From Walt Whitman to the contemporary period, the long poem has been one of the more dynamic, intricate, and yet challenging literary practices of modernity. Addressing those challenges, Writing in Real Time combines systems theory, literary history, and recent debates in poetics to interpret a broad range of American long poems as emergent systems, capable of adaptation and transformation in response to environmental change. Due to these emergent properties, the long poem performs essential cultural work, offering a unique experience of history that remains valuable for our rapidly transforming digital age. Moving across a broad range of literary and theoretical texts, Writing in Real Time demonstrates that the study of emergence can enhance literary scholarship, just as literature provides unique insights into emergent properties, making this book a key resource for scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students alike.

Writing in Real Time is the first book-length study of the American long poem as a complex adaptive system.

About the Author
Paul Jaussen is an Assistant Professor of Literature at Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan. His research covers nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, with a particular focus on poetics and literary theory. His essays and reviews have appeared in New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, the Journal of Modern Literature, William Carlos Williams Review, Jacket2, and The Volta.

Reviews
'This extraordinary book shows us exactly how the dynamics of the long poem enable the form, in Pound's phrase, to 'include history.' Jaussen develops a suite of basic concepts that make possible revelatory readings of key works, and a new understanding of modern poetry's most ambitious project.' Michael Clune, Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, and author of Writing Against Time (2013) and American Literature and the Free Market, 1945-2000 (Cambridge, 2010)
'Writing in Real Time is a welcome contribution to the dearth of systems-theoretical analyses of historically pivotal but formally unwieldy poetic projects ... [It] provides tools that are vital and necessary for developing a critical and creative poetic practice with the capacity to engage the complexity of contemporary literary, social, and political ecologies.' James Belflower, Journal of Modern Literature



Book Information
ISBN 9781107195318
Author Paul Jaussen
Format Hardback
Page Count 236
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 480g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 158mm * 17mm