Recherche multi-critères

This article aims at shedding light on the work of Menka Shivdasani, a key figure of contemporary Indian poetry in English. It highlights her involvement in the collective poetry scene of Mumbai and her commitment to connect it to the world. It also focuses on the singular poetic voice she elaborates in the personal itinerary of her poetic work, shaping the self-portrait of a woman poetess in contemporary India.

In this talk given at the ENS Lyon, Christine Froula (Northwestern University), author of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity (2005), Modernism's Body: Sex Culture and Joyce (1996) and To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound's Cantos (1985), explores the interplay of inherited literary forms and conventions, contingent features of modernity and aesthetic imagination in the forging of the formally innovative modernist poetics of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931), and Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos (1948).

Professeure invitée à l'ENS de Lyon, Betsy Erkkilä (Northwestern University) a donné une série de conférences sur Leaves of Grass de Walt Whitman. Elle revient ici sur l'aspect révolutionnaire de la poésie de Whitman.

As a lonely young man largely forgotten by the world and invisible to the most gorgeous women whom you adore, should you not be writing melancholy poetry or the vain prose of deep self-regard. Instead you are drawn to cinema, you derive so much from movies, and it appears that you have been infected by the unsung altruism of commercial cinema, its duty to entertain. Is it because you think you know how to entertain? Is that your conceit? Or is it humility that pushes you to entertain? Is it not true that you find the need to have a deal with your audience – ‘I have something to say and I am afraid you may not be interested, but I seek the right to say it by giving you something in return’. Isn’t that the humility of cinema?

The idea that novels, theater, or poetry often help us live, that they help us feel cleansed or feel stronger, more energized, more alive, or that they at least help us survive by giving us the boost we need to hang on a little longer, is not simply a constant topos of literature, be it western, eastern, or universal. It is an indisputable truth for those who make use of it, whether they write it, read it, comment on it, or transform it into a first-aid kid of maxim-prescriptions and citation-medicines to use as needed.

This article proposes to present the American literary and publishing scene of the 1920s, that favored the publication of Langston Hughes's first two volumes of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926) and Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927). I will first attempt to define the Harlem Renaissance, its temporal boundaries and leading figures, before highlighting the particular nexus of magazine editors, white patrons and publishers, that contributed to the flowering of the New Negro movement.

This article presents an analysis of Dylan Thomas’s early poem “When once the twilight locks no longer”, ignored by scholars, probably because of its extreme obscurity. The analysis is preceded by a theoretical discussion of obscurity in poetry and offers a definition of the term “obscure poem”. I argue that in reading an obscure poem significant changes are generated in the dynamics of text processing. In transgressing the rules of communication, Thomas’s poem raises the question as to how the reader is to decode it.

Cohen's poetry – the title of the book makes no mystery of it – deals essentially with longing: longing for women, for God, or simply truth. What emerges from the whole book is the idea of an irretrievable loss. From the beginning, we learn that in spite of the author's retreat on Mount Baldy, enlightenment has hardly touched him: he has found neither God nor any essential truth.