
Poetics of the Americas
Race, Founding, Textuality
Louisiana State University Press
Will be published approx. on 30. August 1997
Book
Paperback/Softback
277 pages
978-0-8071-2181-8 (ISBN)
Description
Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled ""Intertextuality and civilisation in the Americas,"" this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields. Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilisations.
Addressing themes such as the Moses story in modern literature, the relation between power and cultural encounter, the first African-American novel, and the foundations of Latin American literature and the New World baroque, the contributors link multiculturalism with intertextuality, crossing disciplinary, national, linguistic, and hemispheric boundaries. The volume closes with Jefferson Humphries' deft translation of a poem by Edouard Glissant, a featured speaker at the conference whose writings bear a special relation to the subject of intertextuality.
Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.
Addressing themes such as the Moses story in modern literature, the relation between power and cultural encounter, the first African-American novel, and the foundations of Latin American literature and the New World baroque, the contributors link multiculturalism with intertextuality, crossing disciplinary, national, linguistic, and hemispheric boundaries. The volume closes with Jefferson Humphries' deft translation of a poem by Edouard Glissant, a featured speaker at the conference whose writings bear a special relation to the subject of intertextuality.
Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding. An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Baton Rouge
United States
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 149 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
333 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-8071-2181-8 (9780807121818)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Bainard Cowan is professor of English at Louisiana State University and the author of Exiled Waters: ""Moby-Dick"" and the Crisis of Allegory.
Jefferson Humphries is professor of French, English, and comparative literature at Louisiana State University and author of, among other works, The Otherness Within: Gnostic Readings in Marcel Proust, Flannery O'Connor, and Francois Villon and Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South Since Poe.
Jefferson Humphries is professor of French, English, and comparative literature at Louisiana State University and author of, among other works, The Otherness Within: Gnostic Readings in Marcel Proust, Flannery O'Connor, and Francois Villon and Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South Since Poe.