Words' Worth: What the Poet Does

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Claudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworths revolutionary understanding of real language, Brodsky unfolds a provocative new theory of poetry, a way of looking at poetry that challenges traditional assumptions. Analyzing both theory and practice, and taking in a broad swathe of writers and thinkers from Wordsworth to Rousseau to Hegel to Proust, Brodsky is at pains to draw out the transformative, active, and effective power of literature. Poetry, she says, is only worthy of the name when it is not the property of the poet but of society, when it is valued for what it does. Words' Worth is a bold new work, by a leading scholar of literature, which demands a response from all students and scholars of modern poetry.

Reviews

In this compelling study, Claudia Brodsky radically revises our understanding of what the poet does, above all by developing dazzling readings of what Wordsworth meant by such central terms as real language, imagination, and nature. Through Brodskys tenacious, fine-grained readings of Wordsworths poetry and poetics and also through her perceptive discussions of other writers from Diderot to De Man language emerges as uniquely active and as capable of producing a distinctive kind of knowledge that goes beyond the merely empirical. This is a revelatory book that will transform our sense of the capacities of poetry for good. * Ross Wilson, University Lecturer in English, University of Cambridge, UK, and author of Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (2013) *
'Word's worth' or the 'worthy purpose' of language, and in particular what Wordsworth called alternately 'the real language of men' and 'the language really spoken by men,' is the subject of Claudia Brodsky's illuminating book. In a series of suggestive readings of Wordsworth's poetry and prose Brodsky discovers a force of this real and really spoken language that is analogous to the transcendental power to think what cannot be known in the cognitive sense--what Kant called the sublime. * Kevin McLaughlin, Dean of the Faculty and George Hazard Crooker Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University, USA, and author of Poetic Force: Poetry after Kant (2014) *
In Words' Worth, Claudia Brodsky accomplishes the seemingly impossible: an original reading of Wordsworth that renders his potent commonplaces strange, much in the manner of the poet himself. Rigorously lucid and seriously playful, engaging a range of interlocutors from Kant to Rousseau to Proust to Hegel to de Man, this meditation on language, aesthetics, power and knowledge puts Wordsworths work into philosophical motion, uniting poetry, philosophy and the work of the critic herself in a common endeavor of making and/as knowing. * Helen Deutsch, Professor of English, University of California, Los Angeles, USA *

Author Bio

Claudia Brodsky is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and ancien Directeur de Programme at the Collge International de Philosophie, Paris, France. Her publications include The Imposition of Form (1987), Lines of Thought (1996), Birth of a Nation'hood (co-edited with Toni Morrison, 1997), In the Place of Language (2009), Inventing Agency (co-edited with Eloy LaBrada, Bloomsbury, 2017), and The Linguistic Condition (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2020).