Omissions are Not Accidents

Omissions are Not Accidents PDF Author: Christopher J. Knight
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442640502
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
On modern writers' tendency to think their work is incomplete.

Guys Like Us

Guys Like Us PDF Author: Michael Davidson
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226137392
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Guys Like Us considers how writers of the 1950s and '60s struggled to craft literature that countered the politics of consensus and anticommunist hysteria in America, and how notions of masculinity figured in their effort. Michael Davidson examines a wide range of postwar literature, from the fiction of Jack Kerouac to the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank O'Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. He also explores the connection between masculinity and sexuality in films such as Chinatown and The Lady from Shanghai, as well as television shows, plays, and magazines from the period. What results is a virtuoso work that looks at American poetic and artistic innovation through the revealing lenses of gender and history.

Holding On Upside Down

Holding On Upside Down PDF Author: Linda Leavell
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571301835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 411

Book Description
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) has been heralded as America's greatest poet of the modernist movement. Her volume Collected Poems won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1952 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Moore eventually found her way to New York with her mother whom she continued to live with until her mother passed, a familial devotion so intense that William Carlos Williams complained that it was 'pathological' and prevented her from marrying any 'literary guys'. Moore never married. Linda Leavall is the first biographer to be granted access and freedom to quote from Moore's archives. More than just a standard biography, Leavall re-examines Moore's body of work to complement and enlighten the biography. Through Moore's poems and letters from T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and many others, Leavall has written what is sure to be the definitive biography of Moore.

Observations

Observations PDF Author: Marianne Moore
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description


American and European Literary Imagination

American and European Literary Imagination PDF Author: John McCormick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351320661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 387

Book Description
Western culture is composed of a subtle and complex mixture of influences: religious, philosophical, linguistic, political, social, and sociological. American culture is a particular strain, but unless European antecedents and contemporary leanings are duly noted, any resulting history is predestined to provincialism and distortion. In his account of American literature during the period 1919 to 1932, McCormick deals with the extraordinary work of artists who wrested imaginative order from a world in which the abyss was never out of sight.McCormick's volume is intended as a critical, rather than encyclopedic history of literature on both sides of the Atlantic between the end of World War I and the political and social crises that arose in the 1930s. Although he emphasizes American writers, the emergence of a vital and distinctly modern American literature is located in the cultural encounter with Europe and the rejection of national bias by the major figures of the period.McCormick deals with Gertrude Stein and the mythology of the "lost generation," the tensions and ambivalences of traditionalism and modernity in the work of Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the effect and qualities of Hemingway's style as compared to that of Henry de Montherlant, and the provincial iconoclasm of Sinclair Lewis juxtaposed with the more telling satire of Italo Svevo. The formal innovations in the work of John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, and William Faulkner, the poetic revolution against cultural parochialism and genteel romanticism is given extensive consideration with regard to the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore are also discussed. The concluding chapters discuss literary and social criticism and assess the influence of psychoanalysis, philosophical pragmatism, and radical historiography on the intellectual climate of the period.Teachers and students in English and American Literature, American History, and Comparative Literature, and the general reader interested in the writing of the period, may gain new insights from these valuations, devaluations, and re-evaluations.

