The Mystified Letter

The Mystified Letter

Author: Craig Tichelkamp

Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 215

ISBN-13: 1506486738

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Reading has become a problem--not just of attention, comprehension, or illiteracy rates, but of politics, society, and religion. The Mystified Letter offers an alternative to this malaise: a theology of reading centered on mystical encounter. It retrieves medieval Christian reading culture to build a case for a mystical theology of literature.


Theory as Practice

Theory as Practice

Author: Jochen Schulte-Sasse

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 524

ISBN-13: 9780816627783

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In light of recent, dramatic revisions in criticism of European particularly German Romanticism, this anthology brings together key texts of the movement, especially those written in the last quarter of the eighteenth century by Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich Schlegel, among others.


Writing Revolution

Writing Revolution

Author: Peter J. Bellis

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 0820334618

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In recent years, formalist and deconstructive approaches to literary studies have been under attack, charged by critics with isolating texts as distinctive aesthetic or linguistic objects, separate from their social and historical contexts. Historicist and cultural approaches have often responded by simply reversing the picture, reducing texts to no more than superstructural effects of historical or ideological forces. In Writing Revolution, Peter J. Bellis explores the ways in which literature can engage with—rather than escape from or obscure—social and political issues. Bellis argues that a number of nineteenth-century American writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, saw their texts as spaces where alternative social and cultural possibilities could be suggested and explored. All writing in the same historical moment, Bellis's subjects were responding to the same cluster of issues: the need to redefine American identity after the Revolution, the problem of race slavery, and the growing industrialization of American society. Hawthorne, Bellis contends, sees the romance as "neutral territory" where the Imaginary and the Actual—the aesthetic and the historical—can interpenetrate and address crucial issues of class, race, and technological modernity. Whitman conceives of Leaves of Grass as a transformative democratic space where all forms of meditation, both political and literary, are swept away. Thoreau oscillates between these two approaches. Walden, like the romance, aims to fashion a mediating space between nature and society. His abolitionist essays, however, shift sharply away from both linguistic representation and the political, toward an apocalyptic cleansing violence. In addition to covering selected works by Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau, Bellis also examines powerful works of social and political critique by Louisa May Alcott and Margaret Fuller. With its suggestions for new ways of reading antebellum American writing, Writing Revolution breaks through the thickets of contemporary literary discourse and will spark debate in the literary community.