Wallace Stevens among Others
Diva-Dames, Deleuze, and American Culture
Description
In Wallace Stevens among Others, David Jarraway explores the extraordinary achievement of Wallace Stevens, but in contexts that are not usually thought about in connection with Stevens's work - gay literature, contemporary fiction, Hollywood film, and avant-garde architecture, among others. By viewing the poet among these "other" contexts, Jarraway considers the nature of self-reflection and pays special attention to the discrediting of self-presence as the principle of identity in American writing - a theme that reflects American authors’ abiding concern for subjectivities that engage the world from spaces of distance and difference. By returning to the work of Stevens, Jarraway seeks to refurbish this preoccupation by linking it to the literary theory of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whose work applies to American writers from Melville and Whitman to Fitzgerald and Cummings. Jarraway forges the link between Deleuze and Stevens by drawing out the female subjectivity found in each writer’s work to rethink the more static masculinist premises of being. Informed by a deep knowledge of and fluency with the work of Stevens and Deleuze, Jarraway uses these writers as a means of entry into American literature and culture, Wallace Stevens among Others is a sophisticated analysis that will open new directions for future scholarship.
Reviews
“In chapters on psychoanalysis (using Elizabeth Bishop to mirror Stevens's “unhousing” of identity), American film (centered around George Cukor), and Americana fiction (featuring Joyce Carol Oates and Cormac McCarthy), Jarraway widens the way readers wil
"One comes away from Wallace Stevens among Others with an enlivened sense of the importance of certain aspects of Stevens’ career, such as his admiration for George Santayana and his correspondence with José Rodríguez Feo. One gains new insights, too, int
“Wallace Stevens among Others is a tour-de-force of American culture. The text is remarkably cohesive, well-written, and provides a sophisticated analysis of the works it explores.” Priscilla Walton, Carleton University