V--2nd, Chapter 11 p.324 A room is all that is the case
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Sat Nov 20 09:39:45 CST 2010
That Faust, and Mann's influence here should not underestimated, but
that Faust was a near obsession of the American Romantic imagination,
and that Mann, Spengler, and the machine in the garden Yanks, most
notably Melville, who, of course, begins with His Confessions of a Boy
Sailor and proceeds to the Most Faustian Figure in American
Literature, and not, merely because Ahab makes a deal with the Devil,
for Tom Walker (Irving) and Goodman & Dimsdale
(Hawthorne)...countless others had done so, but that Ahab is the
Faustian plunge, first round the world from the West to the South Seas
and then East, then into it. It is Ahab who is the most Faustian, who,
like Milton's Satan (a model for Ahab)and like the Kingly-common of
Jacksonian Democracy and Colonial boundless adventure (Andrew Jackson
& John Jacob Astor & Co.) expands the West on Iron Rails though the
pasteboard mask and into the depths of Hell and discovers Knowledge is
Power and Mystery is a tool of Rhetorical domination in the apparent
subjugation of Nature and the Other.
On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 10:07 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Kazin's biographical criticism of Fitz are the crack (as Surfer's say).
> An American Confession
> by Alfred Kazin
> http://fitzgerald.narod.ru/critics-eng/kazin-confession.html
>
> Alice wrote, > The biographical speculations seem a waste.<
>
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