Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency:

A Reading of the Poems of J. H. Prynne

Authors

  • Rupsa Banerjee

Keywords:

J.H. Prynne, Poetry, Agency, Capital, Subject

Abstract

Geography’s relation to the creation of a national identity has indelibly influenced different forms of literary writing. In the late capitalist age, the incommensurability of the territorial entity of the nation and physically experienced space cause us to delve deeper into the practices that interpellate us as inhabitants of a democratic nation-space. The scalar fluidity of an individual’s identity is figured by the different ways in which language emulates the social and personal identity of the individual. The virtual nature of the modern democratic state-form where power essentially appears as an empty place is counteracted upon by the poetic language of the late modern British poet J.H. Prynne. Through a study of his two poems (published in the poetry collection Kitchen Poems, 1968) this essay will look into the ways in which individual lives are intertwined with the functioning of economic capital in the state. In an age following the proverbial incursion of the economy into the affective premises of life, Prynne’s language attempts to give agency to the individual caught in the functioning of multiple discourses, separating every day from the pervasive abstractions of high finance resource mobilizations. This task of locating the individual’s identity is done by identifying the connections that the individual shares with the land and by uncovering the material basis of political identity.

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Author Biography

Rupsa Banerjee

Rupsa Banerjee is a third year Ph.D in the Dept. Of English Literature, The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She completed her Bachelors from Calcutta University in English Literature with First Class Honours (2010). She attained her Masters degree with specialization in English Literature from EFLU (2012) with 86%. She has published set of individual poems in the anthology entitled Skeletons brought out by Lady Chaos Press, New York. She has also helped translate Bengali poems of Hungry Generation poet Saileswar Ghosh for a book marketed internationally by a Bengali publication house of considerable repute (Dey’s Press). Another of her publications include a paper entitled The Poetics of William Carlos Williams: The Use of Rolling in Paterson as a means of transfiguration of ‘Actual’/’Linguistic’ Space in the international journal entitled “Colloquium”, published by Bhowanipore Educational Society, Kolkata, India. Her research areas include Postmodern Poetry, Philosophy of Space and Place, Late Capitalist Aesthetic Developments, Hungry Generation Poetry of Bengal, Narratives of dislocation.

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Published

2021-10-28

How to Cite

Banerjee, R. (2021). Late Capitalism and the Problem of Individual Agency:: A Reading of the Poems of J. H. Prynne. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 1(2), 180–202. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/41