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- Title
Metatexts: classical reception without the classics in the poetics of Charles Bernstein.
- Authors
Pfaff, Matthew
- Abstract
Against the grain, I suggest that an understanding of the relationship of the classical to avant-garde practice is both less understood and more urgent than ever before to a well-rounded picture of contemporary avant-garde poetics. At the same time, I argue that avant-garde poetics after modernism offer unique opportunities for the field of classical reception studies. I begin to explore these opportunities by looking to perhaps the most controversial, and last widely recognized, avant-garde movement in American poetics, Language Poetry, and perhaps the most well-known Language poet, Charles Bernstein. One of the most persistent and remarkable features of reception, in Bernstein's work, is the characteristic appearance of classicism apart from classical texts, or what I am calling 'metatextual' reception. This takes the form of (1) the invention of scholarly erudition or classical pedagogical authority through the formal device of the reference, allusion, and footnote; (2) the invention of difficulty through the formal device of orthography; and (3) the invention of the idea of an 'original text' by foregrounding critical intervention and nested distancing procedures. Each of these instances of reception isolates the textual and linguistic mechanisms of classical reception from the 'object' of reception in Greek and Latin texts.
- Subjects
HISTORY of poetics; BERNSTEIN, Charles, 1950-; LANGUAGE poetry; EXPERIMENTAL literature; 20TH century American poetry; TWENTIETH century
- Publication
Classical Receptions Journal, 2015, Vol 7, Issue 3, p333
- ISSN
1759-5134
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/crj/clu016