Download or read book The Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Myth of the Descent to the Underworld in Postmodern Literature written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by Modern American Literature. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld is devoted to the work of one of the most highly acclaimed writers of the post-World War II period of American literature, Thomas Pynchon. Through close readings and broad amplification, this book illustrates that the descent to the underworld is the single most important myth in Pynchon's work, conferring shape and significance upon each of his novels. This book also offers a unique perspective on postmodernism, which is characterized by ludic syncretism - the playful synthesis of myths from a variety of cultures. In addition, Thomas Pynchon and the Postmodern Mythology of the Underworld is a major contribution to the study of myth and literature as a whole, through the definition of what Evans Lansing Smith calls necrotypes - archetypal images catalyzed by the mythology of the underworld. This book employs an interdisciplinary methodology that will be of critical interest to scholars of comparative literature, mythology, and religion; to theorists and critics of modernism and postmodernism; to depth psychologists in the traditions of Jung, Freud, and James Hillman; as well as to the broad base of Pynchon enthusiasts and exponents of popular culture.
Download or read book James Merrill Postmodern Magus written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2008-09 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the unique voices in our century, James Merrill was known for his mastery of prosody; his ability to write books that were not just collected poems but unified works in which each individual poem contributed to the whole; and his astonishing evolution from the formalist lyric tradition that influenced his early work to the spiritual epics of his later career. Merrill's accomplishments were recognized with a Pulitzer Prize in 1977 for Divine Comedies and a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for The Changing Light at Sandover. In this meticulously researched, carefully argued work, Evans Lansing Smith argues that the nekyia, the circular Homeric narrative describing the descent into the underworld and reemergence in the same or similar place, confers shape and significance upon the entirety of James Merrill’s poetry. Smith illustrates how pervasive this myth is in Merrill’s work – not just in The Changing Light at Sandover, where it naturally serves as the central premise of the entire trilogy, but in all of the poet’s books, before and after that central text. By focusing on the details of versification and prosody, Smith demonstrates the ingenious fusion of form and content that distinguishes Merrill as a poet. Moving beyond purely literary interpretations of the poetry, Smith illuminates the numerous allusions to music, art, theology, philosophy, religion, and mythology found throughout Merrill’s work.
Download or read book The Descent to the Underworld in Literature Painting and Film 1895 1950 written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It focuses on `necrotypes', symbolic images typically found in association with descent to the underworld. It also takes an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, with chapters on the nekyia in film, science, psychology, and painting. It pays careful attention to the multicultural sources for the myth - Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, Celtic, Norse, and Native American.
Download or read book Figuring Poesis written by Evans Lansing Smith and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1997 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figuring Poesis focuses on the interrelations between myth and geometrical symbolism in literature since the end of the Second World War. Detailed readings of a wide range of works contextualize allusions to the myths of the apocalypse, the great goddess, alchemy, the labyrinth, and the descent to the underworld. The geometrical symbols that occur in conjunction with these myths serve as images of poesis and hermeneusis. The conclusion brings postmodernist paintings and architecture into the discussion, and develops an iconography of form.
Download or read book Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture written by Judith Fletcher and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture: The Backward Gaze examines a series of twentieth and twenty-first century fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the catabasis, the heroic journey to the underworld. Covering a range of genres - including novels, comics, and children's culture, by authors such as Elena Ferrante, Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, A. S. Byatt, Toni Morrison, and Anne Patchett - it reveals how an enduring fascination with life after death, and fantasies of accessing the world of the dead while we are still alive, manifest themselves in myriad and varied re-imaginings of the ancient descent myth. The volume begins with a detailed overview of the use of the myth by ancient authors such as Homer, Aristophanes, Vergil, and Ovid, before exploring the ways in which the narrative of a return trip to Hades by Odysseus, Aeneas, Orpheus, and Persephone can be manipulated by contemporary storytellers to fit themes of social marginality and alterity, postmodern rebellion, the position of female authors in the literary canon, and the dislocation endured by refugees, exiles, and diasporic populations. It also argues that citations of classical underworld stories can disrupt and challenge the literary canon by using media - such as comic books, children's culture, or rock music - not conventionally associated with high culture.
Download or read book Hell in Contemporary Literature written by Falconer Rachel Falconer and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath
Download or read book Myths of the Underworld in Contemporary Culture written by Judith Fletcher and published by Classical Presences. This book was released on 2019 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examining a range of contemporary fictional works that adapt Greco-Roman myths of the descent into the underworld, from novels and comics to children's culture, this volume reveals the ways in which the catabasis narrative can be manipulated by storytellers to reflect upon postmodern culture, feminist critiques, and postcolonial appropriations.
Download or read book The Literature of Hell written by Margaret Kean and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays considering the representation and perception of hell in a variety of texts.
Download or read book Metropolis on the Styx written by David L. Pike and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Metropolis on the Styx,David L. Pike considers how underground spaces and their many myths have organized ways of seeing, thinking about, and living in the modern city. Expanding on the cultural history of underground construction in his acclaimed previous book, Subterranean Cities, Pike details the emergence of a vertical city in the imagination of nineteenth-century Paris and London, a city overseen by hosts of devils and undermined by subterranean villains, a city whose ground level was replete with passages between above and below. Metropolis on the Styx brings together a rich variety of visual and written sources ranging from pulp mysteries and movie serials to the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and the novels of Marcel Proust, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Elinor Glyn to the broadsheets and ephemera of everyday urban life. From these materials, Pike conjures a working theory of modern underground space that explains why our notions about urban environments remain essentially nineteenth-century in character, even though cities themselves have since changed almost beyond recognition.Highly original in subject matter, methodology, and conclusions, Metropolis on the Styx synthesizes a number of critical approaches, periods of study, and disciplines in the analysis of a single category of space—the underground. Pike studies the built environments and the textual and visual ephemera (including little-known or unknown archival material) of Paris, London, and other cities in conjunction with canonical modern literature and art. This book integrates a rich visual component—photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined subterranean spaces—into the fabric of the argument.
