AtD-related: The aesthetic of danger in "The Princess Casamassima" by Henry James

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

"'Rr Rff-rff Rr-rr-r/ff/-rrf-rrf,' replied Pugnax without looking up, 
which Darby, having like the others in the crew got used to Pugnax's 
voice---easier, really, than some of the regional American accents the 
boys heard in their travels---now interpreted as, '/The Princess 
Casamassima/.'" (pp. 5-6)

I know little about Henry James and haven't read the book in question. 
At the Pynchon Wiki - a very useful source, btw - there is the following 
information (including a quote from Mark):

http://against-the-day.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Princess_Casamassima,_The 


Half an hour ago, I read an article by a Frankfurt Amerikanist named 
Johannes Völz, whose book "The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction 
and the Uses of Threat" will be published at CUP in autumn, on angst in 
US literature. There it says:

 > Auch Henry James und Willa Cather – beide Meister des Romans an der 
Schwelle zwischen Realismus und Modernismus – entwickeln in Werken wie 
„Die Prinzessin Casamassima“ (1886) und „Im Haus des Professors“ (1926) 
eine Ästhetik der Gefahr, in der Angst weder beruhigt werden kann, noch 
zu passiver Machtlosigkeit führt, sondern vielmehr ermöglicht, in der 
bedrohlichen Unübersichtlichkeit der Welt Ressourcen der eigenen 
Entfaltung zu erkennen. <

http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/themen/amerikaner-und-ihre-nationale-sicherheit-14160344.html

In my ad-hoc-translation: "Also Henry James and Willa Cather - both 
masters of the novel at the threshold between realism and modernism - 
develop in works like 'The Princess Casamassima' (1886) and 'The 
Professor's House' (1926) [Wikipedia says 1925 - kfl] an aesthetic of 
danger, in which angst can neither be smoothed nor leads to passive 
powerlessness yet rather enables to recognize in the menacing complexity 
of the world the resources of one's own unfolding."

Isn't this - the recognition that the world's menacing complexity is 
actually the resource of one's own unfolding - a key experience of the 
/Inconvenience/'s crew? It's what makes them fly toward grace.


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