Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) - Softcover

Middleton, Professor Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0817351515 ISBN 13: 9780817351519

Publisher: University Alabama Press, 2005

Synopsis

A dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance.

Distant Reading considers poetry as performance, offers new insights into its popularity, and proposes a new history of its origins. It also explores related issues concerning the reception of poetry, the impact of the computer on how we read poetry, the persistence of the letter "I" in poems by avant-garde poets, the strangeness of the line-break as a demand on the reader's attention, and the idea of the reader as consumer. These themes are connected by a historically contextualized and theoretically sophisticated discussion of contemporary American and British poets continuing to work in the modernist tradition.

The introductory essay establishes a new methodology that transforms close reading into what Middleton calls "distant reading," interpretive reading that acknowledges the distances that texts travel from their point of composition to readers in other geographical and historical locations. It indicates that poetic innovation is often driven by a desire on the part of the poet to make this distance do cultural work in the meanings that the poem generates.

Ultimately, Distant Reading treats poetry as a cultural practice that is always situated within specific sites of performance—recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen—rather than as a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Middleton is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and author of Literatures of Memory: History, Time, and Space in Postwar Writing (coauthored with Tim Woods), The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Aftermath (poems).

From the Back Cover

Distant Reading is a dynamic account of the history, practice, and theory of poetry as performance. It argues that poetry is a cultural activity that is always situated within specific sites of performance--recited on stage, displayed in magazines, laid out on a page, scrolled on the computer screen--rather than a transcendent cloud of meaning tethered only to its words."Middleton investigates the manifold events that are usually conglomerated together under the name of reading: interactions of voice and text, of phonology, physiology and psychology; the sociology of the poetry reading; the ways that contemporary technologies connect and disperse a poem's readership. These complexities are exactly what make poetry interesting. Distant Reading promises to be a groundbreaking study of contemporary poetry--and it's a pleasure to read."--Bob Perelman, author of The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary HistoryPeter Middleton is Professor of English at the University of Southampton, United Kingdom, and author of The Inward Gaze: Masculinity and Subjectivity in Modern Culture and Aftermath (poems).

Edition details

• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0817351515
• ISBN 13: 9780817351519
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 262