This gave his emotional life an apostrophic structure - he was always trying to reach someone who wasn’t there, which is what literary critics call apostrophe, the targeting of an absent party by a spoken address (“ Little Red Corvette / Baby, you’re much too fast”). She came back now and then but was a very erratic figure, an alcoholic who was sometimes doting, sometimes destructive, and then she died when Keats was 14. That said, it’s safe to say that the defining event of Keats’s life was that his mother Frances abandoned him and his siblings when he was nine years old, after his father died. Could you expand on how you made these connections? How does love cause us to plead for what has disappeared?ĪNAHID NERSESSIAN: I go back and forth between being sort of exhausted by psychoanalytic tropes and feeling personally clarified and intellectually excited by them. In these contexts, Keats’s dense compositions are love poems that are at once grand and intimate. The ode describes expressions of love as, in your words, “a strange compulsion to speak to those who aren’t there.” And you trace such laments to Freud’s concept of object withdrawal: the acting-out over the loss of a parent. JACK SKELLEY: You link Keats’s evolution of the ode form to both Roland Barthes and Sigmund Freud (your title alludes to Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments from 1977). I spoke to Nersessian about her book and the implications of its readings of Keats for contemporary pop music, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and autotheory. Not only do its essays on Keats’s six Great Odes speak to all those in love with the poet they are also intimately crucial to our late-capitalist, media-saturated world. Precious few books I have read on William Blake, Percy Shelley, or John Keats have fulfilled that goal, in my view Nersessian’s book is one. Long ago, I nursed an aspiration to be a professor of English Romanticism like the author (who teaches at UCLA), thinking I could translate that canon’s timelessness to readers and students of today. THE NEW BOOK by Anahid Nersessian, Keats’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse, arrived, for me, as if from an alternate-universe self.
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