Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose

Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose PDF Author: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192593110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
This study analyzes post-Romantic prose whose authors—in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and more—occupy a range of subject-positions. Unlike poetry, modern literary prose has no rhetorical repertoire or structure (beyond those of grammar) that one could tabulate. As a result, it becomes a zone of experimentation and spontaneous creativity, as well as a means to investigate the concept of spontaneity, understood as post-secular. Heeding separate histories and peculiar particularities, this volume reveals writers discovering their ideas as they go, in prose whose sound, rhythm, syntax, and imagery escapes the preordained. There are chapters on William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (and Hindu philosophy), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adil Jussawalla, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These writers are intelligently vexed by two transitions: first, the movement from impulse into form; and second, the overlap between literary forms and social forms. They explore the yearning for renovated societies which, expressive of our deepest selves, would also enable those selves—in times of panicked fragmentation, moral relativism, and communication imperiled—to interact as citizens.

Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose

Spontaneity and Form in Modern Prose PDF Author: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192593110
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This study analyzes post-Romantic prose whose authors—in terms of race, gender, class, nationality, and more—occupy a range of subject-positions. Unlike poetry, modern literary prose has no rhetorical repertoire or structure (beyond those of grammar) that one could tabulate. As a result, it becomes a zone of experimentation and spontaneous creativity, as well as a means to investigate the concept of spontaneity, understood as post-secular. Heeding separate histories and peculiar particularities, this volume reveals writers discovering their ideas as they go, in prose whose sound, rhythm, syntax, and imagery escapes the preordained. There are chapters on William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman (and Hindu philosophy), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Herman Melville, D.H. Lawrence and Saul Bellow, Virginia Woolf and Marion Milner, Gwendolyn Brooks, Adil Jussawalla, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. These writers are intelligently vexed by two transitions: first, the movement from impulse into form; and second, the overlap between literary forms and social forms. They explore the yearning for renovated societies which, expressive of our deepest selves, would also enable those selves—in times of panicked fragmentation, moral relativism, and communication imperiled—to interact as citizens.

Trying Not to Try

Trying Not to Try PDF Author: Edward Slingerland
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0770437621
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
A deeply original exploration of the power of spontaneity—an ancient Chinese ideal that cognitive scientists are only now beginning to understand—and why it is so essential to our well-being Why is it always hard to fall asleep the night before an important meeting? Or be charming and relaxed on a first date? What is it about a politician who seems wooden or a comedian whose jokes fall flat or an athlete who chokes? In all of these cases, striving seems to backfire. In Trying Not To Try, Edward Slingerland explains why we find spontaneity so elusive, and shows how early Chinese thought points the way to happier, more authentic lives. We’ve long been told that the way to achieve our goals is through careful reasoning and conscious effort. But recent research suggests that many aspects of a satisfying life, like happiness and spontaneity, are best pursued indirectly. The early Chinese philosophers knew this, and they wrote extensively about an effortless way of being in the world, which they called wu-wei (ooo-way). They believed it was the source of all success in life, and they developed various strategies for getting it and hanging on to it. With clarity and wit, Slingerland introduces us to these thinkers and the marvelous characters in their texts, from the butcher whose blade glides effortlessly through an ox to the wood carver who sees his sculpture simply emerge from a solid block. Slingerland uncovers a direct line from wu-wei to the Force in Star Wars, explains why wu-wei is more powerful than flow, and tells us what it all means for getting a date. He also shows how new research reveals what’s happening in the brain when we’re in a state of wu-wei—why it makes us happy and effective and trustworthy, and how it might have even made civilization possible. Through stories of mythical creatures and drunken cart riders, jazz musicians and Japanese motorcycle gangs, Slingerland effortlessly blends Eastern thought and cutting-edge science to show us how we can live more fulfilling lives. Trying Not To Try is mind-expanding and deeply pleasurable, the perfect antidote to our striving modern culture.

Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't

Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't PDF Author: Scott Saul
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043103
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
In the long decade between the mid-fifties and the late sixties, jazz was changing more than its sound. The age of Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite, John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and Charles Mingus's The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was a time when jazz became both newly militant and newly seductive, its example powerfully shaping the social dramas of the Civil Rights movement, the Black Power movement, and the counterculture. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't is the first book to tell the broader story of this period in jazz--and American--history.

