Uneasy Alliance: Twentieth-century American Literature, Culture and Biography

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Hans Bak
Rodopi, 2004 - 367 páginas
Uneasy Alliance illuminates the recent search in literary studies for a new interface between textual and contextual readings. Written in tribute to G.A.M. Janssens, the twenty-one essays in the volume exemplify a renewed awareness of the paradoxical nature of literary texts both as works of literary art and as documents embedded in and functioning within a writer's life and culture. Together they offer fresh and often interdisciplinary perspectives on twentieth-century American writers of more or less established status (Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay, E.E. Cummings, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow, Michael Ondaatje, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros) as well as on those who, for reasons of fashion, politics, ideology, or gender, have been unduly neglected (Booth Tarkington, Julia Peterkin, Robert Coates, Martha Gellhorn, Isabella Gardner, Karl Shapiro, the young Jewish-American writers, Julia Alvarez, and writers of popular crime and detective fiction). Exploring the fruitful interactions and uneasy alliance between literature and ethics, film, biography, gender studies, popular culture, avant-garde art, urban studies, anthropology and multicultural studies, together these essays testify to the ongoing pertinence of an approach to literature that is undogmatic, sensitive and sophisticated and that seeks to do justice to the complex interweavings of literature, culture and biography in twentieth-century American writing.

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Contenido

Preface
9
Peter Rietbergen
31
Gonny van Beekvan Overbeek
59
Edward Margolies 101 10
101
Richard S Kennedy
143
Susan Castillo
173
Marian Janssen
199
Jaap van der Bent
215
Jan Bakker
243
Ashley
269
Hans Bak
285
Mary A McCay
305
Loes Nas
323
Hans Bertens
345
Notes on Contributors
363
Derechos de autor

René Verwaaijen
229

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Página 16 - I don't agree with you. I think just the other way. I don't know whether I succeed in expressing myself, but I know that nothing else expresses me. Nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me; everything's on the contrary a limit, a barrier, and a perfectly arbitrary one. Certainly the clothes which, as you say, I choose to wear, don't express me; and heaven forbid they should!
Página 175 - On the other hand, if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.
Página 16 - There's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self? Where does it begin? where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us - and then it flows back again. I know a large part of myself is in the clothes I choose to wear. I've a great respect for things.
Página 83 - Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow! Faithless am I save to love's self alone. Were you not lovely I would leave you now: After the feet of beauty fly my own. Were you not still my hunger's rarest food, And water ever to my wildest thirst, I would desert you — think not but I would! — And seek another as I sought you first. But you are mobile as the veering air, And all your charms more changeful than the tide, Wherefore to be inconstant is no care: I have but to continue at your side. So wanton,...
Página 15 - I you'll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There 's no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we're each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our 'self?
Página 326 - The moment the insider steps out from the inside she's no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not-quite an insider and not-quite an outsider.
Página 92 - By our first strange and fatal interview, By all desires which thereof did ensue, By our long starving hopes, by that remorse Which my words...
Página 23 - His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed ; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession.

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