This essay turns from a discussion of measure as it pertains to poetry to a discussion of Hölderlin’s poem “In Lovely Blueness” in the context of Heidegger’s essay on that poem, “Poetically Man Dwells.” For Hölderlin, paradoxically, although man measures himself against the godhead, there is a sense in which, for man, there is no measure on earth. I argue that Heidegger’s attempt to bridge the gap between absence and presence has the effect of “retheologizing” the poem and distorting its meaning. The argument proceeds partly by measuring several English translation of the poem against one another.

For Mina Loy, human appetites are often comical, even uproarious. This essay considers Loy’s use of risibility–the desire to laugh–as it accompanies and extends her examinations of longings such as sexuality and hunger. Modernist philosophers like Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud were preoccupied with laughter; Loy responds to their approaches in her writing, as do many of her contemporaries, particularly Wyndham Lewis. Here it is argued that in her poetry and her thirties novel, Insel, Loy depicts a desiring body neither whole nor inviolate—a body determined by otherness and endlessness. Loy’s articulation of desire, in other words, is both in league with, and more extreme than that of French philosopher Georges Bataille, who was himself a product of a large-scale reconsiderationof human longing at the outset of the twentieth century.

Charles Olson’s erudite poetry and prose have elicited discussions that emphasize sources he himself references or was known to consult. The present essay counters this trend by examining the importance of John Dewey’s concept of experience for understanding the largest stakes of Olson’s project. Although Olson is not known to have read Dewey or to have attended the lectures that became Art as Experience (1934), Dewey can be seen as the signal pragmatist precursor for Olson’s attempts to unite art and experience in a more holistic model of culture than the hierarchical and alienated one that prevailed after World War II. Like Dewey, Olson emphasizes the importance of direct experience over received knowledge, values the rough, unpolished quality of vernacular creation over the normative esthetics of cultural institutions, believes in the pedagogical effectiveness of both experience and art, and sees artistic form as arising out of fully engaged experience.

Modernism is often characterised by its appeal to painting rather than to music as a model of literary form. This essay explores what is taken to be a continuing dependence on metre and rhythm as types of signification. From Swinburne and Mallarmé through to Pound and Eliot, it is argued, poets looked to “musical” effects of verse as rich sources of memory and association.

“Every man his specialty” brings recent debates about dependency into the foreground of disability studies by looking at one modernist author, Samuel Beckett, whose characters are often disabled but who rely on each other for solace and support. Beckett’s plays explore the “abject dependence” of individuals for whom ontological and theological props have been removed and who must negotiate the passing of time in order as Estragon in Godot says, “to create the illusion we exist.

In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy, famously, as an activity that consists in forming, inventing, and fabricatingconcepts.” But this definition of philosophy implies a somewhat singular “analytic of the concept,” to borrow Kant’s phrase. One of the problems it posesis the fact that concepts, from a Deleuzian perspective, have no identity but only a becoming. This paper examines the nature of this problem, arguing thatthe aim of Deleuze analytic is to introduce the form of time into concepts in terms of what he calls “continuous variation” or “pure variability.” The aim isnot to rediscover the eternal or the universal, but to find the conditions under which something new is produced (creativeness).

The Anthropocentric Vision: Aesthetics of Effect and Terror in Poe’s ‘Hop-Frog’” develops the possible psycho-social results of emotional hegemony through a semi-anthropoid figure who avenges himself on a king desperate to assert and sustain supremacy over his subjects. This essay juxtaposes modern anthropological study and Poe’s fiction; it demonstrates that an anthropocentric study of the author’s aesthetics of terror in “Hop Frog” reveals that what we see and perceive as essential to the titular character’s poetics of revenge and hatred are nothing but a reflection of our (the readers’) own anthropocentrism. This anthropocentric study provides a glimpse into how humans perceive, adapt, and conquer adversarial forces within the society. However, the collapse of the apparent rational order, effected by Hop Frog at the end, also provides a glimpse into the nether side of human consciousness and its illimitable capacity to defy comprehension.

Re-presenting the historically silenced subjects is among the trickiest negotiations a researcher has to enter, especially when working with ancient texts. This essay uses a quasi-experimental, reader’s-response approach to academic writing to spotlight the problem of “recovering” marginalized subjects from across cultures and (pre-) histories. The major thrust of the inquiry is the rhetorical challenge of representing silenced or marginalized subjects in revisionary work. Weaving together personal reflections and academic arguments, the essay presents the process of scholarly research as a heuristic for formulating arguments. The essay also proposes–and demonstrates–a process-based approach that takes into account researcher’s positionality.

This “experimental” essay both investigates maps and functions as a map. Taking its cue from the Deleuzean rhizome, this essay proposes a new method of inquiry based upon the Scientific Method. This essay works as a series of displacements. Each piece of new evidence will take the paper in a different direction. After each piece of evidence is introduced, it will be my job to draw conclusions about the displacement. This inquiry works like a Deleuzean map.