The Guy Davenport Reader

The Guy Davenport Reader PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619022524
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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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.

The Guy Davenport Reader

The Guy Davenport Reader PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619022524
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book Here

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.

The Geography of the Imagination

The Geography of the Imagination PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: David R. Godine Publisher
ISBN: 9781567920802
Category : Literary Collections
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.

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.

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

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.

Da Vinci's Bicycle

Da Vinci's Bicycle PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811213509
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
"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."--Page 4 of cover.

Objects on a Table

Objects on a Table PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 1582430357
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This collection of four essays on the art of the still life begins with a look back to pictures of meals painted on the walls of Egyptian tombs--as the author points out, the soul could eat. Davenport’s meditations on the still life dip into the full history of this art form, touching on neolithic cave paintings, the Dutch masters, Cezanne, Van Gogh, even photography and the collage.

Tatlin!

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

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Book Description


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


Twelve Stories

Twelve Stories PDF Author: Guy Davenport
Publisher: Counterpoint
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Stories with references to art, philosophy and literature. In Robot, a dog falls into a hole in a forest, leading a group of French boys to discover the cave of Lascaux, while The Chair is about the writer, Franz Kafka and a garden bathhouse at Marienbad.