Charles Altieri
Biographic Data
| ID | 283582 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Charles Altieri |
| GIVEN NAMES | Charles |
| FAMILY NAME | Altieri |
| SIGNATURE | ALTIERI C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Berkeley |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 50 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Between Poetry and Philosophy
Poetry is not philosophy, nor was it meant to be, except on rare, glorious occasions. And only Wittgenstein seems willing to claim that philosophy should be written as poetry. Yet it is difficult to imagine poetry not wanting to impinge on the cultural roles played by at least some philosophy. And some philosophers, like Hegel and Heidegger, want to influence the course of poetic practice. So it seems useful to inquire into the various ways these…
The Likeness of Things Unlike: A Poetics of Incommensurability
Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday
Modes of Intelligence
Poet as Literary Cartographer: Literary Cartography in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Map”
Scholars tend to focus on Bishop’s sense of place, travel writing, and geographical feelings, yet few scholars examine her role as a literary cartographer. This article explores Bishop’s literary cartography considering her obsession with mapping and exploration. But Bishop also carefully revises the mapmaker’s task to define possibilities for imaginative reversals of cartographic practices. We concentrate on the imaginative logic motivating her …
On The Cantos and Pedagogy
The Fallacy of "Fallacy" and Its Implications for Contemporary Literary Theory
The Fallacy of 'Fallacy'" concentrates on the limitations of logical binaries in constructing arguments for literary theory. My test case is claims about intention. Theorists argue either that intentions can and must be determined or that intention is a psychological entity that cannot be determined simply from textual evidence, even when buttressed by biographical contexts. But such debates center on intentions to mean. This essay argues that li…
Can There Be a Plausible Ethics Developed from Poststructuralist Ontology
This essay argues that an ethics based on the demand of the other simply flees from the typical issues of traditional ethical thinking, which have to concern the self as the primary locus of response and responsibility but also have to justify what can be a demand on that self and with what degree of importance. The ethics of the other seems dangerously close to existentialist versions of authenticity. The test case is Simon Critchley’s elegantly…
Modernist Poetry's Encounter With Epistemic Models of Value
This article elaborates on the dilemma faced by modernist poets in seeking to define values in an intellectual context that was post-Romantic and post-epistemic. Pound and Stevens, for example, reacted strongly against the ways that Romantic writers had tried to tie the rhetorical elaboration of values to precise descriptions, as if description could still support values. Victorian writing tended to experience the effort to ground value in fact a…
IIAffect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys
AfterwordHow the 'New Modernist Studies' fails the Old Modernism
This essay challenges the New Modernist Studies by criticizing its reliance on analogies and its claims that modernist work of subversion is its most significant legacy. The essay tries to diagnose the psychological principles that underlie the formation of these beliefs. It provides an alternative account of the continuing value of modernist work – first, in terms of five principles that make possible non-reductive readings of modernism; and the…
What Theory Can Learn from New Directions in Contemporary American Poetry
This essay develops three arguments. First, it elaborates how some contemporary poets who began working in experimental traditions are turning against the idea that the poem is primarily an aesthetic object emphasizing the material qualities of the medium. Instead, they seek to elaborate notions of rhetoric based on ideas of witnessing rather than on ideals of persuasion. Second, it supports that shift by proposing critiques of those modernist id…
The Poverty of Moral Theory in Literary Discourse: A Plea for Recognizing the Multiplicity of Value Frameworks
Research Article| July 01 2011 THE POVERTY OF MORAL THEORY IN LITERARY DISCOURSE: A Plea for Recognizing the Multiplicity of Value Frameworks Charles Altieri Charles Altieri Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2011) 94 (1-2): 35–54. https://doi.org/10.2307/41200941 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Altieri; THE POVERTY OF MORAL THEORY IN…
Where Can Aesthetics Go
Where Can Aesthetics Go? Charles Altieri (bio) While reading the first two-thirds of this essay I felt as if I wanted to be a cheerleader: "Go, Connor, go! Tell it like it is!" This state is immensely rare for me, because I have internalized all too well an academic training that rewards us for seeking out the vulnerabilities in scholarly arguments. On such weaknesses we build illusions of our own strengths. But with Steven Connor I find myself c…
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
Zamir's book is an intelligent and provocative justification for how literary rhetoric can articulate and test moral belief. He writes with the economy and power of one well-versed in contemporary analytic philosophy, and he offers an impressive grasp of Renaissance drama and classical literature. The book offers three chapters making a theoretical case for ‘philosophical criticism’, then seven chapters each devoted to how a Shakespearean play ca…
The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory
I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience-its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because it is has now no significant other-our basic task is to characterize fully how sensuousness is achieved and put to work…
Tractatus Logico-Poeticus
Maximal Minimalism
Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism
(2004). Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 19, Life Writing and the Generations, pp. 156-175
On difficulty in contemporary American poetry
Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture
Having spent two fruitless weeks attempting to write an essay offering practical advice on how to teach lyric poetry, I had to face the perhaps bizarre truth that I feel much less hollow elaborating theoretical projections about how to direct one's teaching than I do pretending to offer practical wisdom. In this case my hollowness may in fact have been as close as I could come to wisdom. For it suggests that I have yet to find a current theoretic…
The Concept of Force as a Frame for Modernist Art and Literature
Article: Poetics as "Untruth": Revising Modern Claims for Literary Truths
New Literary History - Volume 29, Number 2, Spring 1998
What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry
The Columbia History of American Poetry
Journal Article The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. by Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. xxxiv, 894 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-231-07836-6.) Get access Charles Altieri Charles Altieri University of California, Berkeley, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 1994, Pages 1258–1259, https://doi.org/10.23…
An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon
IIAffect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys
The Columbia History of American Poetry
Journal Article The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. by Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. xxxiv, 894 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-231-07836-6.) Get access Charles Altieri Charles Altieri University of California, Berkeley, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 1994, Pages 1258–1259, https://doi.org/10.23…
What Theory Can Learn from New Directions in Contemporary American Poetry
This essay develops three arguments. First, it elaborates how some contemporary poets who began working in experimental traditions are turning against the idea that the poem is primarily an aesthetic object emphasizing the material qualities of the medium. Instead, they seek to elaborate notions of rhetoric based on ideas of witnessing rather than on ideals of persuasion. Second, it supports that shift by proposing critiques of those modernist id…
On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding
In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as formula of value and for acti…
Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
Zamir's book is an intelligent and provocative justification for how literary rhetoric can articulate and test moral belief. He writes with the economy and power of one well-versed in contemporary analytic philosophy, and he offers an impressive grasp of Renaissance drama and classical literature. The book offers three chapters making a theoretical case for ‘philosophical criticism’, then seven chapters each devoted to how a Shakespearean play ca…
Taking Lyrics Literally: Teaching Poetry in a Prose Culture
Having spent two fruitless weeks attempting to write an essay offering practical advice on how to teach lyric poetry, I had to face the perhaps bizarre truth that I feel much less hollow elaborating theoretical projections about how to direct one's teaching than I do pretending to offer practical wisdom. In this case my hollowness may in fact have been as close as I could come to wisdom. For it suggests that I have yet to find a current theoretic…
AfterwordHow the 'New Modernist Studies' fails the Old Modernism
This essay challenges the New Modernist Studies by criticizing its reliance on analogies and its claims that modernist work of subversion is its most significant legacy. The essay tries to diagnose the psychological principles that underlie the formation of these beliefs. It provides an alternative account of the continuing value of modernist work – first, in terms of five principles that make possible non-reductive readings of modernism; and the…
The Sensuous Dimension of Literary Experience: An Alternative to Materialist Theory
I argue that three versions of materialist theorizing ironically fail to give adequate accounts of two basic features of literary experience-its ways of being sensuous and its manifestation of particular features of labor that can produce compelling singularity for the reader. Ultimately I reject materialist ontologizing because it is has now no significant other-our basic task is to characterize fully how sensuousness is achieved and put to work…
What Is Living and What Is Dead in American Postmodernism: Establishing the Contemporaneity of Some American Poetry
Placing Creeley's Recent Work: A Poetics of Conjecture
Hegel is probably the most influential and articulate modern thinker to make a sharp distinction between a logic of thinking and one based on analyzing the validity of completed propositional thoughts. What Hegel did in philosophy, what indeed remains vital even in anti-Hegelians like Gilbert Ryle, has its poetic parallel in Romantic stresses on the immediate qualities of acts of mind and the dialectical possibilities that arise when we attend in…
Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory
Olson's Poetics and the Tradition
From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics
Gary Snyder's Turtle Island: The Problem of Reconciling the Roles of Seer and Prophet
Numerous paradoxes attend the dream we have inherited from the Romantics that poetry somehow performs epistemological and social functions. Poets find themselves in the position of rejecting aestheticism and formalism in aesthetic and formal terms. As a consequence they must maintain a delicate and problematic balance. They must first maintain pressures of poetic form, if they are to make poetry a unique means of expressing truths of experience, …
Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory
