Download or read book The Preparation of the Novel written by Roland Barthes and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical juncture in the career of Roland Barthes, in which he declared the intention, deeply felt, to write a novel. Unfolding over the course of two years, Barthes engaged in a unique pedagogical experiment: he combined teaching and writing to "simulate" the trial of novel-writing, exploring every step of the creative process along the way. Barthes's lectures move from the desire to write to the actual decision making, planning, and material act of producing a novel. He meets the difficulty of transitioning from short, concise notations (exemplified by his favorite literary form, haiku) to longer, uninterrupted flows of narrative, and he encounters a number of setbacks. Barthes takes solace in a diverse group of writers, including Dante, whose La Vita Nuova was similarly inspired by the death of a loved one, and he turns to classical philosophy, Taoism, and the works of François-René Chateaubriand, Gustave Flaubert, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust. This book uniquely includes eight elliptical plans for Barthes's unwritten novel, which he titled Vita Nova, and lecture notes that sketch the critic's views on photography. Following on The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977-1978) and a third forthcoming collection of Barthes lectures, this volume provides an intensely personal account of the labor and love of writing.
Download or read book Dante and the Book of the Cosmos written by John G. Demaray and published by American Philosophical Society. This book was released on 1987 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a print on demand publication.
Download or read book The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages written by Penelope Reed Doob and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient and medieval labyrinths embody paradox, according to Penelope Reed Doob. Their structure allows a double perspective—the baffling, fragmented prospect confronting the maze-treader within, and the comprehensive vision available to those without. Mazes simultaneously assert order and chaos, artistry and confusion, articulated clarity and bewildering complexity, perfected pattern and hesitant process. In this handsomely illustrated book, Doob reconstructs from a variety of literary and visual sources the idea of the labyrinth from the classical period through the Middle Ages. Doob first examines several complementary traditions of the maze topos, showing how ancient historical and geographical writings generate metaphors in which the labyrinth signifies admirable complexity, while poetic texts tend to suggest that the labyrinth is a sign of moral duplicity. She then describes two common models of the labyrinth and explores their formal implications: the unicursal model, with no false turnings, found almost universally in the visual arts; and the multicursal model, with blind alleys and dead ends, characteristic of literary texts. This paradigmatic clash between the labyrinths of art and of literature becomes a key to the metaphorical potential of the maze, as Doob's examination of a vast array of materials from the classical period through the Middle Ages suggests. She concludes with linked readings of four "labyrinths of words": Virgil's Aeneid, Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Chaucer's House of Fame, each of which plays with and transforms received ideas of the labyrinth as well as reflecting and responding to aspects of the texts that influenced it. Doob not only provides fresh theoretical and historical perspectives on the labyrinth tradition, but also portrays a complex medieval aesthetic that helps us to approach structurally elaborate early works. Readers in such fields as Classical literature, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, comparative literature, literary theory, art history, and intellectual history will welcome this wide-ranging and illuminating book.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Excess written by Allen S. Weiss and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1989-01-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the reciprocal and often transgressive relations between rhetorical figures and libidinal activity. The works of Nietzsche, Artaud, Bataille, Klossowski, and Sade are reconsidered in light of the modernist and postmodernist problematics of simulacra, fascination, sublimation and desublimation, perversion, deconstruction, and libidinal economies. Reading across the boundaries of philosophy, art history, comparative literature, film studies, and psychoanalytic theory, this work reveals the manner in which theoretical discourse is imbued with passional motivations, and, conversely, shows how the passions are structured according to logical and rhetorical figures. In offering specific rereadings of several key figures of our modernist tradition, this work helps identify the sources of the 'postmodern condition.' It thus provides a theoretical foundation for contemporary art and literary criticism--especially of those works to be found at the margins of our culture.
