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.

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.

“Literary Influences”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriel García Márquez
Keyword(s):  
Gulf Of Mexico ◽  
Latin American ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
The South ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Decisive Influence ◽  
The World ◽  
Literary Influences

This chapter presents an interview with Gabriel García Márquez, who talks about his literary influences, including William Faulkner. García Márquez cites Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis as the fundamental influence on his writing. A decisive influence on him, according to García Márquez, is Oedipus Rex. He also discusses Faulkner's influence on him, claiming that they share similar experiences. In particular, García Márquez reveals that Faulkner's whole world—the world of the South which he writes about—was very like his world, that it was created by the same people. He also cites the fact that Faulkner is in a way a Latin American writer whose world is that of the Gulf of Mexico.

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.

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.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Gabriel Garcia Marquez ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Davidson ◽  
Eudora Welty ◽  
The World ◽  
Creative Writer

This book examines what William Faulkner has meant to his fellow writers both in the United States and abroad. Few modern authors, except perhaps James Joyce, have had so profound an influence throughout the world as has Faulkner. He has been called a “writer's writer,” one who is held up as a preceptor and model for other writers to emulate. Novelists, playwrights, and poets have expressed their varying opinions on the value of Faulkner's example as a creative writer. This book contains essays, articles, reviews, letters, and interviews published over the last eight decades by novelists, poets, and dramatists about Faulkner, his fiction, and the power of his accomplishment. These include Donald Davidson, Stephen Vincent Benét, Richard Wright, Eudora Welty, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Forming Provisional Identities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Contemporary Fiction ◽  
Short Story Cycle ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
American Literary History ◽  
Story Cycle ◽  
Narrative Techniques

The introduction argues that the short story cycle is the preeminent genre for articulating the uncertainty that characterizes literary responses to modernity. The introduction outlines two vital contributions of the cycle to American literary history: 1. the absence of textual harmony in the cycle initiated new, pervasive narrative techniques of proliferating perspectives and disrupting chronology that inflect modern and contemporary fiction and 2. the form of the cycle enables the expression of subjectivity without fixity. Contingency and multiplicity are so central to our social-media infused culture that provisionality is its defining characteristic, but this book shows that the seeds for this go back almost to the nation’s founding.

Θεωρία in Ancient Greek Exegetical Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
Борис Тимофеев
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Near East ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Book Of Genesis

Современная научная богословская мысль склонна к унификации терминов и явлений в сфере своих компетенций. Эта тенденция в современных исследованиях в некоторых случаях распространяется и на древние христианские памятники. Так, например, слово θεωρία многие учёные определяют как мистический метод духовного толкования Священного Писания. Это определение нередко применяется в качестве универсального технического определения при анализе экзегетических произведений древних авторов. При этом игнорируется узус самих экзегетов, которые употребляют это слово в иных значениях. В рамках данной статьи предпринимается попытка выявить и показать основные значения слова θεωρία в древней греческой экзегетической литературе. The article deals with the theology, composition and literary form of the narrations which constitute the prologue part of the book of Genesis (1, 1-11, 26). During the second half of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th cent., following the emergence of the Documentary hypothesis as well as the comparison of the Holy Scripture with the newly-discovered literary monuments of Ancient Near East, the greater part of the narrations that constitute the Prologue were labeled myths and ancient Hebrew folklore (J. Wellhausen, H. Gunkel, J. Frazer). In addition to the then detected Near Eastern parallels, this new attitude towards the narrations of the Prologue was fostered by its lack of a clearly expressed historical dedication and the symbolic form of their exposition. Defending the traditional view of the Prologue as sacred history and prophetic revelation, bishop Kassian (Bezobrazov) proposed to consider all the biblical narrations that contain theophanies as metahistorical. Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov, A. F. Losev and B. P. Vysheslavtsev, who analyzed the phenomenon of myth-making, called the Biblical narration of the origins of the world a myth, but in a sense different from that proposed by Gunkel and Frazer. They have founded a new and positive conception according to which a myth is not fi but rather a kind of reality based upon mystical experience. The author of the article analyzes each of the terms enumerated - «history», «myth», «metahistory» - in their use relating them to the Prologue; he also examines the possibility of their harmonizing with the traditional ecclesiastical view of this part of the book of Genesis.

Prologue to Genesis (1, 1-11, 26): Prophetic Revelation, History, Myth or Metahistory?

2020 ◽  
pp. 17-46
Author(s):  
Михаил Анатольевич Скобелев
Keyword(s):  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Near East ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
Ancient Near East ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
The World ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
Book Of Genesis

В статье рассматриваются богословие, композиция и литературная форма сюжетов, входящих в состав Пролога книги Бытия (1, 1-11, 26). Во второй половине XIX - начале XX вв. в результате появления Документальной гипотезы и сопоставления Священного Писания с литературными памятниками Древнего Ближнего Востока большая часть сюжетов, составляющих Пролог, была объявлена мифами и древнееврейским фольклором (Ю. Велльгаузен, Г. Гунекель, Дж. Фрезер). Кроме выявленных ближневосточных параллелей, новому отношению к повествованиям Пролога книги Бытия способствовали: отсутствие в нём ясно выраженной исторической задачи и символичность изложения. Защищая традиционный взгляд на Пролог как на священную историю и пророческое откровение, епископ Кассиан (Безобразов) предложил рассматривать все библейские сюжеты, содержащие теофанию, как метаисторию. Протоиерей Сергий Булгаков, А. Ф. Лосев, Б. П. Вышеславцев, занимавшиеся феноменом мифотворчества, назвали библейское повествование о начале мироздания мифом, но в ином смысле, чем это делали Г. Гункель и Дж. Фрезер. Они обосновали новый положительный взгляд, согласно которому миф не есть выдумка или фантазия, а реальность, основанная на мистическом опыте. В статье анализируется каждый из перечисленных терминов: «история», «миф», «метаистория» применительно к Прологу, а также рассматривается возможность их согласования с традиционным церковным взглядом на эту часть книги Бытия. The article deals with the theology, composition and literary form of the narrations which constitute the prologue part of the book of Genesis (1, 1-11, 26). During the second half of the 19th and at the turn of the 20th cent., following the emergence of the Documentary hypothesis as well as the comparison of the Holy Scripture with the newly-discovered literary monuments of Ancient Near East, the greater part of the narrations that constitute the Prologue were labeled myths and ancient Hebrew folklore (J. Wellhausen, H. Gunkel, J. Frazer). In addition to the then detected Near Eastern parallels, this new attitude towards the narrations of the Prologue was fostered by its lack of a clearly expressed historical dedication and the symbolic form of their exposition. Defending the traditional view of the Prologue as sacred history and prophetic revelation, bishop Kassian (Bezobrazov) proposed to consider all the biblical narrations that contain theophanies as metahistorical. Archpriest Sergey Bulgakov, A. F. Losev and B. P. Vysheslavtsev, who analyzed the phenomenon of myth-making, called the Biblical narration of the origins of the world a myth, but in a sense different from that proposed by Gunkel and Frazer. They have founded a new and positive conception according to which a myth is not fiction but rather a kind of reality based upon mystical experience. The author of the article analyzes each of the terms enumerated - «history», «myth», «metahistory» - in their use relating them to the Prologue; he also examines the possibility of their harmonizing with the traditional ecclesiastical view of this part of the book of Genesis.

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