book by joanna klink. In the May installment, Laura Kasischke offers a rave review of Alice Notley’s masterful, book-length poem, The Descent of Alette (1996). Related Searches. ( Log Out /  Customer Reviews. Get this from a library! Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, not allowed to live in the world above. Alongside the Owl, the other animal motif significant Alette’s performance of crisis is the Snake. Book III. Another tactic Notley deploys in order to perform her crisis of form is what Gertrude Stein famously calls ‘repetition with difference’: the use of repeated phrases that evolve, through a series of minimalist alterations, away from sameness into difference. Tags: Alice Notley. The quotation marks also impart a tentative quality to the language as though, having at her disposal only the linguistic relics of a patriarchal hegemony, the language Alette uses is entirely provisional. 7 -, 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 94 product ratings, 5.0 out of 5 stars based on 9 product ratings, 4.9 out of 5 stars based on 479 product ratings, 4.6 out of 5 stars based on 20 product ratings, 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 42 product ratings, 5.0 out of 5 stars based on 3 product ratings, 4.8 out of 5 stars based on 20 product ratings. Alice Notley presents a feminist epic: a bold journey into the deeper realms. Silberman, Steve. Something went wrong. Descent of Alette is an epic quest poem, a long poem, a poem where we follow Alette, the hero, into the depths of decaying subway stations, underground, a space of many metamorphoses, on a mission to find, expose, and destroy the tyrant--a representation of masculine supremacy--all supremacy, but def male--and heal the world. Provides valuable insights into one of Notley’s most significant works. Buy a cheap copy of The Descent of Alette (Poets, Penguin) book by Alice Notley. Rather than construct a monumental, memorializing narrative, Notley uses a model of interlocking, cthonian cells — subway stations, caves, rooms in the tyrant’s House — to produce a series of lyric poems whose narrative focus is, paradoxically, on ‘stopped time.’[6] The cellular imagism also highlights the radical dislocation experienced by all the subterranean inhabitants in Alette and by Alette herself, who can only move from one prison-like cell to another. Select other issues of the magazine from the | Jacket automotive electrical handbook. It’s a book I save for sharing, or to which I return when I need to be reminded of what it is to read something with so much gravity that it requires a total surrender. ( Log Out /  In "The Descent of Alette," Alice Notley presents a feminist epic, a bold journey into the deeper realms. material is copyright. February 2004  |  Jacket 25  Contents  |  Homepage  |  Catalog  |  Search  |. The lowest-priced brand-new, unused, unopened, undamaged item in its original packaging (where packaging is applicable).Packaging should be the same as what is found in a retail store, unless the item is handmade or was packaged by the manufacturer in non-retail packaging, such as an unprinted box or plastic bag.See details for additional description. Together, they fuel what Page DuBois calls ‘an allegorical, utopian call for tyrannicide in the name of postcapitalist, postpatriarchal future.’[3] Bendall, Molly. Perhaps most importantly, Notley’s quotation marks work much like Emily Dickinson’s dashes: they stagger language in a way that makes the text appear as though it issues from a highly compressed, oracular consciousness. The Decent Of Alette is a rich odyssey of transformation in the tradition of The Inferno. I find myself unable to read it as often as I would because I find it radioactive, dangerous, addictive, all-consuming. 16 July 2001. In Native American tradition, an initiate into the realm of meta-human powers experiences a series of dreams in which a totemic animal announces its claim on the initiate, thus investing him or her with that creature’s non-human attributes and capabilities. Missing Information?. In some sects, sacred women lived in the temples and routinely had indiscriminate sex with male devotees. The Descent of Alette is, for me, already a classic and one well worth reading. As a result, Notley must resort to their obverse — dreams, darkness, the anti-rational — as building materials for her epic. It may not be stored, displayed, published, reproduced, or used for This method of accretion allows for clarification, modification and revision in a way that resembles the linguistic awkwardness of someone struggling to recount a dream, as in the scene of the woman and child  on the subway who are ‘‘both on fire, continuously’’: Essential to this ‘repetition with difference’ is a near absence of punctuation other than the quotation mark, an absence which is only vaguely mitigated by the sporadic use of capitalization. Various theories have been advanced as to whether this was a form of ritualized prostitution or whether these women actually were, in fact, high priestesses. holy heathen rhapsody. The essential question for Notley is thus, as Susan McCabe puts it, ‘Can form and embodiment, snugly in the province of masculine privilege, be remapped along lines other than the phallic?’[2] While Notley does, in some sense, settle on a series of tactics to radically disrupt epic form, she more or less decides, quite brilliantly, to perform the crisis. the sonnets by ted berrigan paperback. Alette, the narrator, finds herself underground, deep beneath the city, where spirits and people ride endlessly on subways, t allowed to live in the world above. Click on the note to be taken to it; likewise to return to the text. DuBois, Page. Just as Notley seeks to subvert the teleology of language at the level of the sentence, so she seeks to dismantle what she deems to be the larger teleological drive of the epic by using what she calls ‘a pattern of near inaction,’ which she models on the ancient Sumerian epic, The Descent of Inana, an epic populated almost exclusively by female deities.

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