Search results for "Jeffrey Craven"
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Converging Stories
In American literature, our discourse on the themes of race and ecology is too narrowly focused on the twentieth century and does not adequately take into account how these themes are interrelated, argues Jeffrey Myers. His new study broadens the field by looking at writings from the nineteenth century. This was an era, Myers reminds us, of renewed violence and oppression against people of color and of unprecedented environmental destruction on a continental scale. Myers focuses particularly on works that engage the notion that white racism and alienation from nature sprang from a common source. Myers first discusses the paradox of Thomas Jefferson's agrarian vision, by which ideas espoused in his Notes on the State of Virginia can support either environmental destruction or conservation, a democratic or a racist society. Next, by looking race-critically at Thoreau's Walden and The Maine Woods, then ecocritically at Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman and Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories, Myers traces the development of a new resistance to racial and ecological hegemony. He concludes by discussing how the antiracist, egalitarian ecocentricity in these earlier writers can be seen in contemporary writer Eddy L. Harris's Mississippi Solo. Myers's discussion encompasses other authors as well, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, and Willa Cather. By looking at works by Native Americans, African Americans, European Americans, and others, and by considering forms of literature beyond the traditional nature essay, Myers expands our conceptions of environmental writing and environmental justice.
R 1,867.00
Pynchon's Against the Day
Thomas Pynchon's longest novel to date, Against the Day (2006), excited diverse and energetic opinions when it appeared on bookstore shelves nine years after the critically acclaimed Mason & Dixon. Its wide-ranging plot covers nearly three decades—from the 1893 World's Fair to the years just after World War I—and follows hundreds of characters within its 1085 pages. The book’s eleven essays by established luminaries and emerging voices in the field of Pynchon criticism, address a significant aspect of the novel's manifold interests. By focusing on three major thematic trajectories (the novel's narrative strategies; its commentary on science, belief, and faith; and its views on politics and economics), the contributors contend that Against the Day is not only a major addition to Pynchon's already impressive body of work, but also a defining moment in the emergence of twenty-first century American literature.
R 3,973.00
American Puritan Elegy
Jeffrey Hammond's study takes an anthropological approach to the most popular form of poetry in early New England - the funeral elegy. Hammond reconstructs the historical, theological and cultural contexts of these poems to demonstrate how they responded to a specific process of mourning defined by Puritan views on death and grief. The elegies emerge, he argues not as 'poems' to be read and appreciated in a post-romantic sense, but as performative scripts that consoled readers by shaping their experience of loss in accordance with theological expectation. Read in the framework of their own time and place, the elegies shed light on the emotional dimension of Puritanism and the important role of ritual in Puritan culture. Hammond's book reassesses a body of poems whose importance on their own time has been obscured by almost total neglect in ours. It represents the first full-length study of its kind in English.
R 2,479.10
David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books
What do we value? Why do we value it? And in a neoliberal age, can morality ever displace money as the primary means of defining value? These are the questions that drove David Foster Wallace, a writer widely credited with changing the face of contemporary fiction and moving it beyond an emotionless postmodern irony. Jeffrey Severs argues in David Foster Wallace's Balancing Books that Wallace was also deeply engaged with the social, political, and economic issues of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A rebellious economic thinker, Wallace satirized the deforming effects of money, questioned the logic of the monetary system, and saw the world through the lens of value's many hidden and untapped meanings. In original readings of all of Wallace's fiction, from The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest to his story collections and The Pale King, Severs reveals Wallace to be a thoroughly political writer whose works provide an often surreal history of financial crises and economic policies. As Severs demonstrates, the concept of value occupied the intersection of Wallace's major interests: economics, work, metaphysics, mathematics, and morality.Severs ranges from the Great Depression and the New Deal to the realms of finance, insurance, and taxation to detail Wallace's quest for balance and grace in a world of excess and entropy. Wallace showed characters struggling to place two feet on the ground and restlessly sought to "balance the books" of a chaotic culture. Explaining why Wallace's work has galvanized a new phase in contemporary global literature, Severs draws connections to key Wallace forerunners Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis, as well as his successors-including Dave Eggers, Teddy Wayne, Jonathan Lethem, and Zadie Smith-interpreting Wallace's legacy in terms of finance, the gift, and office life.
R 1,089.00
