Bücher von Christopher Norris

These poems are the result of a lifetime of highly active involvement with music on the part of a writer best known for his work in philosophy, literary theory (especially deconstruction), and the history of ideas. In this collection he has chosen a great range of verse forms, among them sonnet, terzanelle, quatrain, terza rima, ottava rima, and pantoum. The poems treat individual composers, Purcell to Shostakovich and Philip Glass, and themes such as the tritone, or 'devil in music'. Spanning ten years of intensive creativity these poems mark Norris's sustained attempt to assert a more expansive and challenging conception of poetry's present-day prospects.

These poems continue Christopher Norris's spirited exploration of the paths by which contemporary poetry might find its way out of the self-enclosed sphere of lyric subjectivity into the larger air of philosophical, ethical, political, scientific, and environmental debate. They do so through a range of formal resources, among them rhyme and meter, which Norris regards as portals of creative-intellectual discovery and not, as free-verse practitioners would have it, artificially cramping constraints. Norris also deploys a great range of stanza forms and verse structures to demonstrate the variety of ways in which technique and prosody can serve not only to emphasize, deepen or qualify a point but to express thoughts and feelings beyond the communicative reach of prose discourse. These aspects of his work are subject to commentary in a concluding essay where Norris talks about his passage from literary theory to philosophy and thence to poetry, although-as the reader will soon discover-without having left those earlier interests behind. Indeed, it is a main concern of this collection to make the case-against dominant post-Romantic or Modernist conceptions-that a poem can justifiably put forward certain ideas, propositions, or hypotheses that ask to be assessed in rational-critical as well as aesthetic or literary-critical terms. Norris is very clear that his kind of formalism is strictly a matter of verse-technique or structure and no part of any larger, doctrinally driven autonomist program, like that of the 'old' New Criticism, that treats poems as purely verbal artifacts self-sealed against any such alien intrusions as history, biography, or the meddlesome prose intellect. These poems are intended as mind-openers whose formal elements are always in the service of a deeper, more lucid, and creative engagement with their diverse topics and concerns.What People Are SayingExploring the relationship between poetry, literary criticism, theory, and philosophy, Norris has the earned authority of an expert in all four fields. Yet there's a disarming playfulness in his engagement with the reader, and he makes complex argument memorably musical by mining the resources of meter and rhyme. Deploying a dazzling array of poetic forms - from villanelle, terza rima and sonnet to ballad and acrostic-this collection is a tour de force of wit, intellect, political verve and musicality: in short, a major achievement. -Lucy Newlyn, author of Reading, Writing, and RomanticismEminent philosophers, or literary theorists, do not usually turn, all of sudden, into fully-formed, metrically-perfect and highly-formalized poets; but that is the trick or magic of Christopher Norris. And in this his latest volume of poetry the magic is all the more magical for often silently becoming the very subject of his poems. Witness talk of William Empson's "late-style change of hats," or James Joyce's Daedalus slipping "the scholar's leash." Here then, juggling his hats as he goes, Scholar Norris is well-and-truly on the run. And, as the Runaway himself writes, "just North of here the games begin."- John Schad, author of Paris Bride: A Modernist LifeAbout the AuthorChristopher Norris is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales, where he taught for four decades. He is the author and editor of more than forty books on topics in philosophy, literary theory, politics, music, and the history of ideas. More recently, he has published ten volumes of poetry ranging from lyrics and reflective verse to philosophical verse-essays and political satires. Academically he is best known for his extensive writing on the poet and literary critic William Empson and for his many books and essays on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction.

