W.H. Auden: towards a postmodern poetics

✍ Scribed by Rainer Emig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 248
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This study of Auden's complete poetry and plays reads them in conjunction with two crucial twentieth-century concepts, modernism and postmodernism. A detailed analysis of Auden's writings shows their engagement with and eventual rejection of modernism, with its nostalgia for lost certainties and attempts at renewed wholeness. It demonstrates that questions of the self in relation to itself, others and truths require answers that are risky and often lead to the sacrifice of identity and meaning. Yet instead of another wasteland, Auden's works create an appealing optimism out of conscious failure. They advocate the acceptance of limits, admit the need for others without attempting to dominate them, and accept belief as a need rather than a certainty. Most importantly, they develop a very topical ethical position out of their experiments: a challenge to the individual to act responsibly in the face of an absence of guarantees, guidelines and truths.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Editions used in the Text and their Abbreviations......Page 11
1 Taming the Monster......Page 12
2 Early Auden: Farewell to the Signified......Page 20
Images......Page 21
Mechanisms......Page 28
Models......Page 34
Paid and Bought by Both Sides......Page 40
Dances with Marxism......Page 46
Parody or Pathos: The Ascent of F6......Page 52
On the Frontier......Page 56
Changing the Code......Page 63
Unwriting the Self......Page 71
Reading the Other......Page 79
Writing Difference......Page 88
Partings......Page 91
Parables......Page 99
Symbolic Documentaries......Page 111
Pathos......Page 114
Histories of Knowledge......Page 122
Identity and Subversion......Page 126
English Wanderers......Page 129
Plural Perspectives......Page 139
Diaspora and Dialogue......Page 144
Disputes of Will and Love......Page 147
Premature Extrapolations......Page 156
Multiple Codes......Page 159
Dialogue and its Dissidents......Page 168
Allegories of Anxiety......Page 175
In Praise of the Limit......Page 180
A Truce between Subject and Objects......Page 186
A Poetry Coming to its Senses......Page 194
Humane Order......Page 199
Thanksgiving......Page 207
9 Auden’s Postmodernism......Page 215
Notes......Page 224
Bibliography......Page 236
Index......Page 242