Paul Robert Kerschen

Bio: Paul Robert Kerschen is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Poetry & Romanticism. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 7 citations.

The modernist novel speaks its mind

Abstract: This study conceives the modernist novel as arising from a problem in genre. The end of the nineteenth century left English literature with a rich tradition of narrative prose describing the social and material worlds. At the same time, its aesthetic discourse was dominated by a Romantic poetics which described artworks as staging an opposition between spirit and matter, nature and freedom; and which placed lyric poetry, as an expression of spirit rather than a mimesis of nature, uppermost in its ranking of genres. The difficulties in reconciling this aesthetic to novelistic form account for the strangeness of the modernist novel, whose linguistic form aspires to the condition of lyric at the same time that its plot stages the failure of such an aspiration, the inability of Romanticism to imagine its own fulfillment. I begin with Henry James as a transitional figure; continue with William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf as exemplars of a Romantic-lyric poetics of the novel; and conclude with James Joyce, whose fictional forms resemble those of his contemporaries but ultimately reject many of their Romantic commitments. Some reference is made to twentieth-century philosophers, in particular Ludwig Wittgenstein, as thinkers with points of concordance.

Marxism and Form

Abstract: Marxism and Form is a collection of several self-contained but intimately related essays in aesthetic theory written between 1967 and 1970 on Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, Lukács, and Sartre, and Jameson's own theory of dialectical literary criticism, three of which were published during that period in Salmagundi. The essays on these theorists include valuable excursions into Schiller and Hegel's Aesthetik; and a short and unsystematic bibliography is appended. As Jameson notes in a very interesting preface, these thinkers and the critical Marxist tradition which each in some sense advanced form a germinal and generally inaccessible area of literary critical interest.

Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre.

Abstract: \"Lyric Time\" offers a detailed critical reading of a particularly difficult poet, an analysis of the dominance of temporal structures and concerns in the body of her poetry, and finally, an important original contribution to a theory of the lyric. Poised between analysis of Emily Dickinson's poetic texts and theoretical inquiry, \"Lyric Time\" suggests that the temporal problems of Dickinson's poems are frequently exaggerations of the features that distinguish the lyric as a genre. \"It is precisely the distance some of Dickinson's poems go toward the far end of coherence, precisely the outlandishness of their extremity, that allows us to see, magnified, the fine workings of more conventional lyrics,\" writes Sharon Cameron. \"Lyric Time\" is written for the literary audience at large-- Dickinsonians, romanticists, theorists, anyone interested in American poetry, or in poetry at all, and especially anyone who admires a risky book that succeeds.