Winnowing Fan: Verse-Essays in Creative Criticism

The Winnowing Fan explores different ways to deepen and extend critical engagement with poetry through poetic language and form, covering European poetic history and philosophers from Hume to Deleuze.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 18 April 2019
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

This groundbreaking book delves into various ways in which writing about poetry can enhance and expand our critical understanding by skillfully employing the diverse resources of poetic language and form. Through a series of verse-essays, reflective monologues, and imaginative explorations of literary theory topics, The Winnowing Fan presents a compelling argument for reevaluating established notions of the scope and boundaries of criticism. Norris's poems span the vast expanse of European poetic history, encompassing works from Homer's Odyssey to the modern era, including the writings of French symbolists like Mallarmé and contemporary authors such as Yeats, Benjamin, Heaney, Larkin, and Barthes. Additionally, the book features verse-essays and shorter pieces on philosophers ranging from Hume and Leibniz to Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, de Man, Rorty, Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben. In each instance, Norris endeavors to liberate criticism from conventional academic formats and restore it to a dynamic, reciprocal engagement with the practice of literature itself.

Weight: 370g
Dimension: 128 x 202 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350107304