Nicky Marsh

Imagining the Market: A Visual History

This curation project explores visual representations of financial markets. Focusing on phases of upheaval in transatlantic finance extending back to the early eighteenth century, it traces a recurrent interplay among figuration, abstraction, and allegory in the attempts by graphic practitioners of various kinds (from pamphlet illustrators to fine art photographers) to imagine “the market” in visual form.

Teaching modernist poetry

Modernist poetry has a reputation for difficulty as well as brilliance, obscurity as well as innovations central to modern culture. Modernist poets have experimented with form, subject matter, visual appearance, oral performance, publication, and every aspect of the material and intellectual culture of the poem. Helping students to recognise and understand the energies and interventions at work in this poetry makes great demands on the teacher of literature. In this timely book, leading poets and scholars discuss the pleasures and challenges of teaching the exciting, diverse field of modernist poetry from the beginning of the last century to the present. You will find here many practical classroom ideas, along with plenty of useful information about poets, poems, critics and histories of poetry

Democracy in Contemporary U.S Women's Poetry

Description: This book reads the work of contemporary women poets against recent debates in third wave feminism and democratic theory in exploring the range of ways in which women poets have interrogated the complexities of being public in contemporary U.S culture. Contents: Becoming Public; Paper Money and Tender Acts: Feminism and Democracy; The Poetics of Privacy: Writing the Lyric Self; Against the Outside: The Publics of Language Poetry; Go Grrrl: Democracy and Counter Culture; Romantic Materialism and Emerging Poets.

‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: postmodernism, feminism and Lyn Hejinian's ‘My Life’

This paper locates the work and critical reception of the experimental poet Lyn Hejinian within the emerging debates of ‘third-wave’ feminist critique. It centrally argues that Hejinians writing at once illuminates and undermines the apparent tensions between a feminist and an anti-foundationalist critical position. It specifically focuses on Hejinians use of autobiography, as at once gesturing to the limitations of the theoretically naive self-knowing subject, steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity, and the continuing cultural validity of and desire for narrative, identification, self-expression and referentiality. The paper argues that Hejinians writing makes sense of this equivocation, not through its use of feminized tropes assumed to subvert the linear assumptions of the genre and render the reader ‘active’, but through an attention to the ironical complexities of her own cultural positioning. Hejinians writing demonstrates how the representation of the postmodern feminist subject involves an attention to authoriality, to the possibilities of textual experimentation and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of meaning for these things. Hejinian demonstrates not simply that feminism can reconcile a need for agency with a critique of agency, and that such an act needs to consider its collective implications, but that these kinds of claims actually require an engagement with the varied contexts that continue to make feminists attention to literature meaningful.

‘Paradise falls: a land lost in time’: representing credit, debt and work after the crisis

This article examines the way in which credit and debt have been explored since the 2008 crisis: suggesting a formal analogue in which an abstracted financial capital (credit) has been contrasted against its concrete productive counterpart (debt). The first half of the paper traces this contrast through the theoretical vocabularies for credit and debt that have emerged in the wake of the crisis, in which debt has been separated from credit and the possibility that the former can be read as resisting the latters dependence on financialisation has been explored. In the second half, I explore this dyad as it is made evident in two very recent films, Andrew Niccols 2011 In Time and Rian Johnsons 2012 Looper, which offer an alternative model of social debt, one that uses the connection between time and work to actively critique the movement from productive to financial capital. These two films, I want to suggest, engage with the difficulties of representing the ‘concrete’ nature of productive capital by both thematically and formally foregrounding its literalism.