To prepare for the Other: this is the mission of ethics. Future Present: Ethics and/as Science Fiction fuses contemporary philosophy from Heidegger, Derrida, Levinas, and others with cultural texts preoccupied with the future arrival of an Other: science fiction. We peer through the lens of science fiction with the help of H. G. Wells, Walt Disney, Star Trek, David Cronenberg, Philip K. Dick, and many others, in search of a theory of ethics that leaves open the possibility of the Other (...) and encourages empathy, which is necessary for survival in our multicultural world. (shrink)

Certain general ideas come up repeatedly, in various guises, when contemporary poetry is discussed. One of these might be described as the question of what, if anything, is our social responsibility as poets.That is, there are things writers owe the art of poetry—work, perhaps. And in a sense there are things writers owe themselves—emotional truthfulness, attention toward one’s own feelings. But what, if anything, can a poet be said to owe other people in general, considered as a community? For what (...) is the poet answerable? This is a more immediate—though more limited—way of putting the question than such familiar terms as “political poetry.”Another recurring topic is what might be called Poetry Gloom. I mean that sourness and kvetching that sometimes come into our feelings about our art: the mysterious disaffections, the querulous doubts, the dispirited mood in which we ask ourselves, has contemporary poetry gone downhill, does anyone at all read it, has poetry become a mere hobby, do only one’s friends do it well, and so forth. This matter often comes up in the form of questions about the “popularity” or “audience” of poetry.Possibly the appetite for poetry really was greater in the good old days, in other societies. After the total disaster at Syracuse, when the Athenians, their great imperialist adventure failed, were being massacred, or branded as slaves with the image of a horse burned into the forehead, a few were saved for the sake of Euripides, whose work, it seems, was well thought of by the Syracusans. “Many of the captives who got safe back to Athens,” writes Plutarch,Are said, after they reached home, to have gone and made their acknowledgments to Euripides, relating how some of them had been released from their slavery by teaching what they could remember of his poems and others, when straggling after the fight, had been relieved with meat and drink for repeating some of his lyrics. Robert Pinsky teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book of poems, History of My Heart, was awarded the William Carlos Williams Prize. His other books include Sadness and Happiness, An Explanation of America, and a volume of criticism, The Situation of Poetry. Mindwheel, his narrative entertainment for computer, has been issued by Brøderbund Software. (shrink)

EDITORS' INTRODUCTION Perhaps the single most broadly unifying feature of the early new archaeology was the demand that archaeologists not take the aims and ...

The place of poetry in modern democracy is no place, according to conventional wisdom. The poet, we hear, is a casualty of mass entertainment and prosaic public culture, banished to the artistic sidelines to compose variations on insipid themes for a dwindling audience. Robert Pinsky, however, argues that this gloomy diagnosis is as wrongheaded as it is familiar. Pinsky, whose remarkable career as a poet itself undermines the view, writes that to portray poetry and democracy as enemies is (...) to radically misconstrue both. The voice of poetry, he shows, resonates with profound themes at the very heart of democratic culture.There is no one in America better to write on this topic. One of the country's most accomplished poets, Robert Pinsky served an unprecedented two terms as America's Poet Laureate and led the immensely popular multimedia Favorite Poem Project, which invited Americans to submit and read aloud their favorite poems. Pinsky draws on his experiences and on characteristically sharp and elegant observations of individual poems to argue that expecting poetry to compete with show business is to mistake its greatest democratic strength--its intimate, human scale--as a weakness.As an expression of individual voice, a poem implicitly allies itself with ideas about individual dignity that are democracy's bedrock, far more than is mass participation. Yet poems also summon up communal life.. Even the most inward-looking work imagines a reader. And in their rhythms and cadences poems carry in their very bones the illusion and dynamic of call and response. Poetry, Pinsky writes, cannot help but mediate between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and the outer world of other people. As part of the entertainment industry, he concludes, poetry will always be small and overlooked. As an art--and one that is inescapably democratic--it is massive and fundamental. (shrink)

