciousness and Contemporary Experimental Poetry
• Works Cited
• Index