...Tim Dean Abstract This essay considers the “descriptive turn” in literary studies from the vantage point of poetics, arguing that the history of Western poetry, from the Greeks to the present, offers through the category of epideixis a theory and practice of description that illuminates some...

... of analysis. The five essays and two responses take up subjects from historical fiction to artificial intelligence, genre theory to collaborative authorship, while exploring such formal vantage points as Saidian textualization and Aristotelian epideixis. In the mode of MLQ ’s long-standing commitment...

... and a postmodernist poetics. Fineman’s approach is not unlike that of his colleague Joel Altman in reviewing and reviving much of the frequently disregarded Tudor drama: he grounds poetics (as Aristotle did) in rhetoric, but rhetoric of a special kind, that of epideixis, or praise. This will come...

... for postcolonial literary critics, though for very different reasons. Dean’s enriching analysis of the long history of praise poetry and the use of epideixis in the poems of Mark Doty could enable a renewed emphasis on poetry, a neglected genre in postcolonial literary studies. The sidelining of poetry...