The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays: 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

Product Information

Joyce] is an instrument through which the past can speak. Joyce's past, like Homer's, is not history. If the success of man as a political, companionable animal whose culture has thus far progressed to families living in cities, that achievement of humanity is dying, Joyce saw. Life at family level goes on pretty much as in the bronze age. Man's idea of God, though, is in trouble; his idea of the state is in trouble; and an awful restlessness begins to disturb the inert, paralyzed, darkened life of the people. Ulysses was written between 1914 and 1921, dates that end a world." The schoolroom was its own place, our home another, the red fields of the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people’s houses: all were as distinct as continents in disparate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were insisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport’s (thus her accepted name after its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, she said, patently illogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time), and no dime could ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion (Flash Gordon, Tarzan) for these places were humbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be financed by a grandmother who knew her own mind. It is probably now well accepted, though it is still important to argue, that a lot of our “geography” is in the mind. That is to say we carry around with us mental images of the world, of the country in which we live (all those image of the North/South divide), of the street next door. The New Yorker’s mental map of the USA, Ronald Regan’s imagination of the world, became popular posters. Now, today, all - poems, essay and book itself - have undergone their obscure little resurrection from their entombment on the bottom shelf. Ostensibly this is the only essay here that is attributed to Joyce, but Joyce turns up in practically every second essay in this book! Davenport plugs Joyce's books at every opportunity; not surprising really considering that as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, his was the first thesis ever done there on Joyce!

Tchelitchew: an artist whose painting Cache-Cache turned up earlier on with reference to Finnegans Wake, finds a full chapter here: "Cache-Cache inspired parts of Eliot's Burnt Norton; William Carlos Williams's Paterson owes much to "Phenomena"; and some of the most mysteriously beautiful passages in Cocteau's Leone derive from Tchelitchew's doubled images." This is a translation from an archaic Chinese text, explaining that poetry is a voice out of nature which must be rendered humanly in­ telligible, so that people can know how to live. 3Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era ( Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1 9 7 1 ) , p. 1 04. It was wonderful learning about some new poets: Ronald Johnson features on my immediate horizon and I may now have sufficient impetus to purse Hugh Kenner's magnum opus. Yet questions remain, even-hound. Why exactly Eudora Weltry? I appreciate the situating of her plotlines into a Persephone tradition but still? Both poems were printed there in their stages of creation - one a work of now recognised genius, the other to receive only a crumb of attention, as both were subsequently printed together in a newspaper and now perhaps again here, in this essay. It all added to the melancholy atmosphere of shadowy room, cloudy weather and addicted mind.When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at work, I felt perfectly at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and wondered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must have their range from good to bad, like arrowheads and stone axes.

In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America’s major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport – eBook Details Narrative Tone and Form: a quintessential literary essay discussing tone & stylistic innovations/experimentations in the works of such diverse writers as Flaubert, Kafka, Wittgenstein & Gertrude Stein, moving on to an analysis of Iliad& Odyssey, and finding analogies from the art world, ending with a discussion of architectonic form. Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below. Forty essays on history, art, and literature from one of the most incisive, and most exhilarating, critical minds of the 20th century. But, no doubt, sitting elsewhere, in well-used glory, well-thumbed, annotated with industrious pencilled scribbles, every essay pawed and pored over and fondly loved.

A Lamb and volumes of Montaigne and various anthologies of English essays, all with their seemingly compulsory Bacon, were gathered here as well. There is no way to prepare yourself for reading Guy Davenport. You stand in awe before his knowledge of the archaic and his knowledge of the modern. Even more, you stand in awe of the connections he can make between the archaic and the modern; he makes the remote familiar and the familiar fundamental." As a critic, Davenport shines as an intrepid appreciator, an ideal teacher. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art. His must-have essay collections, The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form, display his range: With a rainwater clarity, he can write about the naturalist Louis Agassiz or ancient poetry and thought... He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He can send you out eagerly searching for C. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. In all this, his method is nothing other than the deep attentiveness engendered by love: that and a firm faith in simply knowing things. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information."