Download or read book The Cruft of Fiction written by David Letzler and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title What is the strange appeal of big books? The mega-novel, a genre of erudite tomes with encyclopedic scope, has attracted wildly varied responses, from fanatical devotion to trenchant criticism. Looking at intimidating mega-novel masterpieces from The Making of Americans to 2666, David Letzler explores reader responses to all the seemingly random, irrelevant, pointless, and derailing elements that comprise these mega-novels, elements that he labels "cruft" after the computer science term for junk code. In The Cruft of Fiction, Letzler suggests that these books are useful tools to help us understand the relationship between reading and attention. While mega-novel text is often intricately meaningful or experimental, sometimes it is just excessive and pointless. On the other hand, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, turns out to be quite important. Letzler posits that this cruft requires readers to develop a sophisticated method of attentional modulation, allowing one to subtly distinguish between text requiring focused attention and text that must be skimmed or even skipped to avoid processing failures. The Cruft of Fiction shows how the attentional maturation prompted by reading mega-novels can help manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes contemporary life.
Download or read book Gods of Love and Ecstasy written by Alain Daniélou and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992-05-01 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shiva and Dionysus are the Hindu and Greek gods of magical power, intoxication, ecstatic sexuality, and transcendence who initiate us into communion with the creative forces of life. Revealing the earliest sources of the traditions of Shiva and Dionysus, Alain Danielou reconstructs the fabric of our ancient relationship with creation, vividly relating practices that were observed from the Indus Valley to the coasts of Portugal at least six thousand years ago.
Download or read book Catalog of Copyright Entries Third Series written by Library of Congress. Copyright Office and published by Copyright Office, Library of Congress. This book was released on 1976 with total page 1406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Mazing of the Text written by Margaret M. Bolovan and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1999 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry that employs images and structures of the labyrinth simultaneously involves the poet's contemplative wanderings or deeper descents into self while searching for meaning. As a mythic symbol, the labyrinth also extends outside of any individual work, necessitating intertextual analysis in the quest to unravel the labyrinthine threads left in the «mille longs détours» of French poetic discourse. A Mazing of the Text explores the multifaceted nature of the labyrinth as manifest in selected French texts from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Works by Joachim Du Bellay, Théophile de Viau, Saint-Amant, Thomas Corneille, Jean Racine, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Marguerite Yourcenar are examined in light of the metaphorical reflective capacity and the pluridimensional quality of mythic signification.
Download or read book Le Livre Contemporain written by and published by . This book was released on 1918 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe 1100 1389 written by Dawn Marie Hayes and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-11-23 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe investigates the medieval understanding of sacred place, arguing for the centrality of bodies and bodily metaphors to the establishment, function, use, and power of medieval churches. Questioning the traditional division of sacred and profane jurisdictions, this book identifies the need to consider non-devotional uses of churches in the Middle Ages. Dawn Marie Hayes examines idealized visions of medieval sacred places in contrast with the mundane and profane uses of these buildings. She argues that by the later Middle Ages-as loyalties were torn by emerging political, economic, and social groups-the Church suffered a loss of security that was reflected in the uses of sacred spaces, which became more restricted as identities shifted and Europeans ordered the ambiguity of the medieval world.
Download or read book Labyrinths of Language written by Wendy B. Faris and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book House of Leaves written by Mark Z. Danielewski and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2000-03-07 with total page 738 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A novelistic mosaic that simultaneously reads like a thriller and like a strange, dreamlike excursion into the subconscious.” —The New York Times Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth -- musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies -- the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages but also discovered a way back into the lives of their estranged children. Now this astonishing novel is made available in book form, complete with the original colored words, vertical footnotes, and second and third appendices. The story remains unchanged, focusing on a young family that moves into a small home on Ash Tree Lane where they discover something is terribly wrong: their house is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Of course, neither Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Will Navidson nor his companion Karen Green was prepared to face the consequences of that impossibility, until the day their two little children wandered off and their voices eerily began to return another story -- of creature darkness, of an ever-growing abyss behind a closet door, and of that unholy growl which soon enough would tear through their walls and consume all their dreams.
Download or read book A Companion to Fran ois Rabelais written by Bernd Renner and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-08-30 with total page 639 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty-two eminent scholars of Early Modernity offer a thorough examination of the art and the main themes of François Rabelais’s work in the larger context of European humanism.
Download or read book Mirrors of Infinity written by Allen S. Weiss and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Resource added for the Landscape Horticulture Technician program 100014.
Download or read book From Ritual to Romance and Beyond written by Manfred Schmeling and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 2011 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
