Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory

by H.L. Hix

In a series of topical explorations structured like a sonata, H. L. Hix identifies the consequences of postmodern theory through such issues as grief, freedom, beauty, obscenity, love, and sex to its axiological consequences. A basic motif, postmodernism's distribution of meaning over space rather than time, recurs throughout the chapters, each of which in some way amplifies the book's underlying theme, virtue. The "exposition" of the theme in the first ten chapters receives its "development" in the chapter, "Postmodern Virtue," and its "recapitulation" in the aphorisms of the final chapter. By choosing names like "deconstruction," postmodern theory postures as that which shakes foundations. But any declaration of an end is also a declaration of a beginning, and Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes pushes past the posturing to ask what foundations postmodern theory has laid.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1995

About the author

H. L. Hix has published an anthology, Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation (2004), and eight books of poetry and literary criticism with Etruscan, including Shadows of Houses (2005), Chromatic (2006), God Bless: A Political/Poetic Discourse (2007), Legible Heavens (2008), Incident Light (2009), First Fire, Then Birds (2010), As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry (2002), and Lines of Inquiry (2011). He has two more books forthcoming from Etruscan, As Much As, If Not More Than (2013) and I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language (2014).

In addition to having been a finalist for the National Book Award for Chromatic, his awards include the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Peregrine Smith Award, and fellowships from the NEA, the Kansas Arts Commission, and the Missouri Arts Council. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas at Austin, taught at Kansas City Art Institute, and was an administrator at The Cleveland Institute of Art, before accepting his current position as professor in the Creative Writing MFA at the University of Wyoming. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Texas at Austin and at Shanghai University.