scholarly journals Kollektiv (Collective)

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Sina
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Implications ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Original Meaning ◽  
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre

The idea of the ‘collective’ plays a key role in Goethe’s late work. It denotes a balance between multiplicity and unity, heterogeneity and homogeneity, which is characteristic both of Goethe’s authorship and of his literary work, above all his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). Etymologically, Goethe’s use of the term refers back to its original meaning from the Latin colligere; for him, a collective emerges when parts are gathered and arranged into some sort of ordered whole. It has formal, intellectual, and social implications. The term is semantically close to the concepts of the ‘aggregate’ and the ‘compendium,’ which are also essential to Goethe’s late poetics. The collective, the aggregate, and the compendium are all situated between mere particularity and full systematicity, in a sphere of the intermediary. Finally, Goethe’s idea of the collective found resonance primarily and early on in the United States, specifically in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The American Art of Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 70-98
Author(s):  
John Michael Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
American Art ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
American Renaissance ◽  
Interior Space

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of the architectural figuration of human cognition from the ancient world to Renaissance Europe and, finally, to the American Renaissance where it came to possess a striking cultural and literary potency. The first section pursues the two-fold task of elucidating this archetypal trope for consciousness, both its ancient moorings and its eventual transmission into Europe. The second section shows that three of the most prominent writers of the American Renaissance—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne—engaged this mystically inspired architectonic symbolism, employing far older techno-cultural suppositions about interior space. I thereby offer an account of the intellectual and spiritual heritage upon which Romantic writers in the United States drew to articulate cognitive interiority. These Romantics did more than value creativity in contradistinction to Enlightenment rationalism; they were acknowledging themselves as recipients of the ancient belief in cosmogenesis as self-transformation.

scholarly journals Reading Resistances in Ralph Waldo Emerson and José Martí

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
ANDREW TAYLOR
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
The United States ◽  
Jose Marti ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Starting Point

This article takes as its starting point a consideration of the ways in which the ideological methodology of “New Americanist” criticism has closed off possibilities of reading that might choose to value ambiguity, contradiction, and excess – elements which militate against the discursive neatness of critique. In readings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and José Martí, I argue that resolutely politicized interpretations of Emerson fail to do justice to the unstable texture of his prose. In turn, Martí's writing about the United States is more uneven, surreal and excessive than a straightforward account of postcolonial resistance allows. Both Emerson and Martí exhibit a discursive flexibility that puts pressure on readings driven by inflexible ideological parameters seeking to position both men within frameworks of political quietism and postcolonial revolution respectively. I explore how the idea of revolution is imagined by Emerson in ways that run counter to our more conventional understanding of political transformation. To be sure, Martí's revolutionary actions in the cause of Cuban independence were tangible in ways that Emerson could never have countenanced for himself; nevertheless Emerson's understanding of resistance as differently located and performed provoked in Martí a high, and consistent, degree of sympathy.

scholarly journals Discursive Strategies and Politics of (Neo-)colonialism: A Textual Analysis of Saadat Hassan Manto’s Letters to Uncle Sam

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Inayat Ullah ◽  
Iman Aib
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Discursive Strategies ◽  
Research Findings

Colonialism has been such a multifaceted and complicated phenomenon that it often juxtaposed the culture of the colonized in simultaneous assimilation of, and resistance to, the culture of the colonizers. Embedded in the theory of Post colonialism, this research aims at carrying out a qualitative analysis of discursive strategies used in Saadat Hassan Manto’s literary work Letters to Uncle Sam from a neo-colonial perspective. It seeks to highlight the issues of globalization and the effects that it engendered upon the then newly-established independent state of Pakistan. The research findings conclude that globalization has resulted in putting an end to the so-called purity of culture. Manto, therefore, explicitly satirizes the super power (read the United States of America) for its hidden agendas of manipulating and exploiting the economic system as well as the cultural beliefs of Pakistan under the mask of prospering nations by building a global market to create a new means of dominance that works through consent.

Phenomenology

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Horst Ruthrof
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Jean Paul ◽  
Literary Work Of Art ◽  
Wolfgang Iser ◽  
Reception Aesthetics

Phenomenological literary theory has its roots in Edmund Husserl’s studies of the directional acts of consciousness in the first half of the 20th century and Roman Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art and The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, arguing that literary works can come into existence only in the act of reading. Under the influence of Martin Heidegger, phenomenology absorbed hermeneutic insights from Dilthey, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, as well as existentialist features, foremost from Jean-Paul Sartre, with Merleau-Ponty contributing a corporeal accent by reiterating Husserl’s distinction between the biophysical body (Körper) and the animate body (Leib). George Poulet of the Geneva school and the early Yale critics added an author-oriented form of literary criticism, while Ingarden’s work was taken up by the Konstanz school theorists Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss, the latter challenging ontological approaches by a historically anchored form of reception aesthetics. In the United States, the idea of phenomenology in literature has been prominently pursued by Maurice Natanson. At the same time, phenomenological literary theory is undergoing a revival in the wake of the neo-phenomenology of Hermann Schmitz, notably in such writings as Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature.

Rechy, John

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo L. Ortiz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
El Paso ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The United States ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
Border City ◽  
John Rechy ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Mixed Ethnicity

For half of his nearly sixty-year writing career, John Rechy was recognized primarily for his contributions to homosexual literature in the United States, even as from the beginning of that career he consistently cast his major protagonists as young men of mixed ethnicity, part-Mexican and part-Scottish, hailing like him from the border city of El Paso, Texas. As the fields of queer and US Latinx literary studies emerged in the 1980s, critics and scholars began to study the important intersectionalities of Rechy’s multiple identities more explicitly and intentionally, and that attention has been sustained ever since, leading to a significant rethinking of earlier responses to Rechy’s literary work, and a significant opening of the possible viable readerly approaches to Rechy’s entire writing career. Underrepresented in this matrix of critical approaches toward Rechy’s work that favor issues of identity, however, is a more direct, committed interest in describing the specifically literary, and aesthetic, aspects of Rechy’s contributions to the cultural traditions to which he matters, regardless of whether that interest foregrounds or not the understandably compelling factors of identity (ethnic, gender, sexual, class, geographic, etc.) that drive so much extant Rechy criticism. That critical project will surely benefit from a greater attention to, for example, Rechy’s experiments with form, style, and the materiality of print across the six decades of his career, very likely discovering there that those experiments can open alternative doors to understanding not only Rechy’s artistry, but also the unique qualities of his queerness, and the unique qualities of his latinidad.

Orientalism in Nineteenth-Century America

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael J. Altman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
The United States ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Oriental Mysticism

During the nineteenth century, Americans encountered Asia through a number of exchanges. Drawing on the work of Edward Said, this chapter surveys the development of American Orientalism across three areas: academic Orientalism, representative Orientalism, and Orientalist discourses of power. Academic Orientalism first developed in the United States as the work of British Orientalists in India filtered into the country. Later, Americans such as William D. Whitney placed American Orientalism on par with its European competitors. Meanwhile, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, imagined Asia as a land of Oriental mysticism and contemplation in contrast to American materialism and reason. Finally, the World’s Parliament of Religion in 1893 used representations of the Orient to bolster claims of American cultural supremacy. Through all of these examples, Orientalism collapsed the line between religion and race such that the Orient always represented racial and religious inferiority to white Christian America.

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