The Qualities of Action: A Theory of Middles in Literature
The Qualities of Action: Part II
The first part of this essay, which appeared in the preceding issue of boundary 2, tried to show how literary texts can be seen as developing what I called a space of middles, a space elaborated by the qualities of the dramatic actions they present. Literary culture, I argued, must be seen as fostering our awareness of those areas of experience where the causal languages of metaphysics and science, of beginnings and endings, are simply not adequa…
Placing Creeley's Recent Work: A Poetics of Conjecture
Hegel is probably the most influential and articulate modern thinker to make a sharp distinction between a logic of thinking and one based on analyzing the validity of completed propositional thoughts. What Hegel did in philosophy, what indeed remains vital even in anti-Hegelians like Gilbert Ryle, has its poetic parallel in Romantic stresses on the immediate qualities of acts of mind and the dialectical possibilities that arise when we attend in…
Genteel Modernism
The Hermeneutics of Literary Indeterminacy: A Dissent from the New Orthodoxy
W HERE AMBIGUITY WAS, there indeterminacy will be, Freud might have said had he foreseen the repetition compulsion which contemporary literary critics hide from themselves. Twenty years ago virtually every good graduate student could spin out intricate verbal and imagistic patterns demonstrating the paradoxical themes in a literary text. And now his counterpart is becoming expert at showing how texts respond to perennial problems of language and …
Culture and Skepticism: A Response to Michael Fischer
Presence and Reference in a Literary Text: The Example of Williams' 'This Is Just to Say
Ecce Homo: Narcissism, Power, Pathos, and the Status of Autobiographical Representations
Charles Altieri, Ecce Homo: Narcissism, Power, Pathos, and the Status of Autobiographical Representations, boundary 2, Vol. 9/10, Vol. 9, no. 3 - Vol. 10, no. 1, Why Nietzsche Now? A Boundary 2 Symposium (Spring - Autumn, 1981), pp. 389-415
Dramatistic Education
An Idea and Ideal of a Literary Canon
Reach without a Grasp
Pound's Vorticism as a Renewal of Humanism
Humanism having had no chance in the accident, in life I mean, save for an occasional decade which has usually been followed by some pest like the counterreformation... Humanism has . . . taken refuge in the arts.... The artist has been so long a humanist! He has been a humanist out of reaction. He has had the sense to know that humanity was unbearably stupid and that he must try to disagree with it. But he has also tried to lead and persuade it;…
Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding
Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry
1. Self and sensibility in contemporary poetry 2. The dominant poetic mode of the late seventies 3. The pressure to transform 4. The paradoxes of contemporary antiromanticism 5. Robert Creeley's poetics of conjecture: the pains and pleasures of staging a self at war with its own lyric desires 6. John Ashbery: discursive rhetoric within a poetics of thinking 7. Self-reflection as action: the recent work of Adrienne Rich 8. Epilogue: Criticism and …
Plato's Performative Sublime and the Ends of Reading
F Richard Rorty's critique of foundationalist thought did not exist, literary theory would do very well to invent it. By his cogent resistance to foundationalism-that is, notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation-Rorty offers critics freedom from the empirico-analytic model of philosophical authority which we often clumsily crave or uneasi…
John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts
"Ponderation" in Cezanne and Williams
This peculiar and wholly new merit of M. Delacroix . . to evoke with color alone what might be called the atmosphere of the human drama, or the spiritual mood of the creator-this quality peculiar to him has always drawn to him the sympathy of all poets, and if it were legitimate to draw a philosophic proof from a purely material phenomenon, I would ask you to notice, sir, that in the crowd that gathered to pay him the last honours, many more writ…
Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism
On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism, and Self-Understanding
In this remarkable blend of sophisticated philosophical analysis and close reading of literary texts, Richard Eldridge presents convincing argument that literature is the most important and richest source of insights in favor of historicized Kantian moral philosophy. He effectively demonstrates that only through the interpretation of narratives can we test our capacities as persons for acknowledging the moral laws as formula of value and for acti…
Temporality and the Necessity for Dialectic: The Missing Dimension of Contemporary Theory
is the painful fact that modern culture no longer experiences temporality in accord with Enlightenment models of progress. For us the social force of time is not a source of hope but a specter promising the degeneration of all that we can still value. The challenge then is to show why we need a temporal dimension to our interpretive thinking. What does this dimension add to our powers as agents, and how might its reflective presence actually affe…
The Columbia History of American Poetry
Journal Article The Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. by Jay Parini and Brett C. Millier. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. xxxiv, 894 pp. $59.95, ISBN 0-231-07836-6.) Get access Charles Altieri Charles Altieri University of California, Berkeley, California Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 81, Issue 3, December 1994, Pages 1258–1259, https://doi.org/10.23…
Art (37 works) · Literature (28 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Aesthetics (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Poetry (17 works) · Poetry Analysis and Criticism (16 works) · History (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works)