The Testimonies Of Russian And American Postmodern Poetry: Reference, Trauma, And History

This book challenges the belief in the purely linguistic nature of contemporary poetry and offers an interpretation of late twentieth-century Russian poetry as a testimony to the unforeseen annulment of communist reality and its overnight displacement by a completely unfathomable post-totalitarian order. Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva argues that, because of the sudden invalidation of a reality that had been largely seen as unattained and everlasting, this shift remained secluded from the mind and totally resistant to cognition, thus causing a collectively traumatic psychological experience. The book proceeds by inquiring into a school of contemporary American poetry that has been likewise read as cut off from reality. Executing a comparative analysis, Vassileva advances a new understanding of this poetry as a testimony to the overwhelming and traumatic impact of contemporary media, which have assailed the mind with far more signals than it can register, digest and furnish with semantic weight.

• | Author: Albena Lutzkanova-Vassileva
• | Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• | Publication Date: Jun 30, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 304 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Literary Criticism
• | ISBN-10: 1501322664
• | ISBN-13: 9781501322662