Download or read book A New Gnosis written by David M. Odorisio and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-01-01 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Superhero phenomena exploded into 20th- and 21st-century popular culture by way of the visual medium of comic books. In an increasingly secular (yet spiritual) culture that has largely renounced “the gods” (and even religion), what does the return of the superhero through our own pop cultural mythologies say to us—or even about us? This collection of essays from leading and up-and-coming scholars in the fields of comparative mythology and depth psychology considers the return of the superhero as representative of our own unique emergent modern mythology: a wildly diverse pantheon that reflects back to us our most far-reaching hopes and (im)possible (super)human desires. In placing the interpretive tools of comparative mythology and depth psychology alongside the comic book phenomenon, a super-powered palette emerges that unveils the hidden potential of modern readers’ own heightened imaginations. The essays in this anthology examine select comic book and superhero characters from the “Silver Age” 1960s through contemporary 21st-century adaptations and innovations, as readers are invited to discover and uncover what the (re)emergence of these perennial gods and goddesses have to say about our own secret super selves today.
Download or read book Subterranean Space in Contemporary Mexico City Literature written by Liesbeth François and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-05 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book studies the role of subterranean spaces in literary works about Mexico City. It analyzes how underground spaces such as the subway, the sewage system, tunnels, crypts, and the subsoil itself relate to the whole of the city in a body of works published after 1985, the year of the deadliest earthquake in the capital’s history. The texts belong to the most important genres in urban literature (the novel, the short story, and the crónica) and demonstrate the crucial role played by the underground in contemporary imaginings of the megalopolis, as it condenses and confronts the tensions that run through them. This central idea is developed through four analytical chapters focusing on the political, ecological, historical, and aesthetic dimension of subterranean imaginaries.
Download or read book The Mouse and the Myth written by Dorene Koehler and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-24 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upholds “a Disney vacation as a religious experience . . . [offers] insightful arguments relating to the nature of play as well as Nietzschean philosophy” (Reading Religion). Rituals mark significant moments in our lives—perhaps none more significant than moments of lightheartedness, joy, and play. Rituals of play are among the most sacred of any of the rites in which humanity may engage. Although we may fail to recognize them, they are always present in culture, providing a kind of psychological release for their participants, child and adult alike. Disneyland is an example of the kind of container necessary for the construction of rituals of play. This work explores the original Disney theme park in Anaheim as a temple cult. It challenges the disciplines of mythological studies, religious studies, film studies, and depth psychology to broaden traditional definitions of the kind of cultural apparatus that constitute temple culture and ritual. It does so by suggesting that Hollywood’s entertainment industry has developed a platform for mythic ritual. After setting the ritualized “stage,” this book turns to the practices in Disneyland proper, analyzing the patron’s traditions within the framework of the park and beyond. It explores Disneyland’s spectacles, through selected shows and parades, and concludes with an exploration of the park’s participation in ritual renewal. “There is much to commend in Koehler’s study . . . Surely, her work should encourage others to examine myth construction and sacred-secular rituals in popular culture.”—H-Celebration
Download or read book British Postmodern Fiction written by Theo d'. Haen and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 1993 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hell in Contemporary Literature written by Rachel Falconer and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean when people use the word 'Hell' to convey the horror of an actual, personal or historical experience? Now available in paperback, this book explores the idea that modern, Western secular cultures have retained a belief in the concept of Hell as an event or experience of endless or unjust suffering. In the contemporary period, the descent to Hell has come to represent the means of recovering - or discovering - selfhood. In exploring these ideas, this book discusses descent journeys in Holocaust testimony and fiction, memoirs of mental illness, and feminist, postmodern and postcolonial narratives written after 1945. A wide range of texts are discussed, including writing by Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, Alasdair Gray, and Salman Rushdie, and films such as Coppola's Apocalypse Now and the Matrix trilogy. Drawing on theoretical writing by Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida, Judith Butler, David Harvey and Paul Ricoeur, the book addresses such broader theoretical issues as: narration and identity; the ethics of the subject; trauma and memory; descent as sexual or political dissent; the interrelation of realism and fantasy; and Occidentalism and Orientalism.Key Features*Defines and discusses what constitutes Hell in contemporary secular Western cultures*Relates ideas from psychoanalysis to literary traditions ranging from Virgil and Dante to the present*Explores the concept of Hell in relation to crises in Western thought and identity. e.g. distortions of global capitalism, mental illness, war trauma and incarceration*Explains the significance of this narrative tradition of a 'descent to hell' in the immediate political context of 9/11 and its aftermath
Download or read book Postmodern Canadian Fiction and the Rhetoric of Authority written by Glenn Deer and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1994 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Criticism that takes an ideological approach to Canadian writing is scarce; political-rhetorical studies are even more uncommon. In this original approach to postwar Canadian fiction Glenn Deer presents provocative readings of ideologies as well as experiments with authorial stances.
