Maureen Whitebrook argues that literature, through both its form and its content, can expose and criticize liberal theory and point beyond it to a new political theory. She describes how 'literary political criticism' might be done, and demonstrates such criticism in four essays that expose the connections between specific political and literary texts. Fiction, Whitebrook concludes, does a better job than liberal political theory of examining the relationship between the individual and the State.
Includes a selection of poems by American poets and works of art by a variety of artists. A collection of well-known poems, from Ogden Nash to Walt Whitman, with accompanying illustrations that also represent a wide range of artists and styles. A number of garden poems are matched with beautiful color reproductions of famous paintings. Includes a selection of poems by American poets and works of art by a variety of artists.
Critical essays on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, Sara Teasiale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Marianne Moore with representative selections from their work.
In this wondrous picture book bursting with mixed-media art, an imaginary garden is the center of a special relationship between a girl and her grandfather.
Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their very conception and the marks they bear of human care and cultivation, gardens stand as restorative, nourishing, necessary havens. With Gardens, Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. The ancients, explains Harrison, viewed gardens as both a model and a location for the laborious self-cultivation and self-improvement that are essential to serenity and enlightenment, an association that has continued throughout the ages. The Bible and Qur'an; Plato's Academy and Epicurus's Garden School; Zen rock and Islamic carpet gardens; Boccaccio, Rihaku, Capek, Cao Xueqin, Italo Calvino, Ariosto, Michel Tournier, and Hannah Arendt - all come into play as this work explores the ways in which the concept and reality of the garden has informed human thinking about mortality, order, and power. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, Gardens is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's earlier classics, Forests and The Dominion of the Dead. Voltaire famously urged us to cultivate our gardens; with this compelling volume, Robert Pogue Harrison reminds us of the nature of that responsibility - and its enduring importance to humanity.
In 1954, the French writer, politician, and publisher André Malraux posed at home for a photographer from the magazine Paris Match, surrounded by pages from his forthcoming book Le musée imaginaire de la sculpture mondiale. The enchanting metaphor of the musée imaginaire (imaginary museum) was built upon that illustrated art book, and Malraux was one of its greatest champions. Drawing on a range of contemporary publications, he adopted images and responded to ideas. Indeed, Malraux’s book on the floor is a variation of photographer André Vigneau’s spectacular Encyclopédie photographique de l’art, published in five volumes from 1935 on—years before Malraux would enter this field. Both authors were engaged in juxtaposing artworks via photographs and publishing these photographs by the hundreds, but Malraux was the better sloganeer. Starting from a close examination of the photograph of Malraux in his salon, art historian Walter Grasskamp takes the reader back to the dawn of this genre of illustrated art book. He shows how it catalyzed the practice of comparing works of art on a global scale. He retraces the metaphor to earlier reproduction practices and highlights its ubiquity in contemporary art, ending with an homage to the other pioneer of the “museum without walls,” the unjustly forgotten Vigneau.
The gardens in Imaginary Gardens by Elizabeth C. Ward, both real and imagined, are as varied the Big Sur, restless under a full moon; long white beaches where madwomen dig for shells; sun-gold walled gardens and gardens created in the dark night of the mind. Jamie, aging poet rages across the landscape in pursuit of a woman he has seen silhouetted against the moon, while his wife, Caitlin, "black haired and ugly, older than the stones at the bottom of the creek, " hunkers back in the dark and waits for her chance to wreak vengeance. A thin rivulet of the sea winds its silent way inland, past field and farmhouse to the city, glides down street and alleyway and up a stairwell to the room where Iain and his innocent young bride lie in each others arms. Moser, school teacher, alone under the light at the kitchen table correcting essays, envisions the strange dark eyed student whose talent is greater than his own, splayed across his attic bed on the other side of town. Imagines clasping that would-be Icarus in his arms; accompany him on that godlike flight toward the sun. Five year old Law watches an unending line of cars, a ghost train, inch its way through Pasadena of 1942, on its way to Manzanar. In this collection of dense, rich stories, it is life that dominates, relentless in its sole purpose: the creation of more life. The battle is waged between youth and the old, innocence and knowledge, life and art; the burning of autumn leaves and spring's stubborn and glorious renewal. And always, in Ward's stories, life wins. Elizabeth Campbell Ward grew up in Pasadena, California. After graduating from Stanford University, she moved with her husband and children to Newport Beach where she authored the Coast Road Mysteries series: Laguna Contracts, Coast Highway 1, and A Nice Little Beach Town. Death in a California Landscape, the fourth in the series will be published in summer, 2013. She has also published the novel, Muse.
