Language at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Literature, and the Poetics of Culture

Is poetry still relevant today, or is it merely a dwindling historical art? How have poets of the recent past dealt with challenges to poetics? Seeking to chart the poetic act in a period not so much hostile as indifferent to poetry, Language at the Boundaries outlines spaces where poetry and poetics emerge in migration, translation, world literature, canon formation, and the history of science and technology. One can only come so close to fully possessing or explaining everything about the poetic act, and this book grapples with these limits by perusing, analyzing, deconstructing, and reconstructing creativity, implementing different approaches in doing so. Peter Carravetta consolidates historical epistemological positions that have accrued over the last several decades, some spurred by the modernism/postmodernism debate, and unpacks their differences--juxtaposing Vico with Heidegger and applying the approaches of translation studies, decolonization, indigeneity, committed literature, and critical race theory, among others. What emerges is a defense and theory of poetics in the contemporary world, engaging the topic in a dialectic mode and seeking grounds of agreement.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Limitrophy: Approaches to Poetics 1 Tuning in/to the Diaphora: Lyric, Metaphysics, and the Reasons of Allegory 2 Poetics and Linguistics: Boundaries of Language in F. T. Marinetti and Gertrude Stein 3 Poetics of Paradox: An Approach to Thus Spoke Zarathustra 4 Poetics of the Manifold and the Hybrid: Poets between Cultures 5 Poetica Cosmographica: An American Poet in Taiwan 6 Poetics of Science: Poiesis, techne, logos 7 Poetics of Translation as Migration 8 The Canon(s) of World Literature: Premises to a Postcolonial, Transnational Poetics Bibliography Index of Names Subject Index

About the Author :
Peter Carravetta is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, USA. His previous publications include After Identity: Migration, Critique, Italian American Culture (2017), The Elusive Hermes: Method, Discourse, Interpreting (2012), and Prefaces to the Diaphora: Rhetorics, Allegory, and the Interpretation of Postmodernity (1991). He also edited the collection Dante Worlds. Echoes, Places, Questions (2019).

Review :
Carravetta is a tireless explorer of the rhetorical fascinations of language and its struggles to break through into thought. This collection of essays is a battering intellectual whirlwind, storming through Dante and Nietzsche to meet passions seeking voice in our time. Peter Carravetta's Language at the Boundaries is a contemporary Defense of Poetry in the great tradition of the genre. No one in the past 30 years has made a stronger case for the poem and the various poetics and interpretive strategies surrounding it. He ranges from a hermeneutics of mysticism to humanistic criticism, always with the goal of translating his theoretical findings 'into meaningful, effective forms for a broader understanding of human experience.' Among the remarkable aspects of Language at the Boundaries is Carravetta's distinctive ability to bring together the disciplines of poetic literature and philosophy in a veritable effort to reconcile the "ancient quarrel." Erudite and rigorous, creative and provocative, this collection of essays weaves together a tapestry of reflections thoroughly grounded in the history of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze with a dazzling engagement with world literature in its differential compass.