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Literary Criticism General

Wallace Stevens among Others

Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture

by (author) David R. Jarraway

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2015
Category
General
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780773546028
    Publish Date
    Aug 2015
    List Price
    $70.00
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773597778
    Publish Date
    Sep 2015
    List Price
    $100.00

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Description

In Wallace Stevens among Others David Jarraway explores the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens, but in contexts that are not usually thought about in connection with Stevens's work - gay literature, contemporary fiction, Hollywood film, and avant-garde architecture, among others.

By viewing the poet among these "other" contexts, Jarraway considers the nature of self-reflection and pays special attention to the discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American writing - a theme that reflects American authors’ abiding concern for subjectivities that engage the world from spaces of distance and difference. By returning to the work of Stevens, Jarraway seeks to refurbish this preoccupation by linking it to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work applies to American writers from Melville and Whitman to Fitzgerald and Cummings. Jarraway forges the link between Deleuze and Stevens by drawing out the female subjectivity found in each writer’s work to rethink the more static masculinist premises of being.

Informed by a deep knowledge of and fluency with the work of Stevens and Deleuze, Jarraway uses these writers as a means of entry into American literature and culture, Wallace Stevens among Others is a sophisticated analysis that will open new directions for future scholarship.

About the author

David R. Jarraway is professor of American literature at the University of Ottawa.

David R. Jarraway's profile page