Practices of Surprise in American Literature after Emerson

Practices of Surprise in American Literature after Emerson PDF Author: Kate Stanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book establishes surprise as a key Emersonian affect, and demonstrates its significance for transatlantic modernism and the philosophy of pragmatism.

Practices of Surprise in American Literature after Emerson

Practices of Surprise in American Literature after Emerson PDF Author: Kate Stanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108426875
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book establishes surprise as a key Emersonian affect, and demonstrates its significance for transatlantic modernism and the philosophy of pragmatism.

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson PDF Author: Kate Stanley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108554199
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson locates a paradoxical question - how does one prepare to be surprised? - at the heart of several major modernist texts. Arguing that this paradox of perception gives rise to an American literary methodology, this book dramatically reframes how practices of reading and writing evolved among modernist authors after Emerson. Whereas Walter Benjamin defines modernity as a 'series of shocks' inflicted from without, Emerson offers a countervailing optic that regards life as a 'series of surprises' unfolding from within. While Benjaminian shock elicits intimidation and defensiveness, Emersonian surprise fosters states of responsiveness and spontaneity whereby unexpected encounters become generative rather than enervating. As a study of how such states of responsiveness were cultivated by a post-Emerson tradition of writers and thinkers, this project displaces longstanding models of modernist perception defined by shock's passive duress, and proposes alternate models of reception that proceed from the active practice of surprise.

Sound Recording Technology and American Literature

Sound Recording Technology and American Literature PDF Author: Jessica Teague
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108840132
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2013.

American Literature and Immediacy

American Literature and Immediacy PDF Author: Heike Schaefer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487386
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Demonstrates that the quest for immediacy, or experiences of direct connection and presence, has propelled the development of American literature and media culture.

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era

Liberalism and American Literature in the Clinton Era PDF Author: Ryan M. Brooks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316519813
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Argues that a new, post-postmodern aesthetic emerges in the 1990s as American writers grapple with the triumph of free-market politics.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History

Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Discourse of Natural History PDF Author: Juliana Chow
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108845711
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book discusses how literary writers re-envisioned species survival and racial uplift through ecological and biogeographical concepts of dispersal. It will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth-Century American literature and Literature and the Environment.

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Rethinking Sympathy and Human Contact in Nineteenth-Century American Literature PDF Author: Marianne Noble
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108481337
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
The book analyzes the evolution of antebellum literary explorations of sympathy and human contact in the 1850s and 1860s. It will appeal to undergraduates and scholars seeking new approaches to canonical American authors, psychological theorists of sympathy and empathy, and philosophers of moral philosophy.

Apropos of Something

Apropos of Something PDF Author: Elisa Tamarkin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022645312X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 445

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Book Description
"Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the immensity and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.""--

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction

Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction PDF Author: Sarah E. Chinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009442694
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
The book is a study of the ways that white radicals deployed the physical and literary image of amputation during the Civil War and Reconstruction to argue for full Black citizenship and against a national reconciliation that reimposed white supremacy. It gives readers a new way to think about the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature

Class, Whiteness, and Southern Literature PDF Author: Jolene Hubbs
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009250655
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Shows how representations of poor white southerners helped shape middle-class identity and major American literary movements and genres.