The Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism

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This path-breaking book explores different ways in which writing about poetry can deepen and extend our critical engagement by deploying creatively the manifold resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and inventive variations on topics in literary theory The Winnowing Fan makes a strong case for revising received ideas about the scope and limits of criticism. Norriss poems traverse the full range of European poetic history from Homers Odyssey, through the work of French symbolists such as Mallarm, to modern writers such as Yeats, Benjamin, Heaney, Larkin, and Barthes. There are also verse-essays and shorter pieces on philosophers from Hume and Leibniz to Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, de Man, Rorty, Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben. In each case Norris seeks to free criticism from conventional academic forms and return it to an active mutual engagement with the practice of literature itself.

Reviews

The volume is full of wit, playfulness and intellectual agility ... It's a hugely ambitious, arrestingly original work, which turns criticism into poetry and poetry into critique. * Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year *
The appearance of The Winnowing Fan represents a major literary event. With extraordinary skill, insight and intellectual dexterity, Christopher Norris has reinvented the poetry of ideas for our time in this enthralling collection of unique, elegant, hugely ambitious works. Its certainly the most fascinating collection of poems Ive read for many a year. * Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster, UK *

Author Bio

Christopher Norris is Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cardiff, Wales, and has taught at many universities in India, Australia, Greece, Spain, Germany, Canada, China, the US, and elsewhere. He is the author of numerous books on aspects of philosophy, critical theory, and modern intellectual history.