Beat Culture

Beat Culture PDF Author: William T. Lawlor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1851094059
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 447

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Book Description
The coverage of this book ranges from Jack Kerouac's tales of freedom-seeking Bohemian youth to the frenetic paintings of Jackson Pollock, including 60 years of the Beat Generation and the artists of the Age of Spontaneity. Beat Culture captures in a single volume six decades of cultural and countercultural expression in the arts and society. It goes beyond other works, which are often limited to Beat writers like William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, and Michael McClure, to cover a wide range of musicians, painters, dramatists, filmmakers, and dancers who found expression in the Bohemian movement known as the Beat Generation. Top scholars from the United States, England, Holland, Italy, and China analyze a vast array of topics including sexism, misogny, alcoholism, and drug abuse within Beat circles; the arrest of poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges; Beat dress and speech; and the Beat "pad." Through more than 250 entries, which travel from New York to New Orleans, from San Francisco to Mexico City, students, scholars, and those interested in popular culture will taste the era's rampant freedom and experimentation, explore the impact of jazz on Beat writings, and discover how Beat behavior signaled events such as the sexual revolution, the peace movement, and environmental awareness.

The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

The Figure of the Animal in Modern and Contemporary Poetry PDF Author: Michael Malay
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319706667
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
This book argues that there are deep connections between ‘poetic’ thinking and the sensitive recognition of creaturely others. It explores this proposition in relation to four poets: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, and Les Murray. Through a series of close readings, and by paying close attention to issues of sound, rhythm, simile, metaphor, and image, it explores how poetry cultivates a special openness towards animal others. The thinking behind this book is inspired by J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. In particular, it takes up that book’s suggestion that poetry invites us to relate to animals in an open-ended and sympathetic manner. Poets, according to Elizabeth Costello, the book’s protagonist, ‘return the living, electric being to language’, and, doing so, compel us to open our hearts towards animals and the claims they make upon us. There are special affinities, for her, between the music of poetry and the recognition of others. But what might it mean to say that poets to return life to language? And why might this have any bearing on our relationship with animals? Beyond offering many suggestive starting points, Elizabeth Costello says very little about the nature of poetry’s special relationship with the animal; one aim of this study, then, is to ask of what this relationship consists, not least by examining the various ways poets have bodied forth animals in language.

Autobiography in Early Modern England

Autobiography in Early Modern England PDF Author: Adam Smyth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521761727
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Explores life-writing forms - almanacs, financial accounts, commonplace books and parish registers - which emerged during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Pace of Fiction

The Pace of Fiction PDF Author: Brian Gingrich
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191899143
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The Pace of Fiction redefines the literary history of the novel by analyzing its most elaborate feature: its pace. It moves from the rise of the novel to realism and modernism. It starts by tracing the evolution of two narrative units: scenes ("shown" slowly) and summaries ("told" swiftly). These units emerge from the conflict of epic and drama, gain shape in the commentaries of Fielding and Goethe, and become dynamically opposed in nineteenth-century realism. In Middlemarch, they rotate in regular sequence: summaries move swiftly until scenes slow them down; scenes play out dramatically until summaries sweep them forward; their movement imitates the conflict of fate and free will. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, scenic impulses overtake summary storytelling. The reader sees the tendency already in Austen's dialogues, Hawthorne's tableaux, or Balzac's battering drama, and finds it in Jane Eyre's placement of summaries in private scenes. When Flaubert extends scenic vividness to all of his summaries, and when Henry James subordinates his summaries to scenic consciousness, the extreme pressure of scene upon summary brings the opposition of realist pacing to collapse. But other oppositions arise in the modernisms that follow. In the alternation of stasis and kinesis, of drifting thoughts and everyday actions, of stories and acts of storytelling—in Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Mann, Hemingway—pace gathers and creates meaning in new ways.

Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration

Forms of List-Making: Epistemic, Literary, and Visual Enumeration PDF Author: Roman Alexander Barton
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030769704
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This open access book attempts to show that an examination of the list’s formal features has the potential to produce genuine insights into the production of knowledge, the poetics of literature and the composition of visual art. Following a conceptual introduction, the twelve single-authored chapters place the list in a variety of well-researched contexts, including ancient Roman historiography, medieval painting, Enlightenment periodicals, nineteenth-century botanical geography, American Beat poetry and contemporary photobooks. With its interdisciplinary approach, this book is a unique contribution to an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists.

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here

The Million-Petalled Flower of Being Here PDF Author: Vidyan Ravinthiran
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781780374765
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64

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Book Description
Ravinthiran's second collection is a book of sonnets for his wife. These are love poems that turn analytical, consider the world, and stand for a larger community, including readers themselves. Many describe life in the North-East England for a mixed-race couple, considering both the redemptive force of love and the cultural origins of our discontent.

The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West

The Cambridge Companion to Literature of the American West PDF Author: Steven Frye
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107095379
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.