The discrete light-cone quantization (DLCQ) of a supersymmetric gauge theory in 1+1 dimensions is discussed, with particular attention given to the inclusion of the gauge zero mode. Interestingly, the notorious “zero-mode” problem is now tractable because of special supersymmetric cancellations. In particular, we show that anomalous zero-mode contributions to the currents are absent, in contrast to what is observed in the nonsupersymmetric case. An analysis of the vacuum structure is provided by deriving the effective quantum mechanical Hamiltonian of the gauge (...) zero mode. It is shown that the inclusion of the zero modes of the adjoint scalars and fermions is crucial for probing the phase properties of the vacua. We find that the ground-state energy is zero and thus consistent with unbroken supersymmetry and conclude that the light-cone Fock vacuum is unchanged with or without the presence of matter fields. (shrink)

Whatever we choose to call Beckett’s series of disjunctive and repetitive paragraphs , Ill Seen Ill Said surely has little in common with the short story or the novella. Yet this is how the editors of the New Yorker, where Beckett’s piece first appeared in English in 1981, evidently thought of it, for like all New Yorker short stories, it is punctuated by cartoons and, what is even more ironic, by a “real” poem, Harold Brodkey’s “Sea Noise” . Notice that (...) the reader immediately knows—or is supposed to know—that Brodkey is a poet and Beckett a fiction writer, not only because “Sea Noise” is designated a poem in the issue’s table of contents, but also because its placement on the page, framed by white space, distinguishes it from Ill Seen Ill Said, which is printed in standard New Yorker columns. Yet if we examine the sound structure of Brodkey’s poem, we find that the rhythm of recurrence is, if anything, less prominent here than in the Beckett “prose.” The four stanzas are of irregular line length ; the stress count ranges from one to five ; rhyme occurs only once, at the end of the poem ; and alliteration and assonance are not marked. Unless we assume that poetry is defined by the sheer decision of its maker to lineate the text, or unless we want to call “Sea Noise” a poem because it is built around a single extended metaphor , there is no rationale for the classification the New Yorker has implicitly adopted.4The meaning of this classification is worth pondering, for it represents, in microcosm, the orthodoxy of every major literature textbook and literary history as well as of most classrooms in the United States and Britain, which that Beckett is a writer who, like the young Joyce or the young Faulkner, wrote in his dim youth some negligible, clotted lyric poems but whose real work belongs to drama and fiction. As such, we don’t teach Beckett in our poetry courses or include him in discussions of contemporary poetry and poetics. The index of any major book on the subject—say, Robert Pinsky’s The Situation of Poetry—will bear this out. And yet the irony is that contemporary poets are increasingly using forms that cannot be properly understood without the example of Beckett’s astonishing “lyrics of fiction”—to use Ryby Cohn’s apt term5—or, as I shall call them, his “associative monologues.” Perhaps, then, it is time to rethink our current procedures of canon making. In what follows, I shall use Ill Seen Ill Said as an example.4. Contemporary prosodists, perhaps because they must account for the difficult case of free verse, generally do equate verse—and hence implicitly the poem—with lineation. For example, Charles O. Hartman, in his recent Free Verse: An Essay in Prosody , observes that, difficult as it is to define the word “poetry” “rigorously and permanently,” verse can be distinguished from prose quite readily:Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose…. This is not really a satisfying distinction, as it stands, but it is the only one that works absolutely. The fact that we can tell verse from prose on sight, with very few errors…indicates that the basic perceptual difference must be very simple. Only lineation fits the requirements. [P.11]But, as I have just shown in the case of Beckett and Brodkey, what looks like verse may sound like prose and vice versa. The “basic perceptual difference” between the two is surely not as simple as Hartman suggests. I discuss this question from a somewhat different angle in “The Linear Fallacy,” Georgia Review 35 : 855-69.5. See Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett , chap. 5, “Lyrics of Fiction.”. (shrink)