Poetics Today 2000 21(1):95-128; DOI:10.1215/03335372-21-1-95
Duke University Press
Aftershock: Poetry and Cultural Politics Since 1989 |
Avant-Garde Poetries after the Wall
Jonathan Monroe
Comparative Literature, Cornell
ABSTRACT
In leading off the section "Aftershock: Poetry and Cultural Politics
since 1989," this essay takes as its point of departure the pivotal
historical, cultural, and political questions posed by the fall of the Berlin
Wall. It explores, in particular, the concomitant collapse of the oppositional
discursive economy that shaped and informed discussions of innovative or new
avant-garde poetries (Language Poetry in particular) as these poetries
gradually gained currency in the academy during the late Cold War period.
Tracing a necessary reconfiguration of practices in light of the increasing
prominence of multicultural poetries in the 1990s, it analyzes the
implications of the shift that has occurred in the decade since 1989: from a
poetry, poetics, and cultural politics invested in oppositional cultural
economies to one that might more accurately be described as appositional.
Recognizing diversity as the "unsurpassable horizon" of the
post-1989 period, the article sees in the alliance between new avant-garde and
multicultural poetries the promise of a liberatory poetry and poetics that
would contribute to the development of multiple cultural literacies.

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Copyright 2000 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University