Peter Middleton
Biographic Data
| ID | 3635033 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Middleton |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Middleton |
| SIGNATURE | MIDDLETON P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1974 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Elsewhere
This essay pays tribute to Laura Marcus’s work on autobiography, and her interest in emergent aesthetic discourses, by discussing two fictionalised memoirs, John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. One theme is the lure of what Yves Bonnefoy calls ‘cet ailleurs insituable’ or the ‘elsewhere’. In the course of the discussion of autobiographical ruses I also briefly discuss confessional poetry, and Virginia …
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
The Objectivist Nexus
Epigenetics and poetry
The essay explores how a poem, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem ‘The Four Year Old Girl’ (1998), and a novel, Michael Byers’s Long for This World (2003), draw on the resources of the aesthetic to reflect on epistemological, ethical, and affective consequences of genetic variation that generates per- ceived disability. Although neither text explicitly addresses epigenetics, the same drive to understand genetic information in terms of development and e…
Open Oppen
Discusses issues of semantics and intentionality arising from syntactic fragmentation in the later poetry of George Oppen. Oppen’s reception was initially uncertain despite his Pulitzer, and one reason was his apparent willingness to make unequivocal affirmations in propositional form. My discussion follows Peter Nicholls’s meticulous analysis of a poem from Seascape: Needle’s Eye, and takes up references to Hegel on the speculative proposition, …
Anonymous Poetry
High Visibility
Reply to Drew Milne
The Inward Gaze
Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism
The emergence of a politically sophisticated radical poetry in the United States, a poetry popularly known as Language Poetry, has been one of the most exciting cultural developments of the past two decades. Not since the thirties has there been such a sense of aesthetics and politics converging in explicit projects, whether poems, publishing, or dialogues with those engaged in other more evidently political struggles. Many of the poets have help…
Linguistic Turns
Wittgenstein and the Question of Masculinity
Wittgenstein is not the most obvious writer to choose for a discussion of masculinity. He is so silent about it that it might seem impossible to argue that a work like the Philosophical Investigations is engaged with issues of masculinity at all. Even his homosexuality seems to offer little scope for such a discussion. In this paper I shall not address that homosexuality, but I will question the silence, although not on the grounds that the silen…
The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake
A contemporary reading of Blake's later wo rk needs to begin w i t h an unrecoverable element of the textual p roduct ion , its silence — and Blake's. The prophetic books stand almost alone, w i t h very little of the accompanying wr i t ten material such as letters and essays that surrounds the work of the other Romantic poets. This silence goes even deeper because these poems were not read for many years, and it was nearly a century before read…
The Nature of Professionalism
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Anonymous Poetry
The Nature of Professionalism
The Revolutionary Poetics of William Blake
A contemporary reading of Blake's later wo rk needs to begin w i t h an unrecoverable element of the textual p roduct ion , its silence — and Blake's. The prophetic books stand almost alone, w i t h very little of the accompanying wr i t ten material such as letters and essays that surrounds the work of the other Romantic poets. This silence goes even deeper because these poems were not read for many years, and it was nearly a century before read…
Wittgenstein and the Question of Masculinity
Wittgenstein is not the most obvious writer to choose for a discussion of masculinity. He is so silent about it that it might seem impossible to argue that a work like the Philosophical Investigations is engaged with issues of masculinity at all. Even his homosexuality seems to offer little scope for such a discussion. In this paper I shall not address that homosexuality, but I will question the silence, although not on the grounds that the silen…
Linguistic Turns
Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism
The emergence of a politically sophisticated radical poetry in the United States, a poetry popularly known as Language Poetry, has been one of the most exciting cultural developments of the past two decades. Not since the thirties has there been such a sense of aesthetics and politics converging in explicit projects, whether poems, publishing, or dialogues with those engaged in other more evidently political struggles. Many of the poets have help…
Reply to Drew Milne
The Inward Gaze
High Visibility
Anonymous Poetry
Open Oppen
Discusses issues of semantics and intentionality arising from syntactic fragmentation in the later poetry of George Oppen. Oppen’s reception was initially uncertain despite his Pulitzer, and one reason was his apparent willingness to make unequivocal affirmations in propositional form. My discussion follows Peter Nicholls’s meticulous analysis of a poem from Seascape: Needle’s Eye, and takes up references to Hegel on the speculative proposition, …
The Objectivist Nexus
Epigenetics and poetry
The essay explores how a poem, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge’s poem ‘The Four Year Old Girl’ (1998), and a novel, Michael Byers’s Long for This World (2003), draw on the resources of the aesthetic to reflect on epistemological, ethical, and affective consequences of genetic variation that generates per- ceived disability. Although neither text explicitly addresses epigenetics, the same drive to understand genetic information in terms of development and e…
The Future of Literary Thinking
All good writing takes us somewhere uncomfortable. One of the great services given by Textual Practice over the past 30 years has been to create a comfortable place for uncomfortable criticism. Yet right now, it is not writing but the world itself that is proving incommodious. What should criticism be doing in a political culture that has embraced hostility
Elsewhere
This essay pays tribute to Laura Marcus’s work on autobiography, and her interest in emergent aesthetic discourses, by discussing two fictionalised memoirs, John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. One theme is the lure of what Yves Bonnefoy calls ‘cet ailleurs insituable’ or the ‘elsewhere’. In the course of the discussion of autobiographical ruses I also briefly discuss confessional poetry, and Virginia …
Philosophy (9 works) · Art (7 works) · Literature (6 works) · Poetry (6 works) · Linguistics (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · History (4 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Poetry Analysis and Criticism (4 works)