In the Pursuit of the 'Ungraspable Phantom of Life'

In the Pursuit of the 'Ungraspable Phantom of Life' PDF Author: Daniel C. Bark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Whales
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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In the Pursuit of the 'Ungraspable Phantom of Life'

In the Pursuit of the 'Ungraspable Phantom of Life' PDF Author: Daniel C. Bark
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Whales
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description


"The Ungraspable Phantom of Life"

Author: Pamela Jo Reed
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Exiled Royalties

Exiled Royalties PDF Author: Robert Milder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019971326X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Exiled Royalties is a literary/biographical study of the course of Melville's career from his experience in Polynesia through his retirement from the New York Custom House and his composition of three late volumes of poetry and Billy Budd, Sailor. Conceived separately but narratively and thematically intertwined, the ten essays in the book are rooted in a belief that "Melville's work," as Charles Olson said, "must be left in his own 'life,'" which for Milder means primarily his spiritual, psychological, and vocational life. Four of the ten essays deal with Melville's life and work after his novelistic career ended with the The Confidence-Man in 1857. The range of issues addressed in the essays includes Melville's attitudes toward society, history, and politics, from broad ideas about democracy and the course of Western civilization to responses to particular events like the Astor Place Riots and the Civil War; his feeling about sexuality and, throughout the book, about religion; his relationship to past and present writers, especially to the phases of Euro-American Romanticism, post-Romanticism, and nascent Modernism; his relationship to his wife, Lizzie, to Hawthorne, and to his father, all of whom figured in the crisis that made for Pierre. The title essay, "Exiled Royalties," takes its origin from Ishmael's account of "the larger, darker, deeper part of Ahab"--Melville's mythic projection of a "larger, darker, deeper part" of himself. How to live nobly in spiritual exile--to be godlike in the perceptible absence of God--was a lifelong preoccupation for Melville, who, in lieu of positive belief, transposed the drama of his spiritual life to literature. The ways in which this impulse expressed itself through Melville's forty-five year career, interweaving itself with his personal life and the life of the nation and shaping both the matter and manner of his work, is the unifying subject of Exiled Royalties.

The Value of Herman Melville

The Value of Herman Melville PDF Author: Geoffrey Sanborn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108471447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 173

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Book Description
This book explores the writings of Herman Melville across his career and examines the distinctive qualities of his style.

In Pursuit of Moby-Dick

In Pursuit of Moby-Dick PDF Author: Joseph S. Catalano
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031403576
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
This study presents Moby-Dick as a novel with three distinct but interconnecting stories: Ishmael’s, which he shares ten years after it has taken place; Ahab’s, which is Ishmael's account of the memorable captain of a whaling ship; and a third which centres on whales and whaling, which has not received significant critical attention. While each of these perspectives compete for prominence in the narrative, Ahab and Ishmael's stories have often distracted from the vital significance of the whaling narrative as what outlasts Ahab’s obsessive mission. Catalano rights this wrong by coming to a strikingly original and thought-provoking conclusion which becomes the heart of the book's argument: “the unity of Melville’s book comes, first, from the way the numerous literary, philosophical, and religious reflections are rooted in those magnificent beings, whales and in the men and ships that pursue them, and, second, in the way these reflections illuminate our own lives.”

Sea-Brothers

Sea-Brothers PDF Author: Bert Bender
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 151281430X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Sea-Brothers offers the most extensive analysis to date of the sea and its meaning in American literature. On the basis of his study of Melville, Crane, London, Hemingway, Matthiessen, and ten lesser-known sea-writers, Bert Bender argues that the tradition of American sea fiction did not end with the opening of the western frontier and the replacement of sailing ships by steamers. Rather, he demonstrates its continuity and vitality, identifying a central vision within the tradition and showing how particular authors draw from, transform, and contribute to it. What is most distinctive about American sea fiction, Bender contends, is its visionary, often mystical, response to the biological world and to man's perceived place in the larger universe. When Melville envisioned the sea as the essential element of life, indeed as life itself, he changed the course of American sea fiction by introducing the relevance of biological thought. But his meditations on the whale and "the ungraspable phantom of life" project a different reality from that envisioned by his successors. In American sea fiction after Melville, the influence of Origin of Species is as powerful as that of Moby Dick or the theme of sailing ships being displaced by steam. The ideal of brotherhood so central to American sea fiction was severely compromised by the biological reality of a competitive, warring nature. Twentieth-century sea fiction has continued to center on the biological world and address the possibility of democratic brotherhood, but the issues were fundamentally changed by Darwin's theories. This book will be a valuable source for students and scholars of American literature and will interest readers of sea fiction.

