cities in ruins: the politics of modern poetics

Cecilia Enjuto Rangel


Examines historical memory, collective cultural memory and nostalgia.


Amazon Books.

The attacks in New York on September 11, 2001, and in Madrid on March 11, 2004, provoked diverse political reactions, but the imminence of the ruins triggered a collective historical awakening. In Cities in Ruins, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel argues that the portrayal in poetry of the modern city as a disintegrated, ruined space is part of a critique of the visions of progress and the historical process of modernization that developed during the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Enjuto Rangel's study investigates the virtually unexplored map of modern ruins in modern poetry. She interprets modern poetry on ruins as a critique of both capitalist definitions of progress and the devastating effects of modern warfare. Furthermore, she argues that the representation of ruins provokes a historical awakening that empowers the text, and the reader, with political and historical agency.

marie de france & the poetics of memory / logan e. whalen

Marie de France and the Poetics of Memory presents the first exhaustive treatment of the rhetorical use of description and memory in all the narrative works of the late 12th-century poet, Marie de France--the first woman to compose literary texts in French. Though she had no access to treatises devoted solely to the arts of memory that were to develop in the centuries following her own, she nonetheless exemplifies some of the same techniques that are extolled by their authors.

Logan E. Whalen's insightful study begins with a discussion of Marie's literary plan in light of classical rhetoric and the art of inventio, or literary topical invention, that developed in the Middle Ages. He then demonstrates how the fifty-six-line prologue that precedes Marie de France's Lais gives an outline of her literary plan, not only for the narrative texts that follow in that particular collection, but also for the whole of her poetic corpus.
Marie's use of description in the Lais shows the way in which she creates an imaginative locus that is conducive to memory through her elaborate descriptions of people, animals, places, events, and an assortment of inanimate objects. Her Fables is examined in light of the way in which scribes and illuminators of the centuries that immediately followed the composition of these texts interpreted them scripturally and iconographically. Finally, Whalen compares the structure of memory and description in the two works the Espurgatoire seint Patriz and the Vie seinte Audree--a text that has traditionally been ascribed to an anonymous author but that has recently been argued to be a fourth text by Marie de France. 
Amazon Books.

repression and recovery: modern american poetry & politics of cultural memory

(Wisconsin Project on American Writers)
by Cary Nelson
(Oct 15, 1991)

Google Books.

"The most successful attempt to date at a poststructuralist literary history. Nelson's book examines the forces that have bequeathed to us a literary academy in which most of modernism has been forgotten, and 'most of us . . . do not know that the knowledge is gone.' "
—Michael Bérubé, Village Voice Literary Supplement

"Nelson's book will make it impossible for anyone to think about either 'modern American poetry' or 'literary history' in quite the same way as before. . . . From its hauntingly successful premise (that the history of modernist culture is one we no longer know we have forgotten) to its recovery of the political questions so many forgotten modern poets looked straight in the eye, Repression and Recovery urges that we think about doing literary history so differently that this activity will always be in crisis, unsettling, even subversive." —Andrew Ross, Princeton University

religion, poetry, and memory in ancient china

ancient china religion -