Author: Allen Ginsberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Book Description
To Eberhart from Ginsberg
Author: Allen Ginsberg
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Book Description
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Book Description
Howl on Trial
Author: Bill Morgan
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing and defending Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and censorship of literary works. This collection begins with an introduction by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shares his memories of hearing Howl first read at the 6 Gallery, of his arrest and of the subsequent legal defense of Howl’s publication. Never-before-published correspondence of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Hollander, Richard Eberhart and others provides an in-depth commentary on the poem’s ethical intent and its social significance to the author and his contemporaries. A section on the public reaction to the trial includes newspaper reportage, op-ed pieces by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and letters to the editor from the public, which provide fascinating background material on the cultural climate of the mid-1950s. A timeline of literary censorship in the United States places this battle for free expression in a historical context. Also included are photographs, transcripts of relevant trial testimony, Judge Clayton Horn’s decision and its ramifications and a long essay by Albert Bendich, the ACLU attorney who defended Howl on constitutional grounds. Editor Bill Morgan discusses more recent challenges to Howl in the late 1980s and how the fight against censorship continues today in new guises.
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 0872868451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244
Book Description
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Howl and Other Poems, with nearly one million copies in print, City Lights presents the story of editing, publishing and defending Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem within a broader context of obscenity issues and censorship of literary works. This collection begins with an introduction by publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who shares his memories of hearing Howl first read at the 6 Gallery, of his arrest and of the subsequent legal defense of Howl’s publication. Never-before-published correspondence of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Gregory Corso, John Hollander, Richard Eberhart and others provides an in-depth commentary on the poem’s ethical intent and its social significance to the author and his contemporaries. A section on the public reaction to the trial includes newspaper reportage, op-ed pieces by Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and letters to the editor from the public, which provide fascinating background material on the cultural climate of the mid-1950s. A timeline of literary censorship in the United States places this battle for free expression in a historical context. Also included are photographs, transcripts of relevant trial testimony, Judge Clayton Horn’s decision and its ramifications and a long essay by Albert Bendich, the ACLU attorney who defended Howl on constitutional grounds. Editor Bill Morgan discusses more recent challenges to Howl in the late 1980s and how the fight against censorship continues today in new guises.
The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told
Author: Dikkon Eberhart
Publisher: NavPress
ISBN: 1496406869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
He was predestined for literary greatness. If only his father hadn’t used up all the words. As the son of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, Dikkon Eberhart grew up surrounded by literary giants. Dinner guests included, among others, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot, all of whom flocked to the Eberhart house to discuss, debate, and dissect the poetry of the day. To the world, they were literary icons. To Dikkon, they were friends who read him bedtime stories, gave him advice, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, helped him with his English homework. Anxious to escape his famous father’s shadow, Dikkon struggled for decades to forge an identity of his own, first in writing and then on the stage, before inadvertently stumbling upon the answer he’d been looking for all along—in the most unlikely of places. Brimming with unforgettable stories featuring some of the most colorful characters of the Beat Generation, The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told is a winsome coming-of-age story about one man’s search for identity and what happens when he finally finds it.
Publisher: NavPress
ISBN: 1496406869
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 315
Book Description
He was predestined for literary greatness. If only his father hadn’t used up all the words. As the son of the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, Dikkon Eberhart grew up surrounded by literary giants. Dinner guests included, among others, Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, W. H. Auden, and T. S. Eliot, all of whom flocked to the Eberhart house to discuss, debate, and dissect the poetry of the day. To the world, they were literary icons. To Dikkon, they were friends who read him bedtime stories, gave him advice, and, on one particularly memorable occasion, helped him with his English homework. Anxious to escape his famous father’s shadow, Dikkon struggled for decades to forge an identity of his own, first in writing and then on the stage, before inadvertently stumbling upon the answer he’d been looking for all along—in the most unlikely of places. Brimming with unforgettable stories featuring some of the most colorful characters of the Beat Generation, The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told is a winsome coming-of-age story about one man’s search for identity and what happens when he finally finds it.
