Charles Altieri

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Charles Altieri is an American literary scholar, critic, and Professor Emeritus of English at the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Rachael Anderson Stageberg Chair in English. [1] [2] His work, consisting of 11 books and over two hundred articles, addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century American [3] and British poetry, modern literary theory, the visual arts, and intersections between literature and philosophy that extend to writing on Plato, Ovid, and Shakespeare. [4]

Contents

Academic Career

At the University of California, Berkeley, Altieri served as Professor and later Professor Emeritus, holding the Rachael Anderson Stageberg Endowed Chair. [5] Over the course of his career, he taught courses in nineteenth-century thought, Victorian literature, modern and contemporary English and American poetry, classical and modern literary theory, and literature’s relationship to the visual arts. [6] He also led interdisciplinary seminars that explored philosophical questions within poetry and art. [1]

Altieri retired from full-time teaching in July 2021 but has remained active in research and mentoring. His ongoing teaching interests include Shakespeare, Hegel, and epic literature subjects through which he continues to explore the concept of affect and its function in literary experience. [7]

Research and scholarly works

American Poetry

Altieri’s first major monograph, Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry of the 1960s (1979), examines how American poets sought to articulate systems of value in a secular cultural context. The study analyzes figures including Robert Lowell, Robert Creeley, W. S. Merwin, and Adrienne Rich, and argues that prevailing New Critical formalism was ill-equipped to address the ethical and social pressures shaping postwar poetry. [8]

In Act and Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning (1981), Altieri develops a philosophical account of literary meaning grounded in the distinction between explanatory models that treat actions as objects and approaches that attend to the expressive qualities displayed by human actions. Drawing centrally on the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the book establishes a conception of literary interpretation based on expressive “display” rather than on formalist or structuralist abstraction. [9]

After Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (1984), Altieri shifted the primary focus of his research toward literary modernism and the visual arts. [10] In Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry (1989), he argues that modernist poetry can be productively understood through the formal innovations of modern painting, beginning with Paul Cézanne and extending to later abstraction. [11]

This approach informs Altieri’s readings of poets such as Ezra Pound, whose work he treats as exemplary of a poetics in which meaning emerges through the manner of expression rather than descriptive representation. [12]

Altieri extended this framework to postmodern art and literature in Postmodernism Now: Essays on Contemporaneity in the Arts. [13] The book analyzes theoretical contradictions within accounts of postmodernism and argues that artists and writers employ formal and conceptual instability as a mode of cultural awareness. Central to this study is his interpretation of the work of John Ashbery, alongside painters and poets associated with experimental and postwar art. [14]

Altieri subsequently returned to modernist poetry in The Art of Modern American Poetry [15] and in Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory: The Importance of Constructivist Values. [16] These studies develop a philosophical account of modernist abstraction grounded in the concept of “inner sensuousness,” derived from the aesthetic theory of G. W. F. Hegel, and argue that materialist approaches to literature cannot adequately explain the experiential and affective dimensions of modernist form. [17]

Wallace Stevens and phenomenology of value

Altieri’s most sustained single-author study is Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value, devoted to Wallace Stevens. [18] The book advances a phenomenological account of how poetic imagination transforms lived situations into experiences of value. Altieri traces Stevens’s development from a conception of value influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, through a broadly Hegelian model of an Absolute that Stevens called “a necessary fiction and finally toward a Wittgensteinian emphasis on particular linguistic practices and resistance to philosophical totalization. [19]

Philosophical aesthetics and theory

Alongside his historical and interpretive studies, Altieri developed a systematic philosophical aesthetics in a series of theoretical works. Canons and Consequences argues for the cultural and educational significance of standards of excellence. [20] Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-Person Expressivity and its Social Implications advances a theory of expressive agency grounded in Wittgenstein’s notion of display [21] , while The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects develops an account of affect as a central dimension of aesthetic experience. [22]

A comprehensive statement of his philosophical position appears in Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience. [23] In this work, Altieri reformulates central claims from Kantian and Hegelian aesthetics in contemporary philosophical terms and argues for the importance of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy for literary criticism, particularly in relation to expression, exemplification, and non-skeptical accounts of meaning. [24]

Later work and theory of experience

After his retirement in 2021, Altieri’s scholarship increasingly addressed the theory of experience and the role of the arts in liberal education, drawing on the pragmatist tradition associated with William James. In Imaginative Experience in the Arts: Promoting Liberal Education, he introduces the method of “indicative criticism,” which examines how artistic choices shape experiential intensity and how individual works engage social and cultural forces. [25]

