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Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America's preeminent authors began to think about photography's implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing. Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman-were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers' reflections on photography-in Emerson's Representative Men, Thoreau's journals, Douglass's narratives of slavery, and Whitman's Specimen Days-with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America. As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan's work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.
Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826266401
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 266
Get Book Here
Book Description
The emergence of photography in the mid-nineteenth century transformed ideas about how the self and nature could be pictured. Although the autobiographical potential of photography seems self-evident today, Sean Meehan takes us back to the birth of the medium when some of America's preeminent authors began to think about photography's implications for the representation of identity and the nature of autobiographical writing. Both photography and autobiography involve a tension between disclosing and concealing their means of production: a chemical process for one, the writing process for the other. Meehan examines how four major authors-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Walt Whitman-were well aware of this tension and explored it in their work. By examining the implications of early photography in their writings, he shows how each engaged the new visual medium, how photography mediated their conceptions of self-representation, and how their appropriation of photographic thinking created a new kind of autobiography. Examining the metonymic nature of photography, Meehan explores how the new medium influenced conceptions of visual and verbal representation. He intertwines these four writers' reflections on photography-in Emerson's Representative Men, Thoreau's journals, Douglass's narratives of slavery, and Whitman's Specimen Days-with theories of photography as expounded by its inventors and observers, from Louis Daguerre and William Talbot in Europe to Oliver Wendell Holmes and Marcus Root in America. As the first book to focus on the emergence of this new visual medium during the American Renaissance, Mediating American Autobiography shows us what photography means for American literature in general and for the genre most closely linked to it in particular. Because the engagement of these writers with photography has been neglected in previous scholarship, Meehan's work provocatively bridges the study of two media and illuminates an important aspect of American thought and culture at the dawn of the technological era.
Author: Bunty Avieson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351606786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 477
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Book Description
The argument has been made that memoir reflects and augments the narcissistic tendencies of our neo-liberal age. The Literature of Remembering: Tracing the Limits of Memoir challenges and dismantles that assumption. Focusing on the history, theory and practice of memoir writing, editors Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph provide a thorough and cutting-edge examination of memoir through the lenses of ethics, practice and innovation. By investigating memoir across cultural boundaries, in its various guises, and tracing its limits, the editors convincingly demonstrate the plurality of ways in which memoir is helping us make sense of who we are, who we were and the influences that shape us along the way.
Author: Robert D. Habich
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1587299631
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
By the end of the nineteenth century, Ralph Waldo Emerson was well on his way to becoming the “Wisest American” and the “Sage of Concord,” a literary celebrity and a national icon. With that fame came what Robert Habich describes as a blandly sanctified version of Emerson held widely by the reading public. Building Their Own Waldos sets out to understand the dilemma faced by Emerson’s early biographers: how to represent a figure whose subversive individualism had been eclipsed by his celebrity, making him less a representative of his age than a caricature of it. Drawing on never-before-published letters, diaries, drafts, business records, and private documents, Habich explores the making of a cultural hero through the stories of Emerson’s first biographers— George Willis Cooke, a minister most recently from Indianapolis who considered himself a disciple; the English reformer and newspaper mogul Alexander Ireland, a friend for half a century; Moncure D. Conway, a Southern abolitionist then residing in London, who called Emerson his “spiritual father and intellectual teacher”; the poet and medical professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, with Emerson a member of Boston’s gathering of literary elite, the Saturday Club; James Elliot Cabot, the family’s authorized biographer, an architect and amateur philosopher with unlimited access to Emerson’s unpublished papers; and Emerson’s son Edward, a physician and painter whose father had passed over him as literary executor in favor of Cabot. Just as their biographies reveal a complex, socially engaged Emerson, so too do the biographers’ own stories illustrate the real-world perils, challenges, and motives of life-writing in the late nineteenth century, when biographers were routinely vilified as ghoulish and disreputable and biography as a genre underwent a profound redefinition. Building Their Own Waldos is at once a revealing look at Emerson’s constructed reputation, a case study in the rewards and dangers of Victorian life-writing, and the story of six authors struggling amidst personal misfortunes and shifting expectations to capture the elusive character of America’s “representative man,” as they knew him and as they needed him to be.
