Tiffany My Silver Planet

A Secret History of Poetry and Kitsch
Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4214-1146-0
Verlag: Johns Hopkins University Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 0 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Hopkins Studies in Modernism

Reveals the hidden origins of kitsch in poetry from the eighteenth century.

Taking its title from John Keats, My Silver Planet contends that the problem of elite poetry’s relation to popular culture bears the indelible mark of its turbulent incorporation of vernacular poetry—a legacy shaped by nostalgia, contempt, and fraudulence. Daniel Tiffany reactivates and fundamentally redefines the concept of kitsch, freeing it from modernist misapprehension and ridicule, by tracing its origin to poetry’s alienation from the emergent category of literature. Tiffany excavates the forgotten history of poetry’s relation to kitsch, beginning with the exuberant revival of archaic (and often spurious) ballads in Britain in the early eighteenth century. In these controversial events of poetic imposture, Tiffany identifies a submerged pact—in opposition to the bourgeois values of literature—between elite and vernacular poetries.

Tiffany argues that the ballad revival—the earliest explicit formation of what we now call popular culture—sparked a perilous but seemingly irresistible flirtation (among elite audiences) with poetic forgery that endures today in the ambiguity of the kitsch artifact: Is it real or fake, art or kitsch? He goes on to trace the genealogy of kitsch in texts ranging from nursery rhymes and poetic melodrama to the lyric commodities of Baudelaire. He scrutinizes the fascist “paradise” inscribed in Ezra Pound’s Cantos as well as the avant-garde poetry of the New York School and its debt to pop and “plastic” art. By exposing and elaborating the historical poetics of kitsch, My Silver Planet transforms our sense of kitsch as a category of material culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tiffany, Daniel

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen
• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Sprachwissenschaften Semiotik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Arresting Poetry
Unpopular Pop
Missing Verses
Bogus
Twice Made
Mass Ornament
2. Poetic Diction and the Substance of Kitsch
Dreams, Mottos, Gossip
Chatter and Virtuosity
Phraseology
Morbid Animation
3. Miscreant
Doppelgänger
Synthetic Vernaculars
Poetry vs. Literature
Commonplace
Lyric Fatality
Thieves' Latin
4. The Spurious Progeny of Bare Nature
Balladry and the Burden of Popular Culture
Exploded Beings and After-Poets
Live Burial
5. Illiterature
Refrain
Lullaby Logic
The Cult of Simplicity
Pets, Trifles, Toys
Gothic Verse and Melodrama
Silver Proxy
6. Queer Idylls
Topologies of Privacy
Reliques
Poetaster
Kitsch, Camp, and Homo-fascism
1800 Words
Poison
7. Kitsching the Cantos
Vortex and Cream Puff
Contraband
The Kitsch of Apocalypse
Epic, Rhapsody, Seizure
Bad Infinity
Ethnofascist Souvenirs
8. Junk
Thermofax
Dada Kitsch
After After-Poets
Coterie and Melodrama
The Metaphysics of Kitsch
9. Inventing Clichés
Plastic Poetry
Liar, Liar
Afterword
In the Poisonous Candy Factory
Counterfeit Capital
Notes
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Tiffany, Daniel
Daniel Tiffany is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books of poetry and literary theory, including Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance and Neptune Park. He has also published translations of texts by Sophocles and the Italian poet Cesare Pavese, as well as Georges Bataille’s pornographic tale, Madame Edwarda. He is a recipient of a Whiting Fellowship and the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.

Daniel Tiffany is a professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of nine books of poetry and literary theory, including Infidel Poetics: Riddles, Nightlife, Substance and Neptune Park.