Nor could the movies be mentioned at Grandmother Fant’s, for attending them meant going into public, a low thing that the Fants have never done. The Fants were French Huguenots, from Bordeaux. They were a kind of Greek tragedy in the third of a great trilogy. Once they were rich with two ships that bore South Carolina cotton from Charleston to France. The United States Navy sank them both in the time of the War–there was a tale we heard over and over of Grandfather Sassard going down with the Edisto, standing impassively on her bridge, a New Testament clutched to his breast, his right arm saluting the colors of the Confederacy, which were soon to follow him beneath the waves of the Atlantic. His brother wore a friendship ring given him by Fitzhugh Lee, and this sacred ornament would be got out of a kind of jewel casket and shown to us. I don’t think I ever dared touch it. Within a few miles of each other in the 1880s, Whitman was putting the last touches to his great book, Eadweard Muybridge was photographing movements milliseconds apart of animals, naked athletes, and women, and Thomas Eakins was painting surgeons, boxers, musicians, wrestlers, and Philadelphians. In a sense Muybridge and Eakins were catching up with Whitman’s pioneering. Their common subject, motion, the robust real, skilled and purposeful action, was distinctly American, an invention. Eakins and Muybridge worked together; Eakins came over to Camden and painted and photographed Whitman. Their arts ran parallel, shared a spirit and a theme. Muybridge’s photographs, the monumental Zoopraxia, kept Degas and Messonier up all night looking at it. There has been no finer movement in American art, nor a more fertile one (from Muybridge, through Edison, the whole art of film), and yet their impact was generally felt to be offensive. Eakins and Muybridge were forgotten for years; Whitman persisted. Simon Catling promotes a sense of the child as a dynamic and active participant, rather than as an immature and passive learner. Another Odyssey Salvatore Quasimodo translates the three lines that begin the third book of the Odyssey: II sole, lasciata la serena distesa dell' acqua, si levo verso ii cielo di rame a illuminare gliI always seemed to find myself book browsing on rainy afternoons when I would wander up the book shelved hallway into my bedroom where, lying aslant my bed, I'd dip into the bottom shelf of my large bookcase there, in the semi-darkness, and lazily cruise in and out of various volumes.Volumes of essays.

Wie alles Metaphysische ist die Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirklichkeit in der Grammatik der Sprache aufzufinden. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. (Wittgenstein, Zettel, 5 5 ) Before the internet, Google, and hyperlinks, Guy Davenport was the original polymath, perhaps the last great American polymath, who provided the links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. He serves as our guide through the jungles of history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In this collection, Guy Davenport serves as the reader's guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. Davenport provides links between art and literature, music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present. And pretty much everything in between. Not only has he seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything in print, he also has the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to make the connections, to see how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization. Nothing characterizes the twentieth century more than its inability to pay attention to anything for more than a week." The museum, twentieth-century parody of a temple, is all that we have, physically, of the past; and Joyce begins Finnegans Wake in a museum. The early interpreters of The Cantos tended to see the poem as a study of the man of willed and directed action, as a persona of Odysseus. It is now clear that the poem rests most firmly in a deeper, stiller sense of humanity, the city and its continuity, symbolized by the goddess of field and citadel wearing the sanctuary of her people as a crown."And I learned from a whole childhood of looking in fields how the purpose of things ought perhaps to remain invisible, no more than half known. People who know exactly what they are doing seem to me to miss the vital part of any doing. My family, praises be unto the gods, never inspected anything that we enjoyed doing; criticism was strictly for adversities, and not very much for them. Consequently I spent my childhood drawing, building things, writing, reading, playing, dreaming out loud, without the least comment from anybody. I learned later that I was thought not quite bright, for the patterns I discovered for myself were not things with nearby models. When I went off to college it was with no purpose whatsoever: no calling in view, no profession, no ambition. A common trait: as critics, both keep their selves out of the picture— the subject is their focus. Other than sharing a few anecdotes, Davenport completely erases himself from the scene: "Talking about oneself, said Menander, is a feast that starves the guest, and I hope in this essay to keep to the subject I was invited to consider." Despite his formidable erudition, Davenport comes across as affable & modest: "My writing is primitive and contrived, and I have never written about myself in any conscious way."(!) Charles Ives: Davenport calls him the "greatest (American) composer" ever & writes, "he considered Browning to be the great modern poet, and wrote a handsome, majestic overture in his honor- in twelve-tone rows, a dozen years before Schoenberg invented them."! And there's more: