Search

More often associated with hedonism and cheap thrills than with notions of alienation and suffering, Beat literature has rarely been envisaged from the perspective of the paradoxical dynamics at play in the writings. What this book evidences is that the sacrosanct quest for transcendence staged by Kerouac and by Ginsberg is underpinned, primarily, by a trope of nullification that acts as a menace for the self. This tropism for destruction and death is not only emblematic of their works, it is also used as a literary strategy that seeks to conquer the fear of self-annihilation through the writing itself. It is precisely this interplay—approached through an Existentialism that simultaneously converges upon the Transcendentalist legacy of Beat writing—which probes the paradoxical dimension of the texts, enabling the mythological figure of Thanatos to take centre stage. The critical synergy of the book, brought about by relating American literature and culture to European thought, enables in-depth analyses of a selection of novels and poems, grasped through their aesthetic, ontological and historical dimensions. Shedding new light on the literary strategies of two widely misunderstood American writers of the twentieth century, this captivating study into the drives for self-destruction and self-liberation encapsulated by Kerouac and Ginsberg sets out to reinvent the well-worn definition of ‘Beat'through its original approach—an essential critical piece for all those interested in the American counterculture.

HOW THE LITERATURE WE LOVE CONVEYS THE AWAKENING WE SEEK Suppose we could read Hemingway as haiku... learn mindfulness from Virginia Woolf and liberation from Frederick Douglass... see Dickinson and Whitman as buddhas of poetry, and Huck Finn and Gatsby as seekers of the infinite... discover enlightenment teachings in Macbeth, The Catcher in the Rye, Moby-Dick, and The Bluest Eye. Some of us were lucky enough to have one passionate, funny, inspiring English teacher who helped us fall in love with books. Add a lifetime of teaching Dharma — authentic, traditional approaches to meditation and awakening — and you get award-winning author Dean Sluyter. With droll humor and irreverent wisdom, he unpacks the Dharma of more than twenty major writers, from William Blake to Dr. Seuss, inspiring readers to deepen their own spiritual life and see literature in a fresh, new way: as a path of awakening.

This book follows in the footsteps of great thinkers on human happiness, from the Hebrew Bible, through Greek philosophy, medieval mysticism, early modern philosophy, 19th century transcendentalism, the 20th century Harlem Renaissance and early Hebrew poetry, to contemporary writings. As active participators in the ongoing process of creation, we can amend the world and make it a stable, safe place for all. This can be done through curiosity and learning, connecting with the divine and nature, activism for the oneness of all, or by the simple awareness of our significant standing as individuals and as a society in a unique and wonderful system of humanity and the divine. The text includes primary sources on happiness in their original ancient languages: Aramaic, Hebrew and Greek, along with their scholarly translations into English.

Glenn Hughes examines the ways in which six literary modernists—Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, and Bob Dylan—have explored the human relationship to a transcendent mystery of meaning. Hughes argues that visions of transcendence are, perhaps surprisingly, a significant feature in modernist literature, and that these authors'works account for many of the options for interpreting what transcendent reality might be. This work is unique in its extended focus, in a comparative study spanning a century, on the persistence and centrality in modernist literature of the struggle to understand and articulate the dependence of human meaning on the mystery of transcendent meaning. Hughes shows us that each of these authors is a mystic in his or her way, and that none are tempted by the modern inclination to suppose that meaning originates with human beings. Together, they address one of the most difficult and important challenges of modern literature: how to be a mystic in modernity.

Though both Willa Cather and E. M. Forster have been alternately praised as progressives and criticized as conservatives, the novels of both writers embody the tenets of liberal humanism, while at the same time reflecting the tensions associated with modernism (though both of these terms have come under intense critical scrutiny in recent years.) And while a few critics have offered brief comparisons of individual works or particular tendencies of Cather and Forster, none has provided the systematic comparative analysis of the relationship between liberal humanist/modernist tensions and the search for transcendence in their work that this book offers. The principal aims of the present study are to locate the imagined alternatives to the'lamentable present'embodied in the novels of both writers and to explore how literature and the arts might assist in transcending the deficiencies and disunities of life in the modern era.

