by Jula Wildberger (1998)
Just suppose someone wanted to teach the kind of love practiced in Latin love elegy. How would he do it? What difference does it make for 'elegiac love' if it becomes the subject matter of a do-it-yourself handbook? This is the leading question I've explored in this book, following the course step by step and analyzing the 'pedagogy' of Ovid, the Master of Love. Some readers might enjoy thinking about the logic of love by itself. For others, the book might provide something like a running commentary to a text the enjoy exploring. And if you are interested in the mechanics of literary devices, you can find here an in-depth discussion of a striking example of generic transformation, a transformation that would seem paradoxical or outright impossible: the metamorphosis of unhappy, always frustrated 'elegiac' love into the successful erotic practice of the Artists of Love. (The Author) P.S. The copyright for this book now belongs to me. Please feel free to use it for any non-commercial purpose.
Roy Gibson, Steven Green, and Alison Sharrock
'The Art of Love' presents a collection of essays on Ovid's cycle of sophisticated and subversive didactic poems on love 'The Art of Love' and 'Cures for Love', offering a range of perspectives on the poetics, politics, and erotics of the poems.
Harold Bloom
"What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above its age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person.". "From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent achievements of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, the author explores the numerous parallels between his chosen geniuses and the surprising ways they have influenced one another over the centuries. Genius also offers revealing excerpts from their works that continue to surprise, enchant, and move readers time after time. Suffused with his infectious and inexhaustible enthusiasm, Bloom's insightful analyses of the poetry of Milton, Shelley, and Whitman; the drama of Ibsen and Tennessee Williams; and the narratives of Melville and Tolstoy, among many others, illuminate and expand our common understanding and love of these great works of art.". "Illustrated with portraits of many of the featured writers, this book is the culmination of Harold Bloom's half-century of teaching and writing about literature - and a grand yet intimate tour of Western literary and spiritual culture in one magnificent volume. Enriching as it informs, Genius is a book to savor and to treasure."--BOOK JACKET.
Joseph Dewey
"Understanding Richard Powers presents an introduction to one of the most important and admired writers to emerge in the post-Pynchon era of American literature. Joseph Dewey guides readers through Powers's combination of lexical virtuosity and structural daring - typical of the postmodernists - and the novelist's concern with the profound and humane dilemmas surrounding love and death characteristic of the late-twentieth-century realists. Dewey contends that while Powers's novels investigate the most pressing issues of the new millennium, the novelist is most deeply interested in the same thematic argument that consumed Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson - the problem of the self, the deep and unshakable loneliness that has always been at the heart of the American literary imagination."--BOOK JACKET.
Nicky Hamlyn
Alongside the commercial cinema of narrative and spectacle there has always been another practice--call it avant-garde, experimental, or artists' film. In this provocative book, Nicky Hamlyn, an acclaimed filmmaker in the alternative tradition, investigates the film art phenomenon. Taking cues from modern trends in other artforms, notably painting and sculpture, this type of filmmaking emphasizes the nature of its apparatus and medium in order to bring about a critical, inquisitive state of mind in the viewer. It deconstructs, anatomizes, and reimagines what film images are it builds new machines it recreates the setting of cinema or expands into new kinds of performance and exhibition. And it often has a political dimension--urging audiences to make a free and active response,not a passive, consumerist one. Hamlyn treats artists' film conceptually in order to explore key categories that connect different works and filmmakers: from framing to digital media, installation to interactivity, point of view, to sound. In so doing he considers the work of Stan Brakhage, Malcolm Le Grice, and Michael Snow, as well as younger artists such as Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Jennifer Nightingale, and Colin Crockatt, among many others.