By Heart: A Reading of Derrida's ‘Che cos'è la poesia?’ through Keats and Celan
Year: 1993
Type: article
Abstract: Any question of the sort 'what is literature?' or 'what is poetry?' seems as clumsy as it is unavoidable. Inevitably, one finds oneself resisting the question itself and the brutality of the formulae it requires ('poetry is x .. . ' ) . In Derrida's 'Che cos'e la poesia?' the poetic can be engaged only if one also acknowledges the degree to which its distinction is to evade definition and to resist identity. In a sense, the whole text is a performance of the impossibility of answering the question that sets it off. The poetic cannot comply with philosophical questioning: the text ends confessing the arbitrariness of any answer as such:
Source: Oxford Literary Review
DOI: 10.3366/olr.1993.002
Author: Timothy Clark
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2086080680