20th century poetry
A01=Walter Kalaidjian
American poetry
Author_Walter Kalaidjian
Category=DSBH
Category=DSC
Cultural memory
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eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Genocide in literature
History in literature
Holocaust in literature
Literature criticism
Modernism
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Traumatic past
Product details
- ISBN 9780801882319
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2006
- Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In The Edge of Modernism, Walter Kalaidjian explores American poetry on genocide, the Holocaust, and total war as well as on postwar social antagonisms, racial oppression, and domestic violence. By asking what it means for traumatic memory to have agency in the American verse tradition, Kalaidjian creates an original historical account of how American poets became witnesses, often unconsciously, to modern extremity. Combining psychoanalytic theory and cultural studies, this intense, sweeping account of modern poetics analyzes the ways in which literary form gives testimony to the trauma of twentieth-century history. Through close readings of well-known and less familiar poets-among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Edwin Rolfe, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Peter Balakian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Anne Sexton, and Anthony Hecht-Kalaidjian discerns the latent "edge" of modern trauma as it cuts through the literary representations, themes, and formal techniques of twentieth-century American poetics. In this way, The Edge of Modernism advances an innovative and dynamic model of modern periodization.
Walter Kalaidjian is a professor of English at Emory University.
