The Place of Imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gatta
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Contemporary Writers

“Imagination,” a word evidently central to the vocation and sensibility of English Romantic poets, is likewise invoked often as a defining term in American literary history. But what are the theological implications of this crucial category, beginning with Coleridge’s seminal statements about it? How might the human faculty of imagination—often but doubtfully associated with an abstractly ethereal quality of mind—bear upon concrete facts of the world humans experience? And how, in the light of philosophic perspectives, together with Wendell Berry’s provocative reflections on “imagination in place,” might Imagination be understood as integral with the phenomenology of place? Such questions are addressed here by means of themes bearing on the Earthiness of Imagination, the Contemplative Reach of Imagination, and Numinous Layers of Place as Palimpsest. Literary texts analyzed to develop these themes include Whitman’s verse and works by two contemporary writers—poet Marilyn Nelson and novelist Alfred Véa.

The Center of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Local Color ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Multiple Media ◽  
The One

The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is a study of literary regionalism. It focuses on but is not limited to fiction in the United States, also considering the place of the genre in world literature. It argues that regional writing shapes ways of imagining not only the neighborhood, the province, and nation, but also the world. It argues that thinking about place always entails imagining time. It demonstrates the importance of the figure of the schoolteacher and the one-room schoolhouse in local color writing and subsequent place-focused writing. These representations embody the contested relation between localities and the knowledge they produce, and books that carry metropolitan and cosmopolitan learning, in modernity. The book undertakes analysis of how concepts work across disciplines and in everyday discourse, coordinating that work with proposals for revising American literary history and close readings of particular authors’ work. Works from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries are discussed, and the book’s analysis of the form is extended into multiple media.

World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far

2018 ◽  
pp. 121-160
Author(s):  
June Howard
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Sui Sin Far ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Regionalism ◽  
Recent Addition ◽  
Edith Eaton

The fourth chapter of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time is titled “World-Making Words, by Edith Eaton and Sui Sin Far.” It considers the work of this doubly named author, a comparatively recent addition to the canon of literary regionalism. It offers a sketch of Eaton’s life and works, attending closely to recent research and discussing her place in North American literary history. It argues that the author’s success as “Sui Sin Far” depended on her connection to the global locality “Chinatown,” but also that she claims multiple national literatures and writes herself into a world literature beyond their horizons.

The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Early Republic ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Early America ◽  
Early American Literature ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Early American ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
European Colonization

This Companion covers American literary history from European colonization to the early republic. It provides a succinct introduction to the major themes and concepts in the field of early American literature, including new world migration, indigenous encounters, religious and secular histories, and the emergence of American literary genres. This book guides readers through important conceptual and theoretical issues, while also grounding these issues in close readings of key literary texts from early America.

scholarly journals Kosmopolitanisme dalam Majalah Penghiboer di Awal Abad Ke-20

Metahumaniora ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Ethical Policy ◽  
The World

AbstrakSejarah kesusastraan Indonesia lazim dipandang memiliki awalnya denganterbitnya karya-karya yang diterbitkan dan dipromosikan Balai Pustaka sebagai bagiandari program otoritas kolonial Belanda dalam konteks Politik Etis. Namun, pandanganyang Balai Pustaka-sentris semacam ini mengabaikan aktivitas penulisan dan penerbitanyang dilakukan pihak swasta di berbagai kota selain Batavia. Tulisan ini bertujuanmenunjukkan betapa wawasan kelas menengah terdidik di Hindia Belanda pada awal abadkedua puluh melampaui yang direfleksikan dalam karya-karya terbitan Balai Pustaka.Untuk mencapai tujuan ini, diterapkan kajian materialis kultural yang memandangteks sastra maupun non-sastra sebagai bagian dari ekonomi dan kebudayaan material.Dengan berfokus pada majalah Penghiboer, yang terbit di Palembang, akan tampakbetapa warga kelas menengah Hindia-Belanda memiliki kehidupan yang kosmopolitan,yang memandang dirinya merupakan bagian dari masyarakat dunia, dan, karena itupula, menunjukkan ambivalensi dalam menyajikan identitas nasional.Kata kunci: Penghiboer, bacaan populer, majalah, Hindia Belanda, materialisme kulturalAbstractIndonesian literary history is commonly viewed to have had its beginnings in thepublication and promotion of works by Balai Pustaka as a part of the program of the Dutchcolonial authority under the auspices of the Ethical Policy. However, such Balai Pustaka-centricperspective often ignores the writing and publications carried out by the private sector in variouscities other than Batavia. This piece aims at exposing how the world view of the educated middleclass in the Dutch-Indies in the early twentieth century had gone beyond what is reflected in theworks published by Balai Pustaka. To achieve this objective,the cultural materialist approachis employed, which views literary and non-literary texts as apart of the economy and materialculture. Focusing on the magazine Penghiboer, published in Palembang, it will be apparenthow the members of the middle class in the Dutch Indies lived lives in the view that they were apart of a global society, and, therefore, also shows ambivalence in presenting national identity.Keywords: Penghiboer, popular reading, magazines, Dutch Indies, cultural materialism

scholarly journals Kosmopolitanisme dalam Majalah Penghiboer di Awal Abad Ke-20

Metahumaniora ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 136
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World View ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Cultural Materialism ◽  
Global Society ◽  
Ethical Policy ◽  
The World

