Category Archives: Susan Howe

For my final plateau, I would like to revisit Eikon Basilike’s relationship to subjectivity, having now made it through the six plateaus of this section. I realize at this point that my earliest observations about Howe’s complex relationship to subjectivity ignore one important element of this text: that it patently refuses to withdraw its subjectivity,Continue reading “Language VOL II: _Eikon Basilike_ and the Lyric Subject”

As I have asserted throughout my project, any discussion of the role of the reader in a text is first and foremost a discussion of the role of the author and how s/he must be destabilized in order to leave from for a readership. And, I have shown that this discussion has clear roots inContinue reading “The Immateriality of the Common in _Eikon Basilike_”

As my gesture towards Cixous at the close of my last plateau suggests, I am also particularly concerned with embodiment in Eikon Basilike. Issues of materiality and embodiment in this work have by no means been critically ignored; it would seem that nearly every critical study of it over the last decade or so hasContinue reading “BEholding Mimesis: _Eikon Basilike_ as Concrete”

As the end of my last plateau suggests, I am particularly interested in the persistent images of ghosts, specters, and hauntings throughout Susan Howe’s work, and in Eikon Basilike in particular. Reading through the criticism surrounding Howe, it would seem that I am not alone. Kathleen Crown, for example, says Howe’s authorship functions as thoughContinue reading “Hauntological Spectres in _Eikon Basilike_”

In this plateau, I would like to redirect the many discussions of the experimental visual elements of Eikon Basilike by viewing these visual disruptions, first and foremost, as a kind of joyful proclamation rather than as violence or a reflection of violence as they are typically understood. While Eikon Basilike is ostensibly a poetic discussionContinue reading “Ex-static Indeed: A Static Reading of Susan Howe”

Beginning work on Susan Howe is a daunting task because she has garnered so much critical attention. My own scholarship on Howe in this project will focus on one of her most popular texts, A Bibliography of the King’s Book, or, Eikon Basilike, a text that has frequently been the focus of critical scholarship. ForContinue reading “nnfortunate subjectivity in _Eikon Basilike_”