Neuroscience tells us that the brain is nothing but a metaphor machine capable of extracting meaning from a chaotic reality. Following Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin and Žižek, a theory of violence can be established according to which violence is a reaction on the part of the individual to the frustration generated by having her metaphor machine suppressed by the mythic narrative of the Law. In opposition to mythic violence, Benjamin posits the justice of divine violence. Divine justice is an excess of life, the very uniqueness of the metaphor machine. The individual is affected by a difficulty to communicate her metaphor machine to the Other, as if it were inexpressible. This work explores how the characters in the works of David Foster Wallace, Cormac MacCarthy, J. G. Ballard, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Maurice G. Dantec and China Mieville suffer from these limits of language and the constrictions of the Law. Through violence they look for their individual Voice, intended as their will-to-say, the ‘pure taking place of language'(Agamben). In their struggle to be heard these characters are however deaf to the Voice of the Other. There is a need for a new Ethics of Narratives expressed through an Epic of the Voice founded on the will-to-listen, along the lines of the concept of the posthuman theorized by Rosi Braidotti. Here subjectivity is a process of constant autopoiesis dependent on the relationship the individual has with the Other and the environment around her, that is, in the reciprocal will-to-say and will-to-listen. Human beings can meet in the taking-place of language, in the place before the suppressive language of the Law is even born, in a meeting of Voices.

The exciting new book argues for a renewed emphasis on humanism--contrary to the trend of post-humanism, or what Neema Parvini calls'the anti-humanism'of the last several decades of literary and theoretical scholarship. In this trail-blazing study, Michael Bryson argues for this renewal of perspective by covering literature written in different languages, times, and places, calling for a return to a humanism, which focuses on literary characters and their psychological and existential struggles—not struggles of competition, but of connection, the struggles of fragmented, incomplete individuals for integration, wholeness, and unity.

In unserer säkularisierten Welt sind Wissenschafts- und Fortschrittsglaube scheinbar an die Stelle von Transzendenz und Spiritualität getreten. Dennoch ist die enge Verflechtung von Literatur und Religion evident, und zwar in Form von ethischen, anthropologischen und existenziellen Diskursen. „Wir wollen aus unserer Welt heraus“, lässt Friedrich Glauser (1896–1938) eine seiner Figuren sagen. Wenn die Grenzen der alltäglichen Endlichkeit zum Gefängnis werden, kommt das metaphysische Abenteuer einem Befreiungsschlag gleich, der den Wirklichkeitsbereich des wissenschaftlich Belegten und des technisch Machbaren zu überschreiten vermag. Charlott Frenzel zeigt, wie es Glauser u. a. in der schlichten Einkleidung des Kriminalromans eindrucksvoll gelingt wiederzugewinnen, was der modernen Welt abhandengekommen, ja zum Ärgernis geworden ist: den Bezug auf das Göttliche, auf Transzendenz.

What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for humans to form an intimate relation with particular sites or dwelling places on earth? In ancient Rome, the notion of a locale's genius loci signaled recognition of its enchanted, enspirited identity. But in a digitalized America of unprecedented mobility can place still matter as seed ground for the soul? Such questions have been broached by ecocritics concerned with how place-inflected experience figures in literature, and by theologians concerned with ecotheology and ecospirituality. This book offers a uniquely integrative perspective, informed by a theological phenomenology of place that takes fuller account of the spiritualities associated with built environments than ecocriticism typically does. Spirits of Place blends theological and cultural analysis with personal reflection, while focusing on the multi-layered witness presented by American literature. John Gatta's interpretive readings range across texts by an array of canonical as well as lesser-known writers. Along the way, it addresses such themes as the religious implications of localism vs. globalism; the diverse spiritualities associated with long-term residency, resettlement, and pilgrimage; why some sites seem more hallowed than others; and how the creative spirit of Imagination figures in place-identified perceptions of the numinous. Whether in Christian or other religious terms, no discrete place matters absolutely. Yet this study demonstrates how and why hallowed geography and the sacramentality of place have mattered throughout our cultural history.

Africana literary critic and cultural theory scholar, Christel N. Temple, whose groundbreaking books, Literary Pan-Africanism: History, Contexts, and Criticism (2005) and Literary Spaces: Introduction to Comparative Black Literature (2007),have been some of the most influential models of contemporary Africana Studies-based literary criticism, responds to the demand for a core disciplinary source that comprehensively defines and models literary praxis from the vantage point of Africana Studies. This highly anticipated seminal study finally institutionalizes the discipline's literary enterprise. Framing the concept of transcendence, she covers over a dozen traditional African American works in an original and thought-provoking analysis that places canonical approaches in enlightened discourse with Africana studies reader-response priorities. This study makes traditional literature come alive in conversation with topics of masculinity, womanism, Black Lives Matter, humor, Pan-Africanism, transnationalism, worldview, the subject place of Africa, cultural mythology, hero dynamics, Black psychology, demographics, history, Black liberation theology, eulogy, cultural memory, Afro-futurism, the Kemetic principle of Maat, social justice, rap and hip hop, Diaspora, and performance.Scholars now have a focused Africana Studies text—for both introductory and advanced literature courses—to capture the power of the African American literary canon while modeling the most dynamic practical applications of humanities-to-social science practices.

