Download e-book for iPad: Radical Poetics and Secular Jewish Culture (Modern & by Stephen Paul Miller,Daniel Morris,Hank Lazer,Charlie

--Franz Kafka

Kafka's quip--paradoxical, self-questioning, ironic--highlights vividly a number of the key problems with identification and self-representation for Jewish writers within the twentieth century. No crew of writers higher represents the issues of Jewish identification than Jewish poets writing within the American modernist tradition--specifically secular Jews: these disdainful or suspicious of geared up faith, but perpetually formed by means of these traditions.

This selection of essays is the 1st to deal with this frequently obscured size of contemporary and modern poetry: the secular Jewish measurement. Editors Daniel Morris and Stephen Paul Miller requested their participants to deal with what constitutes radical poetry written by means of Jews outlined as "secular," and even if there's a Jewish part or size to radical and modernist poetic perform commonly. those poets and critics tackle those questions by means of exploring the legacy of these poets who preceded and prompted them--Stein, Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen, and Ginsberg, between others.

While there's no effortless solution for those writers approximately what it capability to be a Jew, of their responses there's a wealthy experience of ways being Jewish displays on their aesthetics and practices as poets, and the way the culture of the avant-garde informs their identities as Jews. Fragmented identities, irony, skepticism, a feeling of self as "other" or "outsider," mistrust of the literal, and trust in a practice that questions instead of answers--these are the various traits those poets see as universal to themselves, the poetry they make, and the culture they paintings within.