Gnostic Contagion

Gnostic Contagion PDF Author: Peter O'Leary
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819565648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Brings together the study of literature with the psychology and history of religions.

Gnostic Contagion

Gnostic Contagion PDF Author: Peter O'Leary
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 9780819565648
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Brings together the study of literature with the psychology and history of religions.

To Go Into the Words

To Go Into the Words PDF Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472221302
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
To Go Into the Words is the latest book of critical prose from renowned poet and scholar of Jewish literature Norman Finkelstein. Through a rigorous examination of poets such as William Bronk, Helen Adam, and Nathaniel Mackey, the book engages the contemporary poetic fascination with transcendence through the radical delight with language. By opening up a given poem, Finkelstein seeks the “gnosis” or insight of what it contains so that other readers can understand and appreciate the works even more. Pulling from Finkelstein’s experience of writing thirteen books of poetry and six books of literary criticism, To Go Into the Words consistently rewards the reader with insights as transformative as they are well-considered and deftly mapped out. This volume opens the world of poetry to poets, scholars, and readers by showcasing “the gnosis that is to be found in modern poetry.”

On Mount Vision

On Mount Vision PDF Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587298570
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
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Like a Dark Rabbi

Like a Dark Rabbi PDF Author: Norman Finkelstein
Publisher: Hebrew Union College Press
ISBN: 0878201742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Wallace Stevens' "dark rabbi," from his poem "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle," provides a title for this collection of essays on the "lordly study" of modern Jewish poetry in English. Including chapters on such poets as Charles Reznikoff, Allen Grossman, Chana Bloch, and Michael Heller, this volume explores the tensions between religious and secular worldviews in recent Jewish poetry, the often conflicted linguistic and cultural matrix from which this poetry arises, and the complicated ways in which Jewish tradition shapes the sensibilities of not only Jewish, but also non-Jewish, poets. Finkelstein, described as "one of American poetry's indispensible makers" (Lawrence Joseph), whose previous critical work has been called "the exemplary study of the religious aspect of the works of contemporary American poets" (Peter O'Leary), considers large literary and cultural trends while never losing sight of the particular formal powers of individual poems. In Like a Dark Rabbi he offers a passionate argument for the importance of Jewish-American poetry to modern Jewish culture-and to American poetry-as it engages with the contradictions of contemporary life.

Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 1

Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950, Volume 1 PDF Author: Robert von Hallberg
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
ISBN: 0826363148
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
Over the last sixty years scholars and critics have focused on literary history and interpretation rather than literary value. When value is addressed, the standards are usually political and identitarian. The essays collected in both volumes of Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950 move away from esoteric literary criticism toward a more evaluative and speculative inquiry that will serve as the basis from which poets will be discussed and taught over the next half-century and beyond. Von Hallberg and Faggen have curated a diverse selection of authors to explore this topic. Volume 1 focuses on voice, language, form, and musicality. Stephen Yenser writes about Elizabeth Bishop, Stephanie Burt about C. D. Wright, Nigel Smith about Paul Simon, and Marjorie Perloff about Charles Bernstein, among others. The essays do not provide an exhaustive survey of recent poetry. Instead, Evaluations of US Poetry since 1950 presents readers with more than thirty different models of literary absorption and advocacy. This is done in explicit hope of reorienting the criticism of poetry.

The Superhumanities

The Superhumanities PDF Author: Jeffrey J. Kripal
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226820254
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
A bold challenge to rethink the humanities as intimately connected to the superhuman and to “decolonize reality itself.” What would happen if we reimagined the humanities as the superhumanities? If we acknowledged and celebrated the undercurrent of the fantastic within our humanistic disciplines, entirely new cultural worlds and meanings would become possible. That is Jeffrey J. Kripal’s vision for the future—to revive the suppressed dimension of the superhumanities, which consists of rare but real altered states of knowledge that have driven the creative processes of many of our most revered authors, artists, and activists. In Kripal’s telling, the history of the humanities is filled with precognitive dreams, evolving superhumans, and doubled selves. The basic idea of the superhuman, for Kripal, is at the core of who and what the human species has tried to become over millennia and around the planet. After diagnosing the basic malaise of the humanities—that the truth must be depressing—Kripal shows how it can all be done differently. He argues that we have to decolonize reality itself if we are going to take human diversity seriously. Toward this pluralist end, he engages psychoanalytic, Black critical, feminist, postcolonial, queer, and ecocritical theory. He works through objections to the superhumanities while also recognizing the new realities represented by the contemporary sciences. In doing so, he tries to move beyond naysaying practices of critique toward a future that can embrace those critiques within a more holistic view—a view that recognizes the human being as both a social-political animal as well as an evolved cosmic species that understands and experiences itself as something super.

Rain Taxi Review of Books

Rain Taxi Review of Books PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Arts, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 696

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Book Description


American Poetry as Transactional Art

American Poetry as Transactional Art PDF Author: Stephen Fredman
Publisher: University Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817359818
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Explores the ways American poetry engages with visual art, music, fiction, spirituality, and performance art Many people think of poetry as a hermetic art, as though poets wrote only about themselves or as if the subject of poetry were finally only poetry—its forms and traditions. Indeed much of what constitutes poetry in the lyric tradition depends on a stringently controlled point of view and aims for a timeless, intransitive utterance. Stephen Fredman’s study proposes a different perspective. American Poetry as Transactional Art explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms—its existential interactions with the outside world. Poetry operating in this vein draws together images, ideas, practices, rituals, and verbal techniques from around the globe, and across time—not to equate them, but to establish dialogue, to invite as many guests as possible to the World Party, which Robert Duncan has called the “symposium of the whole.” Fredman invites new readers into contemporary poetry by providing lucid and nuanced analyses of specific poems and specific interchanges between poets and their surroundings. He explores such topics as poetry’s transactions with spiritual traditions and practices over the course of the twentieth century; the impact of World War II on the poetry of Charles Olson and George Oppen; exchanges between poetry and other art forms including sculpture, performance art, and ambient music; the battle between poetry and prose in the early work of Paul Auster and in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life. The epilogue looks briefly at another crucial transactional occasion: teaching American poetry in the classroom in a way that demonstrates that it is at the center of the arts and at the heart of American culture.

Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems

Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems PDF Author: Joe Moffett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1611461634
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
Written from a literary critic’s perspective, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a “contemplation of the divine.”

Gale Researcher Guide for: Nathaniel Mackey and the New Musical Poetry

Gale Researcher Guide for: Nathaniel Mackey and the New Musical Poetry PDF Author: Scarlett Higgins
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1535849819
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 15

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Book Description
Gale Researcher Guide for: Nathaniel Mackey and the New Musical Poetry is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.