Blows Like a Horn
Author: Preston Whaley
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans, reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674045125
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Book Description
Reopening the canons of the Beat Generation, Blows Like a Horn traces the creative counterculture movement as it cooked in the heat of Bay Area streets and exploded into spectacles, such as the scandal of the Howl trial and the pop culture joke of beatnik caricatures. Preston Whaley shows Beat artists riding the glossy exteriors of late modernism like a wave. Participants such as Lawrence Lipton, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and at great personal cost, even Jack Kerouac, defied the traditional pride of avant-garde anonymity. They were ambitious to change the culture and used mass-mediated scandal, fame, and distortion to attract knowing consumers to their poetry and prose. Blows Like a Horn follows the Beats as they tweaked the volume of excluded American voices. It watches vernacular energies marching through Beat texts on their migration from shadowy urban corners and rural backwoods to a fertile, new hyper-reality, where they warped into stereotypes. Some audiences were fooled. Others discovered truths and were changed. Mirroring the music of the era, the book breaks new ground in showing how jazz, much more than an ambient soundtrack, shaped the very structures of Beat art and social life. Jazz, an American hybrid--shot through with an earned-in-the-woodshed, African American style of spontaneous intelligence--also gave Beat poetry its velocity and charisma. Blows Like a Horn plumbs the actions and the art of celebrated and arcane Beat writers, from Allen Ginsberg to ruth weiss. The poetry, the music, the style--all of these helped transform U.S. culture in ways that are still with us. Table of Contents: Introduction: Opening Measures 1. Horn of Fame 2. On the Brink 3. Celluloid Beatniks 4. Ready for Breakfast 5. Howl of Love Conclusion: The Horn Keeps Blowing Notes Credits Index Mr. Whaley, in this book, takes an academic approach to a subject that is just now beginning to attract scholarly interest. He thoroughly fleshes out a range of sources that span the artistic spectrum in order to give balance and objectivity to his treatment of American culture during the bebop and beat eras. The 1960s, with the Civil Rights Movement, the advent of hippie culture, and the protests against the Vietnam War, has long garnered attention from scholars, writers, musical historians, and filmmakers alike. In the popular conception of pop culture, the 1950s are often labeled boring or drab by comparison. Preston Whaley's analysis, however, will go a long way toward identifying the cultural movements of the 1940s and 1950s as part of a linear whole, a direct predecessor of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s. --Douglas Brinkley, author of World War II: the Axis Assault, 1939-1942 This book has a nice exuberance and conviction, a consistent vision and a persuasively engaging tone. It has a winsome, masculinist, optimistic, expansive style that is reminiscent of beat literature itself. --Maria Damon, author of The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry Whaley's Blows Like a Horn made me want to read ruth weiss, see The Subterraneans, reread Visions of Cody and well, I already listen to Coltrane and read Howl all the time .. but these are signs to me of a very effective book. Whaley wants to find a new way of talking about the Beats and post-Beat culture, one that doesn't fall into the rhetoric of liberation and resistance that is so common in the analyses of this genre, or to the cultural studies critiques of the beats that have pointed out the movement's appropriation by the hegemonic structures of Western, white, patriarchal, hetero capitalism and left it there. Whaley looks for a hitherto ignored space in Beat culture in which the aspirations, experiments and prejudices of the Beats can be directly related to precisely the kind of struggles that cultural studies itself is engaged in as a field. The Beats may not solve all problems, but they are aware of many of them, to varying degrees. There's a subtle, improvisatory quality to Whaley's writing that mirrors the kind of in situ politics and aesthetics that he's trying to evoke in Beat culture. He moves between high and low, personal and theoretical as the situation needs. He talks to the reader directly. There's a refreshing directness here, a willingness to address fundamental human situations. --Marcus Boon, author of The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs
Poetic License
Author: Gretchen Cherington
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631527126
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1631527126
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she’d recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents’ well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father’s extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father’s best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s to Cherington’s consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.
The Poetry Circuit
Author: Peter B. Howarth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192650939
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385
Book Description
Live performance has changed poetry more than anything else in the last hundred years: it has given poets new audiences and a new economy, and it has generated new styles, from Imagism, to confessional, to contemporary Spoken Word. But the creative impact that public reading had right through the twentieth century has not been well understood. Mixing close listening to archive performances with intimate histories of modernist venues and promotors, The Poetry Circuit tells the story of how poets met their audience again, and how the feedback loops between their voices, the venues, and the occasions turned poems into running dramas between poet and listener. A nervous T. S. Eliot reveals himself to be anything but impersonal, while Marianne Moore's accident-prone readings become subtle ways of keeping her poems in constant re-draft. Robert Frost used his poems to spar with his fans and rivals, while Langston Hughes wrote Ask Your Mama to expose the prejudice circulating in the room as he spoke it. The Poetry Circuit also shows how the post-war reading boom made new kinds of poetry involving their audience and setting in the performance, such as John Ashbery's anti-charismatic Poets' Theatre, Amiri Baraka's documentary soundtracks of the streets, or the confessional readings of Allen Ginsberg, which shame the listeners more than the poet. Covering the first seventy years of the poetry reading, The Poetry Circuit demonstrates that there never were 'page' and 'stage' poets: the reading simply changed what every modern poet could do.
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes in American Poetry
Author: Matt Theado
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1949979946
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
The Beats, Black Mountain, and New Modes of American Poetry explores correspondences amongst the Black Mountain and Beat Generation writers, two of most well-known and influential groups of poets in the 1950s. The division of writers as Beat or Black Mountain has hindered our understanding of the ways that these poets developed from mutual influences, benefitted from direct relations, and overlapped their boundaries. This collection of academic essays refines and adds context to Beat Studies and Black Mountain Studies by investigating the groups’ intersections and undercurrents. One goal of the book is to deconstruct the Beat and Black Mountain labels in order to reveal the shifting and fluid relationships among the individual poets who developed a revolutionary poetics in the 1950s and beyond. Taken together, these essays clarify the radical experimentation with poetics undertaken by these poets.
