Colin Falck - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Colin Falck is a literary critic and poet. He was associate professor in Modern literature

Modern literature

Modern literature can either refer to*modernist literature *modern literature ....

York College of Pennsylvania

York College of Pennsylvania is a private, coeducational, 4-year college located in southcentral Pennsylvania. The school offers more than 50 baccalaureate majors in professional programs, the sciences, and humanities to its 4,600 undergraduate students...

.

In 1962 Falck co-founded the influential postwar British poetry magazine The Review with Oxford University schoolmates Ian Hamilton

Ian Hamilton (critic)

Robert Ian Hamilton was a British literary critic, reviewer, biographer, poet, magazine editor and publisher....

, Michael Fried, and John Fuller

John Fuller (poet)

John Fuller is an English poet and author, and Fellow Emeritus at Magdalen College, Oxford.Fuller was born in Ashford, Kent, England, the son of poet and Oxford Professor Roy Fuller, and educated at St Paul's School and New College, Oxford. He began teaching in 1962 at the State University of New...

. Falck's poetry would later appear in the first issue of Hamilton's magazine The New Review. In January 1984 he set up, and has from that date acted as chair of, the Thurlow Road Poetry Workshop. Among the poets to have brought their work to the fortnightly (now monthly) meetings of the group are Hugo Williams

Hugo Williams

Hugo Williams is a British poet, journalist and travel writer. His full name is Hugh Mordaunt Vyner Williams He is the son of actor Hugh Williams and the model and actress Margaret Vyner, who co-wrote some upper-middle-class comedies in the late 1950s...

, Jo Shapcott

Jo Shapcott

Jo Shapcott FRSL, is an English poet, editor and lecturer who has won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award.-Career:...

, Ruth Padel

Ruth Padel

Ruth Sophia Padel is a British poet, Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Zoological Society of London. She also writes non-fiction and more recently fiction, broadcasts on wildlife, poetry and literature for BBC Radio 3 and 4, and is Writer in Residence at The Environment Institute,...

, Eva Salzman

Eva Salzman

Eva Salzman is a noted contemporary American poet.Eva Salzman was born in 1960 in New York City, and grew up in Brooklyn where – from the age of 10 until 22 – she was a dancer and later a choreographer. She was educated at Bennington College and Columbia University, moving to Britain in 1985...

, Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe is a British poet, novelist and playwright whose works also include short stories and radio dramas.-Career:Adam Thorpe was born in Paris and grew up in India, Cameroon and England...

, Michael Donaghy

Michael Donaghy

Michael Donaghy was an award-winning New York poet and musician, who lived in London from 1985.-Life and career:...

, Don Paterson

Don Paterson

Don Paterson, OBE, FRSL is a Scottish poet, writer and musician.-Background:Paterson was born in Dundee. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 1990 and his poem A Private Bottling won the Arvon Foundation International Poetry Competition in 1993. He was included on the list of 20 poets chosen for the...

, Jane Duran

Jane Duran

-Background:Duran was born to an American mother and a Spanish father who had fought with the Republican army in the Spanish Civil war. He fled Spain after Franco's victory but would never talk about his experiences. The themes of silences, loss and exile haunt much of her work...

and Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver

Vicki Feaver is an English poet. She studied music at Durham University and English at University College, London, and later worked as a lecturer and tutor in English and Creative Writing at University College, Chichester, where she is an Emeritus Professor.She now lives with her psychiatrist...

.

His 1989 treatise

Treatise

A treatise is a formal and systematic written discourse on some subject, generally longer and treating it in greater depth than an essay, and more concerned with investigating or exposing the principles of the subject.-Noteworthy treatises:...

Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Postmodernism, attempted to re-think the entire foundation of Romantic

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

art criticism

Art criticism

Art criticism is the discussion or evaluation of visual art.Art critics usually criticize art in the context of aesthetics or the theory of beauty...

since Kant

KANT

KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in global function fields, and in local fields. KASH is the associated command line interface...

. The first chapter is a sustained polemic

Polemic

A polemic is a variety of arguments or controversies made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. Other variations of argument are debate and discussion...

against what Falck argued was the nihilism

Nihilism

Nihilism is the philosophical doctrine suggesting the negation of one or more putatively meaningful aspects of life. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of existential nihilism which argues that life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value...

and ontological emptiness of post-modernism and post-structuralist literary theory

Literary theory

Literary theory in a strict sense is the systematic study of the nature of literature and of the methods for analyzing literature. However, literary scholarship since the 19th century often includes—in addition to, or even instead of literary theory in the strict sense—considerations of...

. The next chapter offers, in opposition to Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics...

, a theory of the origin of language

Origin of language

The origin of language is the emergence of language in the human species. This is a highly controversial topic. Empirical evidence is so limited that many regard it as unsuitable for serious scholars. In 1866, the Linguistic Society of Paris went so far as to ban debates on the subject...

based on onomatopoeia. One critic said:

He offers a Neo-Romantic, expressivist
Expressivism
Expressivism in meta-ethics is a theory about the meaning of moral language. According to expressivism, sentences that employ moral terms–for example, “It is wrong to torture an innocent human being”–are not descriptive or fact-stating; moral terms such as “wrong,” “good,” or “just” do not refer...

view influenced by Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

. His view is not self-expressivist, however, since it denies the epistemological notion of a detached subject
Subject (philosophy)
In philosophy, a subject is a being that has subjective experiences, subjective consciousness or a relationship with another entity . A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed...

and situates the human being in the world in the manner of modern phenomenology...Art, for Falck, gives ontological truth.

The book makes constant reference to Kant

KANT

, Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

, Schiller, Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. Shelley was famous for his association with John Keats and Lord Byron...

, Blake

Blake

Blake is a surname or a given name which originated from Old English. Its derivation is uncertain; it could come from "blac", a nickname for someone who had dark hair or skin, or from "blaac", a nickname for someone with pale hair or skin. Another theory is that it is a corruption of "Ap Lake",...

, Keats and Goethe. Author Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia

Camille Anna Paglia , is an American author, teacher, and social critic. Paglia, a self-described dissident feminist, has been a Professor at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania since 1984...

hailed the book as "reveal[ing] the future of literary criticism."

Falck criticized W. H. Auden

W. H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden , who published as W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet,The first definition of "Anglo-American" in the OED is: "Of, belonging to, or involving both England and America." See also the definition "English in origin or birth, American by settlement or citizenship" in See also...

's didactic theory of poetry: "Responsible poetry therefore becomes a kind of war-time fruit-cake

Fruitcake

Fruitcake is a cake made with chopped candied fruit and/or dried fruit, nuts, and spices, and soaked in spirits. A cake that simply has fruit in it as an ingredient can also be colloquially called a fruitcake. In the United Kingdom, certain rich versions may be iced and decorated...

, with the raisins of escape thinly distributed in a daily bread of parable

Parable

A parable is a succinct story, in prose or verse, which illustrates one or more instructive principles, or lessons, or a normative principle. It differs from a fable in that fables use animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as characters, while parables generally feature human...

External links

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