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Writing in Real Time

Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital

Paul Jaussen author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Cambridge University Press

Published:3rd Jul '17

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Writing in Real Time cover

Writing in Real Time is the first book-length study of the American long poem as a complex adaptive system.

Synthesizing systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics, this book offers a theory and history of the American long poem as an emergent system. This approach shows that the long poem is a dynamic, intricate, and culturally-entangled literary practice, with continued relevance for our digital age.From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

'This extraordinary book shows us exactly how the dynamics of the long poem enable the form, in Pound's phrase, to 'include history.' Jaussen develops a suite of basic concepts that make possible revelatory readings of key works, and a new understanding of modern poetry's most ambitious project.' Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and author of Writing Against Time (2013) and American Literature and the Free Market, 1945–2000 (Cambridge, 2010)
'Writing in Real Time is a welcome contribution to the dearth of systems-theoretical analyses of historically pivotal but formally unwieldy poetic projects … [It] provides tools that are vital and necessary for developing a critical and creative poetic practice with the capacity to engage the complexity of contemporary literary, social, and political ecologies.' James Belflower, Journal of Modern Literature

ISBN: 9781107195318

Dimensions: 235mm x 158mm x 17mm

Weight: 480g

236 pages