Reception and influence

Altieri is widely regarded as a leading figure in the study of modern and contemporary poetry in the United States. His integration of philosophy, close reading, and aesthetic theory has contributed substantially to debates on poetic form, affect, subjectivity, and value, particularly within modernist and post-modernist literary studies. [4] His work on expressive display, inner sensuousness, and phenomenological approaches to poetry has been influential among literary scholars and philosophers of art. [26] [27]

Awards

Books

References

  1. 1 2 "Charles Altieri, Professor; The Rachael Anderson Stageberg Endowed Chair". University of California, Berkeley. Archived from the original on 9 April 2011. Retrieved 28 June 2011.
  2. ↑ "Charles Altieri". arts.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2025-05-04.
  3. ↑ Altieri, Charles (2006). The Art of Twentieth‐Century American Poetry: Modernism and After (1 ed.). Wiley. doi:10.1002/9780470774977. ISBN   978-1-4051-2106-4.
  4. 1 2 "Professor Charles Altieri Visits School of Foreign Languages | CUCAS Study in China News". news.cucas.cn. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  5. ↑ Staff, Libby Rainey | Senior (2015-09-18). "Interview: Charles Altieri, professor of Modern poetry". Daily Cal | Berkeley news. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  6. 1 2 "Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory". University of New Mexico Press. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  7. ↑ "Charles Altieri | Critical Theory". criticaltheory.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  8. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1980). Enlarging the temple: new directions in American poetry during the 1960s (Reprint ed.). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press [u.a.] ISBN   978-0-8387-5012-4.
  9. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1981). Act & Quality: A Theory of Literary Meaning and Humanistic Understanding. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN   978-0-87023-327-2.
  10. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1984). Self and sensibility in contemporary American poetry. Cambridge studies in American literature and culture. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-25396-3.
  11. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1995). Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN   978-0-271-01419-7.
  12. ↑ "Book in focus". makeitnew.ezrapoundsociety.org. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  13. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1998). Postmodernisms now: essays on contemporaneity in the arts. Literature and philosophy. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN   978-0-271-01803-4.
  14. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1988). "John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts". Critical Inquiry. 14 (4): 805–830. ISSN   0093-1896.
  15. ↑ Copestake, Ian D. (2008). "Review of The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After". William Carlos Williams Review. 28 (1–2): 177–179. doi:10.5325/willcarlwillrevi.28.1-2.0177. ISSN   0196-6286.
  16. ↑ Altieri, Charles (2021). Modernist poetry and the limitations of materialist theory: the importance of constructivist values. Recencies series: Research and recovery in twentieth-century American poetics. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN   978-0-8263-6265-0.
  17. ↑ Altieri, Charles (2017-12-04). "T.S. Eliot's Christian Poetics and Hegel's Ideal of Inner Sensuousness". Nordisk poesi. 2 (2): 134–149. doi:10.18261/issn.2464-4137-2017-02-03.
  18. ↑ "Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity by Charles Altieri | Paperback". Cornell University Press. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  19. ↑ "Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value by Charles Altieri (review)". Wallace Stevens Journal. 37 (1): 108–110. 2013. doi:10.1353/wsj.2013.0018. ISSN   2160-0570.
  20. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1990). Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals. Northwestern University Press. ISBN   978-0-8101-0914-8.
  21. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1994). Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and Its Social Implications. Blackwell. ISBN   978-1-55786-129-0.
  22. ↑ Altieri, Charles (1994). Subjective Agency: A Theory of First-person Expressivity and Its Social Implications. Blackwell. ISBN   978-1-55786-129-0.
  23. 1 2 "Reckoning with the Imagination by Charles Altieri | Paperback". Cornell University Press. Retrieved 2026-03-09.
  24. ↑ Eldridge, Richard (2016). "ALTIERI, CHARLES. Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience. Cornell University Press, 2015, xii + 262 pp., $79.95 cloth, $28.95 paper.: Book Reviews". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 74 (3): 306–307. doi:10.1111/jaac.12297.
  25. 1 2 Altieri, Charles (2025-09-18). Imaginative Experience in the Arts: Promoting Liberal Education. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN   978-1-350-52666-2.
  26. ↑ "Interview: Charles Altieri, professor of Modern poetry". www.dailycal.org. 2015-09-18. Retrieved 2025-10-20.
  27. ↑ Charles Altieri. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Toward a Phenomenology of Value. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013.
  28. ↑ Altieri, Charles (2024). Literature, Education, and Society: Bridging the Gap. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. ISBN   978-1-032-39317-9.
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