Author: Frank Kermode
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198031157
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
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Book Description
Frank Kermode is one of our most distinguished critics of English literature. Here, he contributes a new epilogue to his collection of classic lectures on the relationship of fiction to age-old concepts of apocalyptic chaos and crisis. Prompted by the approach of the millennium, he revisits the book which brings his highly concentrated insights to bear on some of the most unyielding philosophical and aesthetic enigmas. Examining the works of writers from Plato to William Burrows, Kermode shows how they have persistently imposed their "fictions" upon the face of eternity and how these have reflected the apocalyptic spirit. Kermode then discusses literature at a time when new fictive explanations, as used by Spenser and Shakespeare, were being devised to fit a world of uncertain beginning and end. He goes on to deal perceptively with modern literature with "traditionalists" such as Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as contemporary "schismatics," the French "new novelists," and such seminal figures as Jean-Paul Sartre and Samuel Beckett. Whether weighing the difference between modern and earlier modes of apocalyptic thought, considering the degeneration of fiction into myth, or commenting on the vogue of the Absurd, Kermode is distinctly lucid, persuasive, witty, and prodigal of ideas.
Author: David L. Walker
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400857333
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 225
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Book Description
Through close readings of poems from the entire range of both poets' careers, the author reveals the pivotal role of Stevens and Williams in the shift from modernism to postmodernism. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Author: Carla Locatelli
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512808865
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
This comprehensive study of Beckett's art proposes a doubly contextualized reading of his later works: Carla Locatelli reads late Beckett through his previous writings, and relates them to the literary, philosophical, and critical community which surrounds him. To appreciate his contribution as an epistemological rhetorician, she proposes a multidisciplinary approach that draws upon a remarkably wide range of theorists, including Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Peirce, Jakobson, Deleuze, Lacan, and Derrida. In Part One of this study, Locatelli traces the evolution of Beckett's writing, proposing that his principal concern devolves more and more upon the essential character of representation and its role in the constitution and signification of the subject. Part One also provides a history of this thematic, showing how Beckett's writing effects a radical displacement of representation from function to object of discourse. In Part Two, Locatelli focuses on Beckett's fiction after the Nobel Prize of 1969 , and on the epistemological and aesthetic issues in Company (1980), ill seen ill said (1981), and Worstward Ho (1983). She examines his "unwording" in this "Second Trilogy," and defines it as a process of subtraction that probes into the most basic mode of our being in the world. Here Beckett proposes, as Locatelli suggests , a very real hermeneutics of experience, beyond the "schools of suspicion" which are still influencing some postmodernist thinking. This volume will be of particular value to scholars and students of twentieth-century English literature, French literature, and literary theory .
Author: Harriet Semmes Alexander
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 9780719017063
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
Author: Joseph Conte
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817311157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
Design and Debris discusses the relationship between order and disorder in the works of John Hawkes, Harry Mathews, John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo. In analyzing their work, Joseph Conte brings to bear a unique approach adapted from scientific thought: chaos theory. His chief concern is illuminating those works whose narrative structures locate order hidden in disorder (whose authors Conte terms proceduralists), and those whose structures reflect the opposite, disorder emerging from states of order (whose authors Conte calls disruptors). Documenting the paradigm shift from modernism, in which artists attempted to impose order on a disordered world, to postmodernism, in which the artist portrays the process of orderly disorder, Conte shows how the shift has led to postmodern artists' embrace of science in their treatment of complex ideas. Detailing how chaos theory interpenetrates disciplines as varied as economics, politics, biology, and cognitive science, he suggests a second paradigm shift: from modernist specialization to postmodern pluralism. In such a pluralistic world, the novel is freed from the purely literar
Author: Denis Donoghue
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231057350
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Author: Robin G. Schulze
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472105786
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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Book Description
Traces the ways in which two important poets shaped and reshaped each other's work
Author: Laura Bieger
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 1611684072
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Based on papers originally presented at a 2009 conference hosted at the John-F.-Kennedy-Institut of the Freie Univet'at Berlin.
Author: George S. Lensing
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807168963
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Over sixty years after his death, Wallace Stevens remains one of the major figures of American modernist poetry, celebrated for his masterful style, formal rigor, and aesthetic investigations of the natural, political, and metaphysical worlds. In Making the Poem, noted Stevens scholar George S. Lensing explores the poet’s progress in the creation of his body of work, considering its development, composition, and reception. Drawing on little-known sources and nuanced readings of Stevens’ texts, Lensing expands the customary view of the poet’s creative approaches. This wide-ranging study extends from the origins and overlapping themes of well-known poems through the social and political backgrounds that marked Stevens’ work to the prosodic and musical elements central to his style. Making the Poem features a dynamic new reading of the important early poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds”—viewing it alongside his wife Elsie’s journal describing the sea voyage that inspired the poem—and an extensive, multiperspective treatment of the widely anthologized “The Idea of Order at Key West,” as well as a careful excavation of the poem “Mozart, 1935” in the context of the U.S. Great Depression. Lensing concludes with a discussion of the gradual (and sometimes reluctant) recognition Stevens’ work received from poets and critics in Great Britain and Ireland. Stemming from decades of research and writing, Making the Poem: Stevens’ Approaches presents a holistic view of his creative achievements and a wealth of new material for readers to draw upon in their future encounters with the poetry of Wallace Stevens.
Author: John Steven Childs
Publisher: Susquehanna University Press
ISBN: 9780941664158
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Demonstrating the use of practical semiotics, this book illuminates the mystifying work, The Cantos, by Ezra Pound. This first definitive anatomy of Modernism carefully establishes a set of structural elements as a basis for approaching the text.
