The Geography of the Imagination

The Geography of the Imagination PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567920802
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

The Geography of the Imagination

The Geography of the Imagination PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567920802
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

7 Greeks

7 Greeks PDF Author:
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811212885
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
"Overall, this volume will afford great pleasure to scholars, teachers, and also those who simply love to watch delightful souls disport themselves in language."--Anne Carson

A Balthus Notebook

A Balthus Notebook PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
ISBN: 1644230321
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years. Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

Guy Davenport

Guy Davenport PDF Author: Andre Furlani
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810123894
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Guy Davenport (1927–2005), an American writer of fiction, poetry, criticism, and essays, a translator, painter, intellectual, and teacher, brought a breadth and depth of knowledge to his pursuits that few other writers could approach, let alone appraise. In Andre Furlani, this twentieth-century American master has finally found an apt critical reader. In this first sustained critical study of Davenport, Furlani elucidates the depths of Davenport's fiction and its poetic precedents, brings a rare understanding to the author's reworking of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history, and offers unusual insight into his compositional technique. Furlani explores key themes across the spectrum of Davenport's fiction: pastoral utopia; twentieth-century dystopia; sexual ethics; the mythologizing of childhood; the inseparability of the archaic and the modern; and a celebration of the union of sophia, eros, and poesia. Whether Davenport's view of art and the cosmos should be called "postmodern" is a question that Furlani considers closely--offering, finally, a new aesthetic for this American original who, in these pages, at last receives the thorough and meticulous attention he has long merited.

The Guy Davenport Reader

The Guy Davenport Reader PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 161902103X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination. The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re–educate our eyes."—Guy Davenport Modernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far–ranging work of this neglected genius.

A Table of Green Fields

A Table of Green Fields PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811217712
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description


Tatlin!

Tatlin! PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description


A Balance of Quinces

A Balance of Quinces PDF Author: Erik Reece
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213363
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
As Erik Anderson Reece says in A Balance of Quinces, "Many know Guy Davenport the creator of fiction, the critic, the illustrator, the poet, the translator.... But Guy Davenport the monastic painter is still unknown." Here gathered for the first time is a generous collection of Davenport's paintings and drawings, interwoven with commentary by poet and critic Erik Anderson Reece. The broad scope of Davenport's artistic output is included here: the pen-and-ink portraits, the abstract still lifes, and the collage compositions. Erik Anderson Reece's essay provides cultural background for the work and examines it as am extension of Davenport's writings. Besides the plentiful black-and-white reproductions throughout the text, this edition of A Balance of Quinces also includes twenty-four pages of color plates.

Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic)

Da Vinci's Bicycle (New Directions Classic) PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811227448
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Guy Davenport’s second collection of stories, was first published in 1979, and contains some of his most important fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time. They are all people who see the world differently from their contemporaries and therefore seem absurd, like Pablo Picasso in "Au Tombeau de Charles Fourier," Leonardo Da Vinci in "The Richard Nixon Freischütz Rag," James Joyce and Guillaume Apollinaire in the marvelous "The Haile Selassie Funeral Train." Hilton Kramer of The New York Times has said, "Davenport’s conception of the short story form is remarkable. He has given it some of the intellectual density of the learned essay, some of the lyrical concision of the modern poem––some of its difficulty too––and a structure that often resembles a film documentary. The result is a tour de force that adds something new to the art of fiction." Esteemed writer and translator Guy Davenport's brilliant story collection, first published in 1979, is recognized today as a classic of American fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.

Charles Burchfield's Seasons

Charles Burchfield's Seasons PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: Pomegranate
ISBN: 1566409799
Category : Painting, American
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Charles Burchfeild, one of the finest American watercolorists of the 20th century- and perhaps our greatest visionary - used watercolors with weight, power and flexibility to achieve a variety of effects unprecedented in scale and technique for the medium. Working out of the 19th-century Romantic tradition in which nature's primordial energy is revealed throught the drama of human emotions, Burchfield makes the commonplace extraordinary, the everyday miraculous.