In these renderings of a wide selection from Rilke's New Poems (1907-6) a leading literary theorist and philosopher takes a fresh look at the process, possibilities, and challenges of poetic translation. While honouring Rilke's singular gifts of inventiveness, depth, acute observation, and narrative power Christopher Norris also finds plentiful room for expanding the scope of translation as an exercise in inter-cultural hermeneutics and critical-creative practice. His versions range over genres or modes from the relatively 'straight' to various kinds of self-distancing, ironic, parodic, or downright dissident treatment, thereby combining the activity of translation with those of commentary and critique. At the same time he reflects the poet's formal priorities by retaining rhyme and meter throughout, as in the original texts, but accepting the need for adjustments from poem to poem so as to accommodate the syntactic and prosodic differences between German and English.Rilke has long been a magnet for English translators of varied persuasion but this volume offers much that is timely and distinctive. Norris's renderings are notable for their tonal variety, their often witty or irreverent character, their formal dexterity, their range of intertextual reference or allusion, and their constant awareness of reception-history as a changing backdrop to the poetry that often calls for renewed approaches to the task of translation. Any suspicion of wilful tampering or perverse delight in satirically upping the ante is soon dispelled by the many instances where formal resources are deployed in such a way as to capture salient aspects of the original's meaning, mood, and more elusive nuances.Where these versions depart furthest from traditional practice is in parodying certain questionable aspects of Rilke's work, among them its sometimes rather vapid spiritualism or mysticism, its attitude toward women and sexual relations, and its blind-spots of snobbery and aristo pretension. Elsewhere the pressure or tension created by Norris's active engagement is sufficient to break with the ideal, if such it is, of strict line-for-line or stanza-for stanza proportionality and to overrun the original's length by a factor well beyond normal allowances. Those renderings most often take the form of a dialogue between poet and translator, or a running commentary that functions very much like an interlinear gloss.

Hedgehogs is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about Jacques Derrida by a well-known philosopher, literary theorist, and commentator on his writings. Their topics range widely across the full span of Derrida's work, treated here in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse of a variously witty, ironic, reflective, discursive, and narrative character. Norris's aim is partly to provide a way into that work for readers with a chief interest in poetry and partly to offer fresh points of engagement for philosophers and literary critics, including those who have so far been resistant to it. But his object is also to explore the possibility of playing off formal verse structures against Derrida's very different, broadly symbolist-modernist idea of what poetry can and should be in the wake of practitioners like Mallarmé and Paul Celan. By so doing Norris makes a case - contra the advocates of free verse - for the exploratory-creative rather than restrictive or expression-cramping role of rhyme and meter. These serve at best as formal constraints that liberate thought into semantic, conceptual and imaginative regions beyond anything that might be envisaged by writers of straightforward expository prose, or indeed free verse. Thus they are highly suited to philosophical poetry, especially where it intersects with a mode of thought - like Derrida's - that lives very much in and through its singular resources of linguistic inventiveness. Altogether these poems make a notable contribution to the currently fast-growing field of creative criticism.

Hedgehogs is an extended sequence of poems and verse-essays about Jacques Derrida by a well-known philosopher, literary theorist, and commentator on his writings. Their topics range widely across the full span of Derrida's work, treated here in formal (rhyming and metrical) verse of a variously witty, ironic, reflective, discursive, and narrative character. Norris's aim is partly to provide a way into that work for readers with a chief interest in poetry and partly to offer fresh points of engagement for philosophers and literary critics, including those who have so far been resistant to it. But his object is also to explore the possibility of playing off formal verse structures against Derrida's very different, broadly symbolist-modernist idea of what poetry can and should be in the wake of practitioners like Mallarmé and Paul Celan. By so doing Norris makes a case - contra the advocates of free verse - for the exploratory-creative rather than restrictive or expression-cramping role of rhyme and meter. These serve at best as formal constraints that liberate thought into semantic, conceptual and imaginative regions beyond anything that might be envisaged by writers of straightforward expository prose, or indeed free verse. Thus they are highly suited to philosophical poetry, especially where it intersects with a mode of thought - like Derrida's - that lives very much in and through its singular resources of linguistic inventiveness. Altogether these poems make a notable contribution to the currently fast-growing field of creative criticism.

While in no way oversimplifying its complexity or glossing over the challenges it presents, Norris's book sets out to make deconstruction more accessible to the open-minded reader.