The Poetics of Scale
Author: Conrad Steel
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
Since the start of the twentieth century, poets have been irresistibly drawn to the image of the poem as a kind of data-handling, a way of mediating between the divergent scales of aesthetics and infrastructure, language and technology. Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry—with its particular formal affordances, and the particular hopes and fears we invest it with—has always been bound up with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. The Poetics of Scale takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. This history follows Apollinaire’s ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day. Threading together Apollinaire’s work in the 1910s with three of his American successors—Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley from the 1970s onward—it shows how poetry as a cultural technique became the crucial test case for the scale of our collective imagination.
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
ISBN: 1609389328
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 261
Book Description
Since the start of the twentieth century, poets have been irresistibly drawn to the image of the poem as a kind of data-handling, a way of mediating between the divergent scales of aesthetics and infrastructure, language and technology. Conrad Steel shows how the history of poetry—with its particular formal affordances, and the particular hopes and fears we invest it with—has always been bound up with our changing logistics of macroscale representation. The Poetics of Scale takes us back to the years before the First World War in Paris, where the poet Guillaume Apollinaire claimed to have invented a new mode of poetry large enough to take on the challenges of the coming twentieth century. This history follows Apollinaire’s ideas across the Atlantic and examines how and why his work became such a vital source of inspiration for American poets through the era of intensive American economic expansion and up to the present day. Threading together Apollinaire’s work in the 1910s with three of his American successors—Louis Zukofsky in the 1930s, Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s, and Alice Notley from the 1970s onward—it shows how poetry as a cultural technique became the crucial test case for the scale of our collective imagination.
Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n' Roll
Author: Robert C. Cottrell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442246073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453
Book Description
Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll: The American Counterculture of the 1960s offers a unique examination of the cultural flowering that enveloped the United States during that early postwar decade. Robert C. Cottrell provides an enthralling view of the counterculture, beginning with an examination of American bohemia, the Lyrical Left of the pre-WWII era, and the hipsters. He delves into the Beats, before analyzing the counterculture that emerged on both the East and West coasts, but soon cropped up in the American heartland as well. Cottrell delivers something of a collective biography, through an exploration of the antics of seminal countercultural figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. Cottrell also presents fascinating chapters covering “the magic elixir of sex,” rock ‘n roll, the underground press, Haight-Ashbury, the literature that garnered the attention of many in the counterculture, Monterey Pop, the Summer of Love, the Death of Hippie, the March on the Pentagon, communes, Yippies, Weatherman, Woodstock, the Manson family, the women’s movement, and the decade’s legacies.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442246073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 453
Book Description
Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n Roll: The American Counterculture of the 1960s offers a unique examination of the cultural flowering that enveloped the United States during that early postwar decade. Robert C. Cottrell provides an enthralling view of the counterculture, beginning with an examination of American bohemia, the Lyrical Left of the pre-WWII era, and the hipsters. He delves into the Beats, before analyzing the counterculture that emerged on both the East and West coasts, but soon cropped up in the American heartland as well. Cottrell delivers something of a collective biography, through an exploration of the antics of seminal countercultural figures Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. Cottrell also presents fascinating chapters covering “the magic elixir of sex,” rock ‘n roll, the underground press, Haight-Ashbury, the literature that garnered the attention of many in the counterculture, Monterey Pop, the Summer of Love, the Death of Hippie, the March on the Pentagon, communes, Yippies, Weatherman, Woodstock, the Manson family, the women’s movement, and the decade’s legacies.
Postmodern Belief
Author: Amy Hungerford
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400834910
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219
Book Description
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake--a belief absent of doctrine--has become an answer to pluralism in a secular age. Amy Hungerford reveals how imaginative literature and religious practices together allow novelists, poets, and critics to express the formal elements of language in transcendent terms, conferring upon words a religious value independent of meaning. Hungerford explores the work of major American writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison, and Marilynne Robinson, and links their unique visions to the religious worlds they touch. She illustrates how Ginsberg's chant-infused 1960s poetry echoes the tongue-speaking of Charismatic Christians, how DeLillo reimagines the novel and the Latin Mass, why McCarthy's prose imitates the Bible, and why Morrison's fiction needs the supernatural. Uncovering how literature and religion conceive of a world where religious belief can escape confrontations with other worldviews, Hungerford corrects recent efforts to discard the importance of belief in understanding religious life, and argues that belief in belief itself can transform secular reading and writing into a religious act. Honoring the ways in which people talk about and practice religion, Postmodern Belief highlights the claims of the religious imagination in twentieth-century American culture.