The Present of the Past - Drafts of Memory in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved"
The Present of the Past - Drafts of Memory in T.S. Eliot's

Author: Sebastian Polmans

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2008-02-13

Total Pages: 24

ISBN-13: 3638002721

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Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Siegen, course: Noble Prize Winners. Instantly canonized?, language: English, abstract: In his book about “Tradition” Edward Shils claims, “there are two pasts.” One is the phenomenal past; the past of realism, the past of occurred incidents which builds a sequence of human action until the present is reached. The other past is the perceived past. As “a much more plastic thing” this form of past is recorded in myths, memory and in literature, which are built up on the encounters and experiences with the occurred incidents. Sethe, the fictional figure and protagonist in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, offers a view towards the timelessness and power of memory: “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” Does that mean that memories live amongst us? Of course many things we remember today have been there long before our generation was born – for example experiences of our ancestors during World War II, or even myth, traditional orals. Nevertheless, its appearances before do change in the mind of the living generation which is referring to it. Concerning a pedagogical purpose, in his book, Shils claims for a need of tradition as T.S Eliot does in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. With a sensitive regard to the past as function and feeder for a modern artist, it becomes obvious that even novelty presupposes what T.S. Eliot calls “historical sense”. In his essay from 1919 Eliot debates about the problem of time and its relation towards the past. In Eliot’s understanding “[...] the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; [...] This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”

Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison

Author: Arnold Rampersad

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-01-08

Total Pages: 706

ISBN-13: 0375707980

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Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic figure. Arnold Rampersad skillfully tells the story of a writer whose thunderous novel and astute, courageous essays on race, literature, and culture assure him of a permanent place in our literary heritage. Starting with Ellison’s hardscrabble childhood in Oklahoma and his ordeal as a student in Alabama, Rampersad documents his improbable, painstaking rise in New York to a commanding place on the literary scene. With scorching honesty but also fair and compassionate, Rampersad lays bare his subject’s troubled psychology and its impact on his art and on the people about him.This book is both the definitive biography of Ellison and a stellar model of literary biography.

The Routledge History of Literature in English
The Routledge History of Literature in English

Author: Ronald Carter

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 598

ISBN-13: 9780415243179

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This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.

The Moral Imagination
The Moral Imagination

Author: John Paul Lederach

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 019974758X

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"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.

Home Matters
Home Matters

Author: R. Rubenstein

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2001-02-23

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 0312299753

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Despite its typically regressive associations with homesickness, the longing associated with nostalgia may also function progressively as a vehicle for imaginatively 'fixing' the past in two senses: securing and mending or repairing. Considering fiction by two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities, this study explores tensions between home and exile, insider and outsider, longing and belonging, loss and recovery. Rubenstein argues that nostalgia functions narratively as a strategy for interrogating not only notions of home, homesickness, and homeland but also cultural historical dislocation, aging, and moral responsibility. These narratives re-frame a significant locus of concern in contemporary (female) experience: personal and/or cultural dis-placement and longing for home are ultimately transmuted - imaginatively, at least - by a restorative vision that enables healing and emotional repair.

Cross-cultural Visions in African American Modernism
Cross-cultural Visions in African American Modernism

Author: Yoshinobu Hakutani

Publisher: Ohio State University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0814210309

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Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.

Literary Criticism and Theory
Literary Criticism and Theory

Author: Pelagia Goulimari

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-09-15

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1135053014

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This incredibly useful volume offers an introduction to the history of literary criticism and theory from ancient Greece to the present. Grounded in the close reading of landmark theoretical texts, while seeking to encourage the reader's critical response, Pelagia Goulimari examines: major thinkers and critics from Plato and Aristotle to Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Said and Butler; key concepts, themes and schools in the history of literary theory: mimesis, inspiration, reason and emotion, the self, the relation of literature to history, society, culture and ethics, feminism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, queer theory; genres and movements in literary history: epic, tragedy, comedy, the novel; Romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. Historical connections between theorists and theories are traced and the book is generously cross-referenced. With useful features such as key-point conclusions, further reading sections, descriptive text boxes, detailed headings, and with a comprehensive index, this book is the ideal introduction to anyone approaching literary theory for the first time or unfamiliar with the scope of its history.