可借阅:*
图书馆 | 资料类型 | 排架号 | 子计数 | 书架位置 | 状态 | 图书预约 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
正在检索... Science | Book | 809.93382 P635P | 1 | Stacks | 正在检索... 未知 | 正在检索... 不可借阅 |
链接这些题名
已订购
摘要
摘要
Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, David L. Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature. Passage through Hell suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature, and a possible escape from the current morass of competing critical schools and ideologies.
Pike's readings of Louis Ferdinand Céline and Walter Benjamin reveal the tensions at work in the modern appropriation of structures derived from ancient and medieval descents. His book shows how these structures were redefined in modernism and persist in contemporary critical practice. In order to recover the historical corpus of modernism, he asserts, it is necessary to acknowledge the attraction that medieval forms and motifs held for modernist literature and theory. By pairing the writings of the postwar German dramatist and novelist Peter Weiss with Dante's Commedia , and Christine de Pizan with Virginia Woolf, Pike argues for a new level of complexity in the relation between medieval and modern poetics.
Pike's supple and persuasive reading of the Commedia resituates that text within the contradictions of medieval tradition. He contends that the Dantean allegory of conversion, altered to suit the exigencies of modernism, maintains its hold over current literature and theory. The postwar writers Pike treats?Weiss, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott?exemplify alternate strategies for negotiating the legacy of modernism. The passage through hell emerges as a way of disentangling images of the past from their interpretation in the present.
评论 (1)
Choice 评论
A new approach to Dante's epic poem is always welcome, especially when (as the author admits in the preface) it is an "attempt to escape from the morass of competing claims to formalism on the one hand and historical relevance on the other." Pike (American Univ.) reviews Dante's poem in the light of both earlier works and modern literary texts. The footnotes reflect the author's wide sweep of interests. Chapter headings mirror his special approach to the subject: e.g., "'The Bataille du Styx': Celine's Allegory of Conversion"; "... Descent into Modernity: Peter Weiss's Welttheater"; "The Gender of Descent ... Christine de Pizan and the Topoi of Descent"; "'Romps of Fancy': Virginia Woolf, Turf Battles, and the Metaphorics of Descent"; "... Benjamin's Descent into the City of Light"; "... Beyond a Modernism of Reading: Heaney and Walcott." A useful bibliography and index add to this compelling study of the first great epic in the Italian vernacular. Some scholars may find Pike's handling of the subject arbitrary, personal even; but in its rich sampling of modern texts, this volume in fact provides fresh insights that can only add to the reader's appreciation of Dante's great poem. All academic collections. A. Paolucci; formerly, St. John's University (NY)
目录
Preface | p. vii |
Abbreviations | p. xv |
1 The Persistence of the Universal: Critical Descents into Antiquity | p. 1 |
2 La Bataille Du Styx: Céline's Allegory of Conversion | p. 35 |
3 The Conversion of Dante | p. 62 |
4 The Gender of Descent | p. 134 |
5 p. 203 | |
6 The Descent into History, or beyond a Modernism of Reading: Heaney and Walcott | p. 248 |
Bibliography | p. 261 |
Index | p. 281 |