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The nature of silence is hard to grasp. This book serves to systematize this concept and explore it in the works of three major poets of religious experience: namely, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas. Since these poets worked within a Christian framework, the “silences” they refer to are mainly those emerging in the context of the relationship between God and man in a post-Christian climate. The book’s textual analyses place special attention on the dynamics between thematic and structural manifestations of silence, and are situated at the crossroads of the poetics, philosophy and theology. In this first study bringing together the poetry of Hopkins, Eliot and Thomas, the three poets, each in his unique way, emerge as poetic ministers, practitioners, and producers of silence, who try to find a new language to talk about the Ineffable God and one’s experience of the divine.
"To understand a profound thought is to have, at the moment one understands it, a profound thought oneself; and this demands some effort, a genuine descent to the heart of oneself . . . Only desire and love give us the strength to make this effort. The only books that we truly absorb are those we read with real appetite, after having worked hard to get them, so great had been our need of them." Reading was, for Marcel Proust, more than the pursuit of knowledge: a truly spiritual activity, it was a means of transforming and transcending the self. By reading great authors, he contends, we not only learn of great ideas, but are enriched by the fruits of the world's most inspirational minds.
Times of crisis expose how we experience social, physical, and emotional forms of distance. Alone with Others explores how these experiences overlap, shaping our coexistence. Departing from conventional debates that associate intimacy with affection and distance with alienation, Haustein introduces tact as a particular mode of feeling one's way and making space in the sphere of human interaction. Reconstructing tact's conceptual history from the late eighteenth century to the present, she then focuses on three specific periods of socio-political upheaval: the two World Wars, and 1968. In five reading encounters with Marcel Proust, Helmuth Plessner, Theodor Adorno, François Truffaut, and Roland Barthes, Haustein invites us to reconsider our own ways of engaging with other people, images, and texts, and to gauge the significance of tact today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.
Virginia Woolf's rich and imaginative use of language was partly a result of her keen interest in foreign literatures and languages - mainly Greek and French, but also Russian, German and Italian. As a translator she naturally addressed herself both to contemporary standards of translation within the university, but also to readers like herself. In Three Guineas she ranged herself among German scholars who used Antigone to critique European politics of the 1930s. Orlando outwits the censors with a strategy that focuses on Proust's untranslatable word. The Waves and The Years show her looking ahead to the problems of postcolonial society, where translation crosses borders. In this in-depth study of Woolf and European languages and literatures, Emily Dalgarno opens up a rewarding new way of reading her prose.
This book is about reading Proust’s novel via philosophical and musicological approaches to “modern” listening. It articulates how insights into the way we listen to and understand classical music inform the creation of literary meaning. It asks: are we to take at face value the ideas about art that the novel contains, or are those part of the fiction? Is there a difference between what the novel says and what it does, and how can music provide a key to answering that question? According to this study, Proust asks us to temporalize our interpretation by recognizing the distance between initial and final experiences of the novel, and by being open to the ways in which it challenges attempts at interpretive closure. Proust’s novel responds to the kind of attentive and eternally changing perspectives that can be generated from music and our attempts to make sense of it.
The work of Glenn Gould employs a range of expressive techniques that combine sounds, words and images without ever compromising the unity and logic of the aesthetic vision they reflect. Nevertheless, it is his interpretive brilliance as a pianist that continues to inspire emotion and awe. The genius of Glenn Gould lies in the sounds he created. With Gould, music becomes a language – a language of such rigour, coherence and clarity that all who hear it are able to discern its principal components. Each sound is articulated and perceived distinctly as part of a melodic and harmonic sequence that imbues it with meaning. The structure of each musical phrase is integrated into the work as a wh...
Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton’s representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton’s complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgment of Wharton’s sources sheds light both on the author’s model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton’s travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.
Revival, reinvention, and regeneration: the concept of renascence pervades Joyce’s work through the inescapable presence of his literary forebears. By persistently reexamining tradition, reinterpreting his literary heritage in light of the present, and translating and re-translating from one system of signs to another, Joyce exhibits the spirit of the greatest of Renaissance writers and artists. In fact, his writing derives some of its most important characteristics from Renaissance authors, as this collection of essays shows. Though critical work has often focused on Joyce's relationship to medieval thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Dante, Renascent Joyce examines Joyce's connection to the...
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This wide-ranging volume of essays provides an illuminating set of approaches to the multifaceted contexts of Proust's life and work.