AbstrakSejarah kesusastraan Indonesia lazim dipandang memiliki awalnya denganterbitnya karya-karya yang diterbitkan dan dipromosikan Balai Pustaka sebagai bagiandari program otoritas kolonial Belanda dalam konteks Politik Etis. Namun, pandanganyang Balai Pustaka-sentris semacam ini mengabaikan aktivitas penulisan dan penerbitanyang dilakukan pihak swasta di berbagai kota selain Batavia. Tulisan ini bertujuanmenunjukkan betapa wawasan kelas menengah terdidik di Hindia Belanda pada awal abadkedua puluh melampaui yang direfleksikan dalam karya-karya terbitan Balai Pustaka.Untuk mencapai tujuan ini, diterapkan kajian materialis kultural yang memandangteks sastra maupun non-sastra sebagai bagian dari ekonomi dan kebudayaan material.Dengan berfokus pada majalah Penghiboer, yang terbit di Palembang, akan tampakbetapa warga kelas menengah Hindia-Belanda memiliki kehidupan yang kosmopolitan,yang memandang dirinya merupakan bagian dari masyarakat dunia, dan, karena itupula, menunjukkan ambivalensi dalam menyajikan identitas nasional.Kata kunci: Penghiboer, bacaan populer, majalah, Hindia Belanda, materialisme kulturalAbstractIndonesian literary history is commonly viewed to have had its beginnings in thepublication and promotion of works by Balai Pustaka as a part of the program of the Dutchcolonial authority under the auspices of the Ethical Policy. However, such Balai Pustaka-centricperspective often ignores the writing and publications carried out by the private sector in variouscities other than Batavia. This piece aims at exposing how the world view of the educated middleclass in the Dutch-Indies in the early twentieth century had gone beyond what is reflected in theworks published by Balai Pustaka. To achieve this objective,the cultural materialist approachis employed, which views literary and non-literary texts as apart of the economy and materialculture. Focusing on the magazine Penghiboer, published in Palembang, it will be apparenthow the members of the middle class in the Dutch Indies lived lives in the view that they were apart of a global society, and, therefore, also shows ambivalence in presenting national identity.Keywords: Penghiboer, popular reading, magazines, Dutch Indies, cultural materialism

scholarly journals American Incunabula: 'Grotesque Genesis' and the Genealogical Genre

AmeriQuests ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian J. MacRae
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Patrick Chamoiseau ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
The World ◽  
Book Of Genesis ◽  
Os Sertoes ◽  
Euclides Da Cunha

Analysis of Os Sertões (Euclides da Cunha, Brazil, 1902), Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner, USA, 1936), Cien años de soledad (Gabriel García Márquez, Colombia, 1967), The Invention of the World (Jack Hodgins, Canada, 1977), and Texaco (Patrick Chamoiseau, Martinique, 1992) as a generic ensemble enables diverse treatments of race, class, gender and sexuality to resolve over time and across cultures into the meaningful patterns of American literary history. Each text incorporates the origin in writing and exposes it to difference—plurality, ambiguity, discontinuity. With this, the perpetual rewriting of the strong poem (the Book of Genesis) at the symbolic founding, the originary tradition transforms itself through incorporation of non-canonical elements, as the ‘same’ turns endlessly different: hybrid, ex-centric, grotesque, increasingly Creolized.

Does Literature Matter Today? Thoughts of the Outside

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-113
Author(s):  
Shaobo Xie
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
The Other ◽  
Human Values ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Lost Cause ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
The World

The paper celebrates the publication of Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents as a significant event in the age of neoliberalism. It argues that, in spite of the different premises and the resulting interpretative procedures respectively championed by the two co-authors, both of them anchor their readings of literary texts in a concept of literature that is diametrically opposed to neoliberal rationality, and both impassionedly safeguard human values and experiences that resist the technologisation and marketisation of the humanities and aesthetic education. While Ghosh's readings of literature offer lightning flashes of thought from the outside of the Western tradition, signalling a new culture of reading as well as a new manner of appreciation of the other, Miller dedicatedly speaks and thinks against the hegemony of neoliberal reason, opening our eyes to the kind of change our teaching or reading of literature can trigger in the world, and the role aesthetic education should and can play at a time when the humanities are considered ‘a lost cause’.

Boatmen, Wastrels, and Demons: Figures of Literature

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simona Sawhney
Keyword(s):  
Social Studies ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Sanskrit Text ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
The World ◽  
National Literatures

Engaging some of the questions opened by Ranjan Ghosh's and J. Hillis Miller's book Thinking Literature Across Continents (2016), this essay begins by returning to Aijaz Ahmad's earlier invocation of World Literature as a project that, like the proletariat itself, must stand in an antithetical relation to the capitalism that produced it. It asks: is there an essential link between a certain idea of literature and a figure of the world? If we try to broach this link through Derrida's enigmatic and repeated reflections on the secret – a secret ‘shared’ by both literature and democracy – how would we grasp Derrida's insistence on the ‘Latinity’ of literature? The groundlessness of reading that we confront most vividly in our encounter with fictional texts is both intensified, and in a way, clarified, by new readings and questions posed by the emergence of new reading publics. The essay contends that rather than being taught as representatives of national literatures, literary texts in ‘World Literature’ courses should be read as sites where serious historical and political debates are staged – debates which, while being local, are the bearers of universal significance. Such readings can only take place if World Literature strengthens its connections with the disciplines Miller calls, in the book, Social Studies. Paying particular attention to the Hindi writer Premchand's last story ‘Kafan’, and a brief section from the Sanskrit text the Natyashastra, it argues that struggles over representation, over the staging of minoritised figures, are integral to fiction and precede the thinking of modern democracy.

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