Research Catalog

Title

Poetics of the Americas : race, founding, and textuality / edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries.

Publication

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [1997], ©1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Additional Authors

• Cowan, Bainard.
• Humphries, Jefferson, 1955-

Description

x, 208 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

• Emanating from a colloquium held at Louisiana State University entitled "Intertextuality and Civilization in the Americas," this volume features some of the best minds now writing in comparative and interdisciplinary fields.
• Through lively discussions of topics ranging from Sigmund Freud to Zora Neale Hurston, from Christopher Columbus to the Holocaust, and including latter-day cultural icons such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the contributors create a stimulating dialogue on the crucial role of the poetic imagination in shaping the identity of civilizations.
• Together, the essays offer a full consideration of cultural identity and bring to the fore the difficult question of the larger responsibilities that identity entails. As Bainard Cowan illustrates in his perceptive introduction, in both the past and the future of the Americas, in moments of foundation as well as of conflict and dispersal, there has been or will be present the recurrent need for mythic and poetic understanding.
• An unusually timely work, Poetics of the Americas skillfully addresses the crises that the world faces in the confrontations of cultures, traditions, and peoples.

Series Statement

Horizons in theory and American culture

Uniform Title

Horizons in theory and American culture.

Subject

• Literature and society > America
• America > History and criticism
• America > Civilization

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-202) and index.

Contents

Introduction: Toward Identity and Beyond / Bainard Cowan -- Moses and Intertextuality: Sigmund Freud, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Bible / Barbara Johnson -- "To Weave It into the Literature of the Country": Epic and the Fictions of African American Women / Elizabeth Fox-Genovese -- Latin American and Comparative Literatures / Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria -- Magical Ruins/Magical Realism: Alejo Carpentier, Francois de Nome, and the New World Baroque / Lois Parkinson Zamora -- Interviews with the Bridge-Keeper: Encounters Between Cultures as Phantasmagorized in Monty Python and the Holy Grail / Mireille Rosello -- The Holocaust and the Victimary Revolution / Eric Gans -- Columbus, the Ocean Blue, and Fables That Stir the Mind: To Reinvent the Study of Letters / Sylvia Wynter -- A Field of Islands / Edouard Glissant.

ISBN

• 0807121428 (alk. paper)
• 0807121819 (pbk. : alk. paper)

LCCN

96052687

OCLC

ocm36225846

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries