Books by Ruth Jennison
The Zukofsky Era argues that Objectivist poetry, inaugurated by Louis Zukofsky in 1931, gave expr... more The Zukofsky Era argues that Objectivist poetry, inaugurated by Louis Zukofsky in 1931, gave expression to the complex contours of culture and politics in America during the Great Depression. Jennison's study of Zukofsky and two others in the Objectivist constellation, George Oppen and Lorine Niedecker, elaborates a dialectic between the formal experimental features of Objectivist poetry and its authors' progressive commitments to the radical potentials of modernity. Mixing textual analysis, archival research, and historiography, The Zukofsky Era shows how Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker braided their experiences as working-class Jews, political activists, and feminists into radical, canon-challenging poetic forms. Using the tools of critical geography, The Zukofsky Era offers an account of the relationship between the uneven spatial landscapes of capitalism in crisis and the Objectivists’ paratactical textscapes. In a rethinking of the overall terms in which poetic modernism is described, The Zukofsky Era identifies and assesses the key characteristics of the Objectivist avant-garde, including its formal recognition of proliferating commodity cultures, its solidarity with global anticapitalist movements, and its imperative to develop poetics that nurtured revolutionary literacy.
Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in co... more Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives—poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists—these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse. Essays and poetics by: Alberto Toscano, Rob Halpern., Tyrone Williams, Julian Murphy, Joshua Clover, Christopher Nealon, Andrea Brady, Sean Pryor, Margaret Ronda, Keston Sutherland, Justin Clemens, Ruth Jennison. Edited by Ruth Jennison and Julian Murphet
Papers by Ruth Jennison
The Cambridge Companion to the Poem, ed. Sean Pryor, 2024
in Communism and Poetry Writing Against Capital , 2019
The world's first explicitly articulated experiment in communism-Plato's Republic-entertains an i... more The world's first explicitly articulated experiment in communism-Plato's Republic-entertains an infamously uncomfortable relationship with poetry, the very medium out of which it is woven. Taking issue with the perceived "harm" done by the poets' stories and manners (to public morals, and to the individual soul), Socrates decrees that the communist republic cannot possibly tolerate the promiscuous mimesis of multiple identities that poets routinely perform, nor the general immorality of their narratives. Communism will depend, says Socrates, on the rational distribution of distinct functions throughout the population, and poetry too dangerously muddies those distinctions and threatens the orderly regulation of a polis freed from private property relations. Poetry, in that sense, is innately improper rather than antipropertarian. To achieve and maintain the degree of social cohesion, the ethos, necessary to prevent the return of private property, to make it unthinkable, poetry must be proscribed as the bad conscience of an order of things predicated on falsehood, deception, and imitation, and not on truth.
in Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital , 2019
Bloomsbury Companion to Marx, 2018
Cambridge Companion to Literature of the 1930s, edited by William Solomon, 2018
In the Air: Essays on the Poetry of Peter Gizzi , Ed. Anthony Caleshu, 2017
Our current crisis, whose phenomenal inauguration began in 2008, and whose ending our rulers cont... more Our current crisis, whose phenomenal inauguration began in 2008, and whose ending our rulers continue to proclaim with reference to the metrics of their stock market, continues to structure and transform the critical practices of Marxists and non-Marxists alike. 1 In what follows, I want to chart two waypoints in a historical terrain opened up by the global capitalist crisis and a marked upswing in anti-capitalist and anti-police struggles. In response to these changing historical conditions, we find a corollary set of shifts and foreclosures in an American humanities critical culture that is increasingly polarized between those whose methods confront the assaults on the very existence of remunerated cultural critique, and those whose methods respond just as sensitively to the aggressions of austerity, but turn instead to micro-ontologies, "new materialisms," and neoformalisms. A series of exciting questions has come to our attention: how has the current conjuncture fundamentally transformed the kinds of Marxist critical practice that are possible? What are the opportunities of vision and hermeneutic opened up by our experience of the first deep crisis that unfurled after the definitive end of the hemispheric antinomies structured by the Cold War? Which categories of criticism continue to offer their powers of illumination, and which seem wanting, stale, or too structured by textual forms and political regimes that may be descendent, or eliminated altogether? Do Adornian pessimisms, Lukácsian narratologies, Althusserian allergies to determinative assertions, the fetish as a primary interpretive tool, and reification as dominant pathology continue to offer the critical force they once did? What kind of texts might furnish a pane upon which the breath of new critical practices might frost? My contribution to a regroupment of forces and a renovation of vision in this short essay is to suggest a methodology at once historical and formal: (1) that we examine the texts of crisis in a comparative hermeneutic, such that the older contradictions of capital illuminate those that appear to be novel to our current moment; and (2) to discover in our comparisons the intersections of various limits to capital, which are encoded for our analysis in the limits to poetic form.
Jnt-journal of Narrative Theory, 2011
Book Reviews by Ruth Jennison
American Literary History Online Review, 2021
How does Depression-era politically committed poetry understand and transcode history, revolution... more How does Depression-era politically committed poetry understand and transcode history, revolutionary rupture, and the contents of communist consciousness? How do the answers to these questions transform how we understand not only modernism and its politics, but also the relationship of poetry to social transformation? And what happens when we visit, often for the first time, the voluminous archive of communist poetry without retroactively installing the ideologies of modernism constructed by New Criticism and cold war academic narratives, with their insistence on form as the only permissible place for politics to take place in a text? Sarah Ehlers's book, Left of Poetry: Depression America and the Formation of Modern Poetics, addresses these questions with a range of analytical tools informed by American Studies, Marxism, archival recovery, and material cultures approaches.
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Books by Ruth Jennison
Papers by Ruth Jennison
Book Reviews by Ruth Jennison