This study examines Tennyson's portrayals of the erotic and creative impulses, reading the poet's ubiquitous lover-artists as tropes that figure the desire for transcending the state of being human, a condition of personal fragmentation and limited knowledge. Ostensibly seeking to fulfill erotic wishes, construct utopias, or create grand artistic works, Tennyson's characters engage in a fundamentally spiritual quest, yearning to divine desire: to eternalize the fulfilment of their deepest wishes. Freud revealed how Victorians sublimated sexual desire into religious impulse. This book demonstrates, however, the remarkable way in which Tennyson's poems transact the opposing projection, transfiguring spiritual desire into erotic art. Brilliantly negotiating a middle ground between scientific skepticism and reactionary religiosity, his vastly popular poems suggest that fulfilment of'the wish too strong for words to name'lies in a sacramentality: only as means do art and eros allow transport beyond fragmentation. At a deep level, the poems conclude that language itself brokers transcendence through its very brokenness.

Northrop Frye and American Fiction challenges recent interpretations of American fiction as a secular pursuit that long ago abandoned religious faith and the idea of transcendent experiences. Inspired by recent philosophical thinking on post-secularism and by Northrop Frye's theorizing on the connections between the Bible and the development of Western literature, Claude Le Fustec presents insightful readings of the presence of transcendence and biblical imagination in canonical novels by American writers ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Toni Morrison.Examining these novels through the lens of Frye's ambitious account of literature's transcendent, or kerygmatic power, Le Fustec argues that American fiction has always contained the seeds of a rejection of radical skepticism and a return to spiritual experience. Beyond an insightful analysis of Frye's ideas, Northrop Frye and American Fiction is powerful testimony of their continued interpretive potential.

The present “turn to religion” has also meant a rekindled interest in transcendence, a concept once deemed a relic of a metaphysical past. This volume approaches transcendence from a particular perspective: that of language and literature seen as a matrix of expression of transcendence and its interplay of immanence. The essays in this volume probe the poetic and literary devices through which transcendence has been solicited, evoked, and generated. This has also meant revisiting the long Christian tradition, not simply to rehabilitate it but as an indispensable source for present writing and thinking.“Thus, ultimately, the present anthology offers no apology for traditional views of transcendence and religious experience but presents original contributions to the poetics of transcendence that are sensitive to religious as well as a-religious languages in literature. It is argued that, in order to rethink meanings and the value of transcendence, rigorous ontological philosophy must once again face up to the imaginative potential of poetics.” (From the Introduction)

Modernist Mythopoeia argues that the experimental modernist form of mythopoeia was directed towards expressing a range of metaphysical perspectives that fall between material secularism and dogmatic religion. The book is a timely addition to the'post-secular'debate as well as to the'return of religion'in modernist studies.

Political firebrand, tireless reformer, champion of the avant-garde, Octave Mirbeau embraced his role as disturber of the peace. Inspired by Kropotkin and Dostoyevsky, Mirbeau became the social conscience of the era, speaking in a clear voice to impugn capitalist ideology, to defend the cause of the worker, the child, the pauper, the prostitute, and the soldier sacrificed as cannon fodder.Mirbeau's critiques of society seethe with indictments of indoctrinating agencies: the family, which stifled the child's freedom and expressive creativity, the school, which besotted students with the aridity of its curriculum, the army, which privileged patriotism over the sanctity of life, the church, which sanctified suffering, perverted instinct, and alienated the faithful from nature. Yet Mirbeau shared the admiration of fin-de-siècle zealots for the pariahs, tramps, and beggars rehabilitated in the Scripture. The personal trials of the misbegotten became an insignia of election. Those marginalized by society experienced damnation here below yet had glimpses of the bliss they hoped might await them somewhere higher. Yet it was not just in the less fortunate that Mirbeau sought evidence of the supra-rational. Generally neglected by critics, Mirbeau's interest in the unknown and the inexpressible informed virtually all of his writing and helped shape his views on artistic work and political struggle. For this reason, this study sets out to analyze the spiritual politics of the author. As Mirbeau was becoming involved in the escalating controversy over the Dreyfus case and cementing his alliance with prominent anarchists, he was also undergoing a uniquely personal spiritual evolution. This volume breaks new ground, exploring the author's secular metaphysic, charting his investigation of the spiritually transfiguring experience that redeems man's desolate existence. What begins as Mirbeau's indictment of Catholicism's death-glorifying ethos, his attempt to find refuge from life's pain in the blessedness of Nirvana, becomes a pursuit of mystical diffusion into the community of others. Showing how Mirbeau controverts the existence of a Christian god, this study argues that Mirbeau never abandons his exploration of life's mysteries, apprehensions of the infinite that come from a refinement of his art and an identification with his brothers.

