Books by José F Alvergue
Further Other Book Works, 2015
Fordham University Press , 2020
Papers by José F Alvergue
Comparative Literature Studies, 2017
College Literature, 2016
In 1982 Tanam Press published Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, a book of juxtaposed narrative excu... more In 1982 Tanam Press published Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée, a book of juxtaposed narrative excursions on voice, place, history, and the formation of identity between unsettled poles as experienced by diaspora communities. The book is composed of poetic sections without narrative omniscience, narrative passages which use poetical syntax and grammatical experimentation, maps and diagrams, and accounts of Western mythologies and origin myths made unrecognizable to Western audiences. The text makes extensive use of the page's white space to invoke the resonant shadows of cinematic presence. For years, scholarship on Dictée has split between postmodern theory and postcolonial discourse, but the text also permits a cross-disciplinary approach to understanding the work's lasting aesthetic and political impact. The book has thus opened up
The Minnesota Review, 2014
This article examines Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s aesthetic practices from the 1970s... more This article examines Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s aesthetic practices from the 1970s to today. The recent republication of Vicuña’s Saboramí by Chainlinks Press (2011) permits a new generation of readers to experience her paintings from the 1970s and to read Vicuña’s own explanations behind her ongoing sculpture work, the precarios. The paintings reveal an intersection of multiple philosophical and theoretical footholds; but more important, they show Vicuña the artist searching through concepts and practices to give form to the eruption of experiences that describe the West during the late twentieth century, particularly those that erupt from Salvador Allende’s brief presidency in Chile and the many confrontations between neoliberalism, indigenism, and political activism. Following the movement of visual representation to sculpture, I trace how Vicuña explores the concept of collectivization through aesthetic form and material extension during the 1980s and 1990s, in the precarios. I then map how Vicuña uses form to disclose the interplay of etymology and materiality in Palabrarmás (1992) and Instan (2002), giving plural voice to collectivized expression. The open-endedness of this interplay conducts our readerly attention to the way in which Vicuña stages critical and philosophical engagements with twentieth-century and pre-Columbian aesthetics to reveal a more complex sense of the “present” in the West. A more inclusive temporality, the present in Vicuña’s poetic lyric unlocks ways of building community from the various acts of expressing rights, self, and being.
TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, Nov 12, 2014
MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, 2016
Tab the Journal of Poetry Poetics, Nov 12, 2014
the minnesota review, 2014
This article examines Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s aesthetic practices from the 1970s... more This article examines Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s aesthetic practices from the 1970s to today. The recent republication of Vicuña’s Saboramí by Chainlinks Press (2011) permits a new generation of readers to experience her paintings from the 1970s and to read Vicuña’s own explanations behind her ongoing sculpture work, the precarios. The paintings reveal an intersection of multiple philosophical and theoretical footholds; but more important, they show Vicuña the artist searching through concepts and practices to give form to the eruption of experiences that describe the West during the late twentieth century, particularly those that erupt from Salvador Allende’s brief presidency in Chile and the many confrontations between neoliberalism, indigenism, and political activism. Following the movement of visual representation to sculpture, I trace how Vicuña explores the concept of collectivization through aesthetic form and material extension during the 1980s and 1990s, in th...
Criticism, 2018
Lyric poetry, in its most accessible description as a genre, is experienced between the recogniza... more Lyric poetry, in its most accessible description as a genre, is experienced between the recognizable formal attributes of a speaker and the social structures wherein speaking elicits meaning. In this essay, I focus on Claudia Rankine’s Citizen and the intimate-public speech acts through which a lyric demonstration and critical function emerge. Principally, this essay interrogates the “character” and “event” of American personhood and seeks to understand Rankine’s work between the pessimism of alienation and the shared care articulated in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s theorization of an “undercommons.” Looking at how lyric practice encompasses address as redress, however, requires more of an explanation than the referential narratives of who “we” are or the singular contact of interpellative experiences with lived life. Therefore, this article also draws on the work of Calvin Warren and other contemporary critics in interrogating lyric redress as multiscalar and figurative speech acts in this regard of an American chiasmus, America as a unified voice
the minnesota review, 2018
Abstract:This essay explores the manner in which disavowal exists in the contemporary contexts of... more Abstract:This essay explores the manner in which disavowal exists in the contemporary contexts of liberal democratism, particularly the latter's participation in Arab alienation, and how it is communicated, consequently, in the maintenance of a cultural hegemony over the signifying apertures through which the American body politic is projected, namely, speech acts. The stakes in examining speech acts, for which I turn to poetry and the work of Solmaz Sharif and Rob Halpern, involves thinking about the commons. For one, because liberal democratic identity revolves around a deliberative realm of attachments and intimacies. The commons, moreover, is also where the lived politics of address and recognition sustain a continuum of privilege, exceptionalism, and states of exception. It is where the juridical and metaphysical matrices from which the body garners voice, name, and the affects of the person are demonstrated and denied.
in 21|19: Contemporary Poets in the 19th-Century Archive, 2019
the minnesota review, 2018
Comparative Literature, 2014
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Books by José F Alvergue
Papers by José F Alvergue