Narcissus Sous Rature: Male Subjectivity in Contemporary American Poetry

"In Narcissus Sous Rature, Jody Norton argues that Contemporary American poetry's characteristic problematic is the subject's contestation of hir discursive condition. While self-comprehension is a central, recurrent concern in post-literate poetry, most poetries in English since the Enlightenment have conceived their lyric subjects in accordance with the foundational Western philosophical assumption of the rationality of being. However, after Freud, Heisenberg, Saussure, Derrida, and Lacan, conceptions of the lyric "I" as representative of a more or less permanent, self-conscious, and self-possessed personality, inhabiting an ontologically dependable natural and historical world in a consistent way are no longer credible." "The problems of how to conceptualize the psycho-linguistic structuration of the male (putatively masculine) subject and hir relation to hir cultural environment, and of how to represent both the subject and hir relations in a medium - language - that is complexly involved in the construction of both the subject and hir representation (and, in a certain sense, of the subject as representation) emerge, for Contemporary poets, out of an historic moment particularly strongly marked by theoretical developments in extra-literary fields. Norton asserts that the lyric speaker in Contemporary American poetry cannot be understood unless the explicit and implicit dialogic relations between religious, philosophical, psychological, linguistic, aesthetic, critical and poetic texts are made central to the interpretive project."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved