The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun

The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun PDF

Author: Anil Menon

Publisher: Hachette India

Published: 2022-06-25

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9391028616

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'It was customary, it seems, for an author to begin with excuses, explanations and snivels about their work. Which is quite peculiar since the author is usually the last person to know what their book is about...' Right from the wickedly funny table of contents, which belongs not to this collection but an imagined one, this remarkable genre-defying volume is guaranteed to delight the reader in the mood for something original and different. In the title story, 'The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun', a couple finds that reorganizing their home library has an unexpected consequence on their shared reality; 'The Robots of Eden' is set in a world where stories are no longer essential to be human, because civilized people have developed better technology to mediate their emotions; in 'Into the Night', an old Brahmin leans into the comforts of an ancient language when the future renders him obsolete; and 'How Not to Tell The Ramayana' is a Borgesian journey into a Ramayana retelling unlike any other. This stellar collection of short fiction, as poignant as it is playful, blurs the distinction between what lies inside a story and what lies outside it. It demonstrates yet again why Anil Menon is one of the most formidable names in contemporary Indian writing.

Poetry and Apocalypse

Poetry and Apocalypse PDF

Author: William Franke

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2008-10-10

Total Pages: 229

ISBN-13: 0804779732

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In Poetry and Apocalypse, Franke seeks to find the premises for dialogue between cultures, especially religious fundamentalisms—including Islamic fundamentalism—and modern Western secularism. He argues that in order to be genuinely open, dialogue needs to accept possibilities such as religious apocalypse in ways that can be best understood through the experience of poetry. Franke reads Christian epic and prophetic tradition as a secularization of religious revelation that preserves an understanding of the essentially apocalyptic character of truth and its disclosure in history. The usually neglected negative theology that undergirds this apocalyptic tradition provides the key to a radically new view of apocalypse as at once religious and poetic.

Love’s Shadow

Love’s Shadow PDF

Author: Paul A. Bové

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 0674977157

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A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love. Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if instead we dared to love poetry? To choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, of civilization? Paul Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in the writing of essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make it Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings. Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens

The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens PDF

Author: Wallace Stevens

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2015-08-18

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1101911689

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An essential book for all readers of poetry, and the definitive collection from the man Harold Bloom has called “the best and most representative American poet." Originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens’s seventy-fifth birthday, the book was rushed into print for the occasion and contained scores of errors. These have now been corrected in one place for the first time by Stevens scholars John N. Serio and Christopher Beyers, based on original editions and manuscripts. The Collected Poems is the one volume that Stevens intended to contain all the poems he wished to preserve, presented in the way he wanted. It is an enduring monument to his dazzling achievement.

A Poetry of Two Minds

A Poetry of Two Minds PDF

Author: Sherod Santos

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780820322049

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In his long-awaited first book of prose, poet and essayist Sherod Santos takes a compelling look into some of poetry’s deepest secrets, an investigation that leads him to the surprising conclusion that poems have minds of their own, minds often inaccessible even to the one who composed them. In these essays, Santos explores not only what he thinks about poetry but also what and how poetry thinks about itself. His writings range across the history of Western poetry, from formative classical myths to modern experimental forms, and touch on subjects as diverse as the rhetorical history of cannibalism, the political and cultural uses of translation, and the current state of American poetry. Along the way, he calls on past poets like Ovid, Baudelaire, and Phyllis Wheatley, on twentieth-century poets like Wallace Stevens, H. D., and Rainer Maria Rilke, and on writers and thinkers like Montaigne, Walter Benjamin, Simone Weil, and Paul de Man. These essays explore facets of poetry known best to one who has practiced the art for years. From the methods of poetic attention to the processes by which perception is transformed into language and from the illusive relationship between poetry and “meaning” to the integral relationship between poetry and memory, this collection delves into what it means to be a poet and how being a poet is intimately tied to one’s social and cultural moment. With Santos’s trademark flair for seeking out the overlooked and unforeseeable, A Poetry of Two Minds is an extraordinary collection that testifies to its author’s far-reaching intellectual curiosity. Readers who have delighted in his insights over the years can now have the satisfaction of having them caught between the covers of this provocative book.

Changing Subjects

Changing Subjects PDF

Author: Srikanth Reddy

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2012-07-12

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 0199791023

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Changing Subjects contends that major American poets-such as Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Lyn Hejinian-transformed verse and even changed conceptions of modern subjectivity by exploiting an ordinary rhetorical device, ubiquitous in spoken language: the digression.

Expanding Authorship

Expanding Authorship PDF

Author: Peter Middleton

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 0826362648

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Expanding Authorship collects important essays by Peter Middleton that show the many ways in which, in a world of proliferating communications media, poetry-making is increasingly the work of agencies extending beyond that of a single, identifiable author. In four sections—Sound, Communities, Collaboration, and Complexity—Middleton demonstrates that this changing situation of poetry requires new understandings of the variations of authorship. He explores the internal divisions of lyric subjectivity, the vicissitudes of coauthorship and poetry networks, the creative role of editors and anthologists, and the ways in which the long poem can reveal the outer limits of authorship. Readers and scholars of Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Frank O’Hara, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Jerome Rothenberg, Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Nathaniel Mackey, and Rae Armantrout will find much to learn and enjoy in this groundbreaking volume.

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations PDF

Author: Geoffrey O'Brien

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2022-10-25

Total Pages: 2788

ISBN-13: 0316375314

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From ancient Egypt to today, enjoy a sweeping survey of world history through its most memorable words in this completely revised and updated nineteenth edition. More than 150 years after its initial publication, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations now enters its nineteenth edi­tion. First compiled by John Bartlett, a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a commonplace book of only 258 pages, the original 1855 edition mainly featured selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Today, Bartlett’s includes more than 20,000 quotes from roughly 4,000 con­tributors. Spanning centuries of thought and culture, it remains the finest and most popular compendium of quotations ever assembled. While continuing to draw on timeless classi­cal references, this edition also incorporates more than 3,000 new quotes from more than 700 new sources, including Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pope Francis, Atul Gawande, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hilary Mantel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Claudia Rankine, Fred Rogers, Bernie Sanders, Patti Smith, and Malala Yousafzai. Bartlett’s showcases the thoughts not only of renowned figures from the arts, literature, politics, science, sports, and business, but also of otherwise unknown individuals whose thought-provoking ideas have moved, unsettled, or inspired readers and listeners throughout the ages. Bartlett’s makes searching for the perfect quote easy in three ways: alphabetically by author, chrono­logically by the author’s birth date, or thematically by subject. Whether one is searching for appropriate remarks for a celebration, comforting thoughts for a serious occasion, or simply to answer the question “Who said that?” Bartlett’s offers readers and schol­ars alike a stunning treasury of words that have influ­enced

Allegory and Violence

Allegory and Violence PDF

Author: Gordon Teskey

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9780801429958

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The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.