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1 poem in The World Speaking Back . . . To Denise Riley
No full textTribute volime to Denise Riley on her 70th Birthda
Denise Riley and Lisa Baraitser in conversation
No full textThis conversation between Denise Riley (DR) and Lisa Baraitser (LB) took place in London on 21 April 2015, and was first published in the online journal Studies in the Maternal (Baraitser and Riley, 2016). The conversation centres on Riley’s book Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), which was re-issued by Picador in 2019
Imaginary Intimacies: Death and New Temporalities in the Work of Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle
Full text linkIn The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014), Julia Kristeva understands there to be two forms of relation to death in contemporary culture. The ‘imaginary intimacy with death, which transforms melancholy or desire into representation and thought’ is opposed in Kristeva’s work to ‘the rational realization’ of the act of capital punishment, the former epitomizing ‘vision’ in contrast to the ‘action’ of the latter. This essay proposes that Kristeva’s idea of an ‘imaginary intimacy’ with death can be read in the context of contemporary literary responses to the death of a loved one by Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle. In particular, this essay addresses the relationship between death and new temporalities in Riley’s essay Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), her recent collection of poems Say Something Back (2016), and Royle’s Quilt (2010). The non-linear models of time found in Riley’s and Royle’s works are contextualised via the attempts in phenomenology to theorise the relations between temporality and finitude, as well as via Stephen J Gould’s work on geological time. For Riley, the experience of the death of her son brings with it an ‘altered condition of life’ in which time takes the form of ‘a-temporality.’ Questioning the limits of the sentence, and collapsing the narrative boundaries between the living narrator and the deceased father, Quilt traverses the boundaries between experience lived and an experience impossible to claim. Through such an analysis the essay explores the capacity of experimental works to harbour new non-linear temporalities that reflect on the relation between temporality and finitude in the contemporary
Poems in "The World Speaking Back", a Denise Riley birthday celebration
No full textThe World Speaking Back... To Denise Riley is a transnational and transgenerational poetry anthology to celebrate the work, contribution, and influence of one of our major poets and foremost philosophers, Denise Riley. It includes work from ninety-four authors; each has gifted an individual contribution inspired by Riley s work in some form, be it in the fields of art history, political philosophy, poetics or creative writing; all are offered in tribute to the different spaces and ways in which Riley's work opens new possibilities for its readers.
The book has been prepared as a surprise collective gift by the editors, Ágnes Lehóczky and Zoë Skoulding, and publisher, Boiler House Press, to co-incide with her 70th birthday. It is available here for friends and fans who would also like to 'give something back': proceeds will be donated to a charity of Riley's choosing
Dedramatising Ideology: Style, Interpellation and Impersonality in Denise Riley
Full text linkThis article explores the interrelationship of style, interpellation and impersonality in the writings of Denise Riley. Part one performs a detailed reading of Riley’s essay ‘Malediction’, focussing on her theory of interpellation and her visceral sense of the materiality of language. It articulates the philosophical stakes of the essay by taking seriously its sustained, playful engagement with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and by emphasising the intrinsically Spinozist and dramaturgical elements of Althusser’s theory of interpellation. It also seeks to elucidate the philosophical and political import of Riley’s own critical style, which combines Stoicism (an ‘ethics’ in the broad sense), a materialist philosophy of language, and a distinctive poetics. The second part explores Riley’s theory of style and literary composition. It engages with Riley’s notions of ventriloquy and autoventriloquy, suggesting that her approach to style tends to stress the writer’s guilty susceptibility to words. The final part considers Riley’s elegy ‘A Part Song’ and the fraught manner in which grief accentuates contradictions endemic to style and authenticity alike. It argues that Riley harnesses the tensions of echo and interpellation to produce a poem that functions as much on the level of semi-conscious poetic association as via the interpellative mode of apostrophe
Kindly Fictions: Rereading Loss in the Writings of Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf, and Denise Riley
Full text linkThis thesis explores the response to loss through attention to a distinctive set of narrative texts written by Hélène Cixous, Jean Rhys, Virginia Woolf and Denise Riley. What connects these different writers, across time and place, is not only that each responds to loss in writing, but that each writer does so in a manner contesting prevalent associations of melancholia and trauma, giving place to an alternate ethics of mourning. Freud’s seminal essay, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1917), established the groundwork for contemporary critical examinations of loss, both a source of definitions and a framework to be revised. In particular, melancholia has been reappraised extensively as an ethically privileged response of fidelity following loss. However, as a number of critics elsewhere have noted, the moral economy of the melancholic risks reifying loss in subject-formation and, consequently, risks aggressive and exclusionary attempts at identity reconstruction and consolidation. Associated with an appeal to trauma transfigured as ethically originary, the critical ascendency of melancholia is one from which this thesis departs. As I show, Cixous, Rhys, Woolf and Riley emphasise instead the ways in which loss can be playfully and pleasurably set in motion in the present, as each chapter argues in differing ways. Articulating loss through the framework of fiction, broadly conceived, allows us to avoid the effects of vicarious identification with loss and trauma, while strategies of displacement resist the assumption of an uncritical empathy. The attitude of multidirectional encounter at work across this thesis (with loss; with the ‘other’; across genre, time, and writing) is, what’s more, an attempt to mitigate the paradigm of non-approachability and unsharability when it comes to the loss and trauma of others that, as Denise Riley contends, isolates the bereaved in contemporary life to ‘the inhuman remote realms of the “unimaginable”’
Writing Against the Lyric: Self-Sabotage and Poetic Survival in J. H. Prynne and Denise Riley
Full text linkThis is concerning poetry techniques utilized by J.H. Prynne and Denise Riley, who both criticize the norms of lyric coherence, expressivity, and fixed subjecthood in their artists. Through self-defiance, these poets are trying to survive by deliberately breaking the rules of the traditional poems that represent the incomplete and insecure world of modernity. In their interaction with the lyric, both Prynne and Riley destroy the fantasy of single selfhood, welcoming contradiction and multiplicity. The opaque, thick language of Prynne, with its intellectual and philosophical allusions, is artificially challenging and does not welcome easy communication, actively encouraging the reader to participate in the process of understanding. In contrast, Riley pays attention to the dislocation of time, unstable use of the pronouns, and suppressed affectivity, as she aims at revealing the intricacies of grief, loss, and even disintegration of personal identity. Although both poets are stylistically different, they prove that the notion of self-sabotage is not an unsuccessful attempt but an artistic reaction on the restrictions of the lyric tradition, developing new styles of poetry that are not vulnerable to commodification and provide alternative manifestations of subjectivity. This article brings out, through an evaluation of their work, the way that self-sabotage becomes a measure of resistance and survival to enable Prynne and Riley to push the boundaries of language and redefine poetic success in a postmodern, fragmented environment
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