''There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes..."

[ish mailian]

The Global Remapping of American Literature
Paul Giles


http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9323.html

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 5:05 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Beautiful Democracy
>
> AESTHETICS AND ANARCHY IN A GLOBAL ERA
> RUSS CASTRONOVO
>
> Beautiful Democracy explores the intersection of beauty and violence
> by examining university lectures and course materials on aesthetics
> from a century ago along with riots, acts of domestic terrorism, magic
> lantern exhibitions, and other public spectacles. Philosophical
> aesthetics, realist novels, urban photography, and black periodicals,
> Castronovo argues, inspired and instigated all sorts of collective
> social endeavors, from the progressive nature of tenement reform to
> the horrors of lynching. Discussing Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois,
> Charlie Chaplin, William Dean Howells, and Riis as aesthetic theorists
> in the company of Kant and Schiller, Beautiful Democracy ultimately
> suggests that the distance separating academic thinking and popular
> wisdom about social transformation is narrower than we generally
> suppose.
>
> On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 5:01 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ''There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves
>> as Indian isles by coral reefs -- commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right
>> and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the
>> battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes,
>> which in a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds
>> of water-gazers there.
>>
>> ''Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears
>> Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you
>> see?''
>>
>>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>> American Literary Regionalism in a Global Age
>>
>> by Philip Joseph
>>
>> In this distinctive book, Philip Joseph considers how regional literature
>> can remain relevant in a modern global community. Why, he asks, should we
>> continue to read regionalist fiction in an age of expanding international
>> communications and increasing nonlocal forms of affiliation? With this
>> question as a guide, Joseph places the regionalist tradition of the late
>> nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the center of a contemporary
>> conversation about community.
>>
>> Part of the challenge, Joseph shows, is to distinguish between versions of
>> regionalism that speak nostalgically to modern readers and those that might
>> enter actively into a more progressive collective dialogue. Examining the
>> works of well-known writers including Hamlin Garland, Abraham Cahan, Willa
>> Cather, Zora Neale Hurston, and William Faulkner, Joseph argues that these
>> regionalist authors share a vision of local communities in open discourse
>> with the external world—capable of shaping public thought and policy and
>> also of benefiting from the knowledge and experiences of outsiders. Their
>> fiction depicts a range of localities, from Jewish American neighborhoods
>> and midwest farming communities to southern African American towns and
>> southwestern mixed-race parishes. Their characters are often associated with
>> the literary-artistic process, a method stressing open-ended critique
>> that—unlike journalistic, philosophical, or legal processes—ensures open
>> dialogue.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>> “Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide
>> under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath
>> the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and
>> beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished
>> shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal
>> cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying
>> on eternal war since the world began.
>>
>> Consider all this; and then turn to the green, gentle, and most docile
>> earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a
>> strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean
>> surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular
>> Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the
>> half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst
>> never return!”
>>
>>
>> ― Herman Melville, Moby Dick
>>
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l