Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens

1990 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 715
Author(s):  
Ian F. A. Bell ◽  
Eleanor Cook
Keyword(s):  
1989 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 490
Author(s):  
Glen MacLeod ◽  
Eleanor Cook
Keyword(s):  

1992 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-137
Author(s):  
Graham Allen
Keyword(s):  

2010 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Sellars

At first sight, environmental issues do not seem to feature prominently, if at all, in the work of Jacques Derrida. This essay aims to take a closer look, and thereby to issue a challenge to the burgeoning discipline of eco-criticism. Instead of promoting the Beautiful Soul who is equipped to save the planet by virtue of reading poetry, I argue for the ethical primacy of waste and welter (to recycle a phrase from Wallace Stevens). Jonathan Bate's The Song of the Earth, a powerful but pious work of eco-criticism, ends with a test proposed to the reader; I take the test, which entails reading Stevens's late poem ‘The Planet on the Table’, and fail. Bate's invocation of Martin Heidegger is briefly examined, as are traces of Derrida. What remains of Derrida, I propose, is neither method nor concept but rather remainders that trouble the grounding of environment (Umwelt) as such.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Jennifer Ford

For generations, alphabet books have been widely used by parents, librarians and teachers as early literacy tools for young children. Through images, word play and the interactions between word and image, alphabet books have the effect of introducing preliterate young children to the names, images, symbols and concepts regarding animals, what Matthew Calarco has called ‘symbolic mechanisms’ of animals—names, images, concepts, cultural associations of animals—yet they can also be deconstructive of those same mechanisms. Derrida's insights into the contradictory logic of the supplement and parergon as well as the ‘destabilising synergies of word and image’ offer deconstructive readings of alphabet books for adult and child readers. Recognising what Derrida calls the ‘childlike’ in texts such as alphabet books creates unique polymorphous spaces for the further interrogation of notions of animals.


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