The nine contributors to this collection examine rhetorician Kenneth Burke's understanding of transcendence, applying it to a wide range of social and political issues, including racial and presidential politics.

This book is made up of a set of innovative close readings and meditations on the significance of the modes and logics of separation in the thinking of aesthetic modernity. Separation is defined in Hegelian and psychoanalytic terms as psychic processes in the formation of identity that necessarily entail self-division and estrangement in the emergence of subjectivity and social identity. This phenomenon, called subjection, has been at the core of psychoanalytic readings since the work of Melanie Klein. The works under consideration in the volume include material by W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Ralph Ellison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Paul Celan, as well as the sorrow songs/Negro Spirituals. In each case the moment of passivity and modes of separation are approached as sites of inescapable conflict. The varying psychic, ethical, and political tensions underwriting this experience are examined in detail for each case study.

This book is a collection of wonderful and thoughtful essays that explore the theme of beautiful sanctuaries in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century European literature. The book focuses especially on selected works by Percy Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Henrik Ibsen, and James Hilton. These sanctuaries of light, natural beauty, and tranquility comfort, nurture, and soothe the heart, mind, and soul of the individual, and inspire creative expression.

Thomas Brennan finds roots of the'sensibility of trauma'by returning to the work of Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Eliot. By reading these poets of mourning through the framework of trauma, Brennan reflects on our traumatized moment and weighs two potential responses - the fantasy of transcendence and the ethic of trust.

Despite nearly universal critical acclaim for Robert Penn Warren's later poetry, much about this large body of work remains unexplored, especially the psychological sources of these poems'remarkable energy. In this groundbreaking work, Warren scholar Joseph R. Millichap takes advantage of current research on developmental psychology, gerontology, and end-of-life studies to offer provocative new readings of Warren's later poems, which he defines as those published after Audubon: A Vision (1969). In these often intricate poems, Millichap sees something like an autobiographical epic focused on the process of aging, the inevitability of death, and the possibility of transcendence. Thus Warren's later poetry reviews an individual life seen whole, contemplates mortality and dissolution, and aspires to the literary sublime.Millichap locates the beginning of Warren's late period in the extraordinary collection Or Else: Poem/Poems 1968--1974, basing his contention on the book's complex, indeed obsessive sequencing of new, previously published, and previously collected poems unified by themes of time, memory, age, and death. Millichap offers innovative readings of Or Else and Warren's five other late gatherings of poems -- Can I See Arcturus from Where I Stand?: Poems 1975; Now and Then: Poems 1976--1978, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Being Here: Poetry 1977--1980; Rumor Verified: Poems 1979--1980; and Altitudes and Extensions 1980--1984. Among the autobiographical elements Millichap brings into his careful readings are Warren's loneliness in these later years, especially after the deaths of family members and friends; his alternating feelings of personal satisfaction and emptiness toward his literary achievements; and his sense of the power, and at times the impotence, of memory. Millichap's analysis explores how Warren often returned to images and themes of his earlier poems, especially those involving youth and midlife, with the new perspective given by advancing age and time's passage. Millichap also relates Warren's work to that of other poets who have dealt profoundly with memory and age, including Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and, at times, John Milton, William Wordsworth, and the whole English and American nineteenth-century Romantic tradition.An epilogue traces Warren's changing reputation as a poet from the publication of his last volume in 1985 through his death in 1989 and the centennial of his birth in 2005, concluding persuasively that the finest of all of Warren's literary efforts can be found in his later poetry, concerned as it is with the work of aging and the quest for transcendence.

In Transcendence, thinkers from John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Kevin Hart, to Thomas Carlson, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Marion have come together to create the definitive analysis of this key concept in modern theological and philosophical thought.