The Ethics and Law of Omissions

The Ethics and Law of Omissions PDF Author: Dana Kay Nelkin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190683473
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
This edited volume of new essays explores the principles that govern moral responsibility and legal liability for omissive conduct--behavior that did not occur. Many contributors here try to make sense of the possibility of moral responsibility for omissions, including those that occur unwittingly. The disagreements among them concern the grounds of moral responsibility in these cases: the constellation of states and traits that constitute the self, or the quality of one's will, or exercises of evaluative judgment, or the ability and opportunity to avoid the omission, or the tracing back to a time when one had the witting ability to take steps to avoid future omission. Some contributors consider whether omissions need to be under one's control if one is to be morally responsible for them, as well as which sense of "control" is relevant, if it is, to the question of moral responsibility. Yet others consider whether it is possible for an agent to be morally responsible for an omission that she could not have avoided. On the legal side, contributors also consider various issues concerning the status of omissions in the law: whether circumstances that are usually described as involving legal liability for omissions are better described as involving legal liability for entire courses of conduct; the conditions (such as creation of the peril) under which one can be legally liable for an omission to rescue; why a defendant's legal guilt for a crime can be predicated on an omission to act only if the defendant was under a legal duty to engage in the omitted act; and whether this "duty requirement" is grounded in the desirability of shielding from legal liability those who are not criminally culpable or in the constraint that one's body and property may not be appropriated for the general good. Included with the essays is an introduction to the topic by the volume editors. The book will be of interest to moral philosophers, philosophers of law, and other legal scholars.

The Unsignificant

The Unsignificant PDF Author: Srikanth Reddy
Publisher: Wave Books
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 81

Book Description
The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award–finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015. True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it’s not about—not the logical proofs of philosophy but the affective flux of poetry. The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Brueghel’s “Landscape with Fall of Icarus,” Hermann Rorschach’s inkblots, or Galileo’s drawings of the moon. Ranging from pictorial backgrounds in visual art to portraiture and similes to the poetics of wonder, The Unsignificant embarks on an unsystematic, errant, and eccentric tour of Western poetry and poetics from the ancient world to our continuous present.

Emily Dickinson, a Poet's Grammar

Emily Dickinson, a Poet's Grammar PDF Author: Cristanne Miller
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674250369
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Book Description
Traces the roots of Dickinson's unusual, compressed, ungrammatical, and richly ambiguous style of poetry.

From the Modernist Annex

From the Modernist Annex PDF Author: Karin Roffman
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
ISBN: 0817316981
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of women were forced to seek their education outside the walls of American universities. Many turned to museums and libraries, for their own enlightenment, for formal education, and also for their careers. In Roffman’s close readings of four modernist writers—Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Marianne Moore, and Ruth Benedict—she studied the that modernist women writers were simultaneously critical of and shaped by these institutions. From the Modernist Annex offers new and critically significant ways of understanding these writers and their texts, the distribution of knowledge, and the complicated place of women in modernist institutions.

Experimental

Experimental PDF Author: Natalia Cecire
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
ISBN: 142143377X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
A compelling revision of the history of experimental writing from Pound and Stein to Language poetry, disclosing its uses and its limits. In this bold new study of twentieth-century American writing and poetics, Natalia Cecire argues that experimental writing should be understood as a historical phenomenon before it is understood as a set of formal phenomena. This seems counterintuitive because, at its most basic level, experimental writing can be thought of as writing which breaks from established forms. Touching on figures who are not typically considered experimental, such as Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis, Busby Berkeley, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Gottlob Frege, Experimental offers a fresh look at authors who are often treated as constituting a center or an origin point of an experimental literary tradition in the United States, including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore. In responding to a crisis of legitimization in the production of knowledge, this tradition borrows and transforms the language of the sciences. Drawing upon terminology from the history of science, Cecire invokes the epistemic virtue, which tethers ethical values to the production of knowledge in order to organize diverse turn-of-the-century knowledge practices feeding into "experimental writing." Using these epistemic virtues as a structuring concept for the book's argument, Cecire demonstrates that experimental writing as we now understand it does not do experiments (as in follow a method) but rather performs epistemic virtues. Experimental texts embody the epistemic virtues of flash, objectivity, precision, and contact, associated respectively with population sciences, neuroanatomy, natural history and toolmaking, and anthropology. Yet which virtues take precedence may vary widely, as may the literary forms through which they manifest. Bringing it up to the 1980s, Cecire reveals the American experimental literary tradition as a concerted and largely successful rewriting of twentieth-century literary history. She shows how the Language poets, a group of primarily white experimental writers, restored to the canon what they saw as modernism's true legacy, whose stakes were simultaneously political and epistemological: it produced a poet who was an intellectual and a text that was experimental.