Has poetics peaked? A curmudgeonly commentary
Stephen Brown
Abstract
The end is nigh.Ish.Or so the spate of books and novels about suicidal poets (Farley and Roberts 2018), unsuccessful versifiers (Bilston 2019) and thwarted writers more generally (Ewen 2018; Marche 2024; Paling 2022) seems to suggest.It's a trend that's epitomized by the hugely successful rerelease of John Williams' Stoner, a 1965 novel about failure which was overlooked at the time (Showalter 2015).It's a fad that's part of today's "fail-better" philosophy, where errors, bungles and setbacks are celebrated rather than condemned (Daly 2019, 2020; Herron 2021; Moran 2020). 1 So prevalent is this pro-fail propensity, it's hard to believe that only a decade ago the prospects for poetics were set fair.Brighter than ever, in fact.According to an authoritative, 730-page Poet's Glossary (Hirsch 2014), which covers everything from abecedarian to zeugma, poetics is not only the "systematic study and theory of poetry" but it had broadened to encompass general theories of literary and nonliterary texts alike.Hence the "poetics of prose," of "space," of "structuralism," of "colonialism," of "everyday life."And why stop there, Hirsch (2014) implies, when the "poetics" of, say, philosophy, history, art, architecture, cinema, comedy, consumption and capitalism are ripe for the picking?It's equally hard to believe that only 30 years ago, poetics was making waves in Marketing and Consumer Research.And not just MCR.The social and physical sciences in general and the liberal arts in particular.Back then, the names of leading "literary theorists" like
2 citations
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.25 × 0.4 = 0.10 |
| M · momentum | 0.55 × 0.15 = 0.08 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.