Author: Sean Ross Meehan
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 1640140239
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 189
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Book Description
Sean Meehan's book reclaims three important but critically neglected aspects of the late Emerson's "mind": first, his engagement with rhetoric, conceived as the organizing power of mind and, unconventionally, characterized by the trope "metonymy"; second, his public engagement with the ideals of liberal education and debates in higher education reform early in the period (1860-1910) that saw the emergence of the modern university; and third, his intellectual relation to significant figures from this age of educational transformation: Walt Whitman, William James, Harvard president Charles W. Eliot, and W.E.B. Du Bois, Harvard's first African American PhD. Meehan argues that the late Emerson educates through the "rhetorical liberal arts," and he thereby rethinks Emerson's influence as rhetorical lessons in the traditional pedagogy and classical curriculum of the liberal arts college.
Author: Katja Haustein
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351551779
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 207
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Book Description
What is autobiography and how does it transform in the age of technological reproducibility? Katja Haustein discusses this question as it relates to photography and the role of emotion in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1909-22), Walter Benjamin's Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932-38), and Roland Barthes's Roland Barthes (1977) and Camera Lucida (1980). In her close critical readings, Haustein provides the first comprehensive comparative analysis of these popular works, mapping them against little-studied textual, visual and aural material, some of which has only recently become accessible. In this way, her book opens new avenues in scholarship dedicated to three outstanding twentieth-century writers and contributes to a field of critical inquiry that is still in the making: the history of autobiography in the light of a history of the gaze.
Author: Andrew Menard
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820353434
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
Learning from Thoreau is an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau along with the author--whose lifelong engagement with this "genius of the natural world" leads him to examine the process of learning from an admired model. Using both images and text, Andrew Menard offers a personal meditation on Thoreau's thought, its originality, and its influence on the modern environmental movement. He places Thoreau in dialogue with contemporary artists and thinkers and associates him with a rich variety of places: Walden Pond, the Museum of Modern Art, the Rockefeller State Park Preserve in upstate New York, Mormon Mesa northeast of Las Vegas, and the old town of K nigsberg, Prussia. Each place, each experience, each writer, and each work of art provides a different line of approach. The author also leads us through an expanding and deepening series of keywords that trigger fresh occasions to learn from Thoreau: Concord, Walden, walking, seeing, nature, wildness, beauty. The result is a deeply nuanced and informed portrait of Thoreau's inner and outer landscape.
Author: O. Clayton
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137471506
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 210
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Book Description
Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 examines how British and American writers used early photography and film as illustrations and metaphors. It concentrates on five figures in particular: Henry Mayhew, Robert Louis Stevenson, Amy Levy, William Dean Howells, and Jack London.
Author: Richard Lowry
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 0847845478
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
A new angle on Lincoln and his legacy, exploring the rich and suggestive dialogue between art, image, and politics at the time of the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln was one of the most photographed figures of his century. Richard Lowry explores Lincoln’s association with Alexander Gardner, the man who would create the most memorable and ultimately iconic images of the president, both in his studio and on the battlefields of the Civil War. Lowry’s book is an accessible and lively narrative of this symbiotic relationship and an examination of the emerging role of the media at a moment of national transformation. Lincoln was an early adopter of photographic technology and visionary in how he used it—as FDR was with radio, JFK with television, and Obama with the internet. By highlighting this very modern aspect of such a storied presidency, Lowry opens a new door on Lincoln’s relationship to politics and celebrity just as the mass culture of the image was taking root in America.
Author: Allison K. Lange
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226815846
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 331
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Book Description
"For as long as American women have battled for equitable political representation, those battles have been defined by images--whether drawn, etched, photographed, or filmed. Some of these have been flattering, many of them have been condescending, and some have been scabrous. They have drawn upon prevailing cultural tropes about the perceived nature of women's roles and abilities, and they have circulated both with and without conscious political objectives. Allison K. Lange takes a systematic look at American women's efforts to control the production and dissemination of images of them in the long battle for representation, from the mid-nineteenth-century onward"--
Author: Kenneth M. Price
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192894846
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 721
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Book Description
A Handbook on Walt Whitman that reflects the best new work in the field including chapters that set his work within the context of digital scholarship, discussion of new manuscript discoveries and transcriptions, exploration of environmental angles on Whitman, and a focus on disability studies.
