In all cultures and times, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands. An island is either a destination, or a home, or a place of exile and imprisonment, or simply a place to sojourn. It is an ideal vehicle for journeys treated as allegories, or for acts of finding that turn into acts of losing, or the reverse transformation. An island is not a continent; yet it can be an archipelago. An island is both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name. It can give relief, and pleasure; or it can frustrate, isolate, and negate. Above all, it both invites and resists - or contains or constrains - the imagination. Poetryand Islands explores how islands become repositories of human longings and desires, a locus for some of our deepest fears and fantasies. It balances historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets in English, and in translations into English. The study of particular poems in which islands figure in exemplary ways is balanced by a more detailed discussion of the poets who have played a major role in shaping human responses to islands on a global scale.

Poetry and Islands (Rethinking the Island)

Patke, Rajeev

Reference

Rowman & Littlefield International

Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay ''The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'' revolutionized the way we look at the social function of the work of art, and the paradigms through which we appreciate it. Using this legendary essay--and its idea of the "aura" in unique works of art--as a springboard, the essays collected in Benjamin's Blind Spot apply Benjamin's insights to a wide range of topics. Subjects range from Benjamin's use of hashish to an analysis of Woody Allen's Zelig, from Wallace Stevens to the early recordings of Elvis Presley, and from the dark epiphanies behind Jackson Pollock's work to the question of whether Benjamin's model is even relevant to contemporary issues. In the same volume, presented in the text's margins, is The Manual of Lost Ideas, a massive manuscript that arrived at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry via an anonymous bequest in 1955. Speculated to be thousands of years old, this is the first time the Manual has been published in over two centuries.

Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura

Arts & Photography

Kuppers, Petra

Strathausen, Carsten

Rhodes, Colin

Gross, David

Bell, Vance

Brottman, David

Gantman, Martin

Hertz, Erich

Smith, Marquard

History & Criticism

Institute of Cultural Inquiry

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