Poetry and the Built Environment: A Theory of the Flesh of Art (Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture)
- Synopsis
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In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built
environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our
perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new.
In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin MerciƩ and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with
art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto
and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.
- Copyright:
- 2024
Book Details
- Book Quality:
- Publisher Quality
- ISBN-13:
- 9780192889003
- Related ISBNs:
-
9780192888990,
9780192889010
- Publisher:
- OUP Oxford
- Date of Addition:
- 05/28/24
- Copyrighted By:
- Elizabeth Fowler
- Adult content:
- No
- Language:
-
English
- Has Image Descriptions:
- No
- Categories:
-
Poetry,
Literature and Fiction,
Language Arts
- Submitted By:
- Bookshare Staff
- Usage Restrictions:
-
This is a copyrighted book.