Mourning the elegy: Robert Creeley's 'Mother's Photograph'. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)
- Record Type:
- Journal Article
- Title:
- Mourning the elegy: Robert Creeley's 'Mother's Photograph'. Issue 1 (2nd January 2017)
- Main Title:
- Mourning the elegy: Robert Creeley's 'Mother's Photograph'
- Authors:
- Steen, John
- Abstract:
- ABSTRACT: Although Robert Creeley is rarely considered an elegiac poet, he investigated problems of time and closure in elegiac writing earlier in his career than most critics have acknowledged, and by means unexplored by contemporary elegists like Allen Ginsburg and Sylvia Plath. Like Roland Barthes' La chambre claire (1980), Robert Creeley's 1986 poem 'Mother's Photograph' incorporates and interrogates an alternative technology of representation to resolve a crisis in the work of maternal mourning. The last in a series of elegies written over the course of 14 years, 'Mother's Photograph' suggests that Creeley, like Barthes, experienced the 'sporadic' temporality of grief and the surprising 'violence' attached to the photograph's elegiac use. While the series as a whole sheds light on the trajectory of Creeley's work and suggests a significant revision to existing accounts of elegy in mid-century literary history, the final poem speaks to issues of poetics engaged when a volatile genre, the elegy, is forced to account for the wordless revelations of an aesthetic object imbued with the aura of death. As it reflects on the series' gradual withdrawal from conventional elegy and its consolations, 'Mother's Photograph' turns toward the work of mourning elegy itself.
- Is Part Of:
- Textual practice. Volume 31:Issue 1(2017)
- Journal:
- Textual practice
- Issue:
- Volume 31:Issue 1(2017)
- Issue Display:
- Volume 31, Issue 1 (2017)
- Year:
- 2017
- Volume:
- 31
- Issue:
- 1
- Issue Sort Value:
- 2017-0031-0001-0000
- Page Start:
- 159
- Page End:
- 177
- Publication Date:
- 2017-01-02
- Subjects:
- Robert Creeley -- Roland Barthes -- elegy -- photography -- mourning
Literature, Modern -- 20th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism -- Periodicals
Criticism, Textual -- Periodicals
Semiotics -- Periodicals
801.95 - Journal URLs:
- http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtpr20/current ↗
http://www.tandfonline.com/ ↗
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/0950236X.asp ↗ - DOI:
- 10.1080/0950236X.2016.1189455 ↗
- Languages:
- English
- ISSNs:
- 0950-236X
- Deposit Type:
- Legaldeposit
- View Content:
- Available online (eLD content is only available in our Reading Rooms) ↗
- Physical Locations:
- British Library DSC - 8813.780460
British Library HMNTS - ELD Digital store - Ingest File:
- 1580.xml