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

[ish mailian]

Global/local: cultural production and the transnational imaginary



https://www.dukeupress.edu/global-local

On Sat, Jan 23, 2016 at 5:06 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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