Contexts of Criticism

Contexts of Criticism PDF Author: Harry Levin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674167001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
15 lectures on novelists and literature, ranging from broad problems of critical theory and esthetic formulation to specific analyses of forms and texts.

misReading Nietzsche

misReading Nietzsche PDF Author: M. Saverio Clemente
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532619243
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
Perhaps more than any philosophy written in the past few centuries, the work of Friedrich Nietzsche has given rise to controversy, misunderstanding, and dissent. Today Nietzsche is remembered as the revolutionary author of such polemical ideas as the death of God, the revaluation of values, the will to untruth, and the Übermensch. Yet is Nietzsche’s philosophy as atheistic, relativistic, nihilistic, and immoral as some commentators have claimed? Or ought we perhaps to give more credence to Nietzsche’s own assertion that one writes books “precisely to conceal what one harbors” (BGE, 9, 289)? If “whatever is profound loves masks” (BGE, 2, 40) then might Nietzsche’s more daring claims be interpreted as clever masks behind which he conceals a deeper philosophy and on which he reveals a hidden truth? Is it not possible that the standard readings of Nietzsche are in fact misreadings—that his work invites misreading, that it is intentionally unclear, deceptive, disguised? The goal of this volume is to reread Nietzsche for all that he shows and all that he hides. It is to dig deeper into his work in order to challenge misreadings of old and invite misreadings anew—as, indeed, his work itself calls for and demands.

The Renaissance of Impasse

The Renaissance of Impasse PDF Author: Jean-François Leroux
Publisher: Peter Lang
ISBN: 9780820469379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
In his 1963 debut essay for the militant Quebec journal, Parti pris, André Brochu invoked the figure of the sixteenth-century skeptic Michel de Montaigne in the name of what Ralph Waldo Emerson, responding to the same over a century earlier, had called, «an original relation to the universe». «Écrire», wrote Brochu, «c'est redéfinir la relation originelle de l'homme à l'univers, c'est, comme écrit magnifiquement Montaigne, 'faire l'homme'...» By tracing the idealism of nineteenth-century American and twentieth-century Quebec writers back to Montaigne and his rejection of Aristotelian and Scholastic reason, The Renaissance of Impasse offers an alternate history to that found in much (post)Romantic criticism, wherein modern skepticism tends to be identified with, and so in a sense confined to, the project of Enlightenment reason. Key works from Thomas Carlyle, Emerson and Herman Melville to Hubert Aquin, Réjean Ducharme and Victory-Lévy Beaulieu serve to define and to refine the sense of an impasse - personal, social, spiritual, historical, and political - that accompanies the «modern» drive to renaissance.

American Lonesome

American Lonesome PDF Author: Gavin Cologne-Brookes
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 080716948X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
American Lonesome: The Work of Bruce Springsteen begins with a visit to the Jersey Shore and ends with a meditation on the international legacy of Springsteen’s writing, music, and performances. Gavin Cologne-Brookes’s innovative study of this popular musician and his position in American culture blends scholarship with personal reflection, providing both an academic examination of Springsteen’s work and a moving account of how it offers a way out of emotional solitude and the potential lonesomeness of modern life. Cologne-Brookes proposes that the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism, which assesses the value of ideas and arguments based on their practical applications, provides a lens for understanding the diversity of perspectives and emotions encountered in Springsteen’s songs and performances. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy from William James to Richard Rorty, Cologne-Brookes examines Springsteen’s formative environment and outsider psychology, arguing that the artist’s confessed tendency toward a self-reliant isolation creates a tension in his work between lonesomeness and community. He considers Springsteen’s portrayals of solitude in relation to classic and contemporary American writers, from Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson to Richard Wright, Flannery O’Connor, and Joyce Carol Oates. As part of this critique, he discusses the difference between escapist and pragmatic romanticism, the notion of multiple selves as played out both in Springsteen’s work and in our perception of him, and the impact of performances both recorded and live. By drawing on his own experiences seeing Springsteen perform—including on tours showcasing the album The River in 1981 and 2016—Cologne-Brookes creates a book about the intimate relationship between art and everyday life. Blending research, cultural knowledge, and creative thinking, American Lonesome dissolves any imagined barriers between the study of a songwriter, literary criticism, and personal testimony.