Guy Davenport – författare

Selected writings of the remarkable teacher, lecturer, and scientist, Louis Agassiz, whose enthusiasm for natural history is communicated with vitality and precision. The editor's introduction and notes at the beginning of each chapter provide a cogent analysis of the contributions of the scientist-writer.

This volume features selections from the New Directions founder's correspondence with Guy Davenport, the polymath artist and author of The Geography of the Imagination. More than simply detailing an author/publisher relationship, these letters depict two fine minds educating and supporting each other in the service of literature.

A Table of Green Fields includes ten stories, variously about the painter Henry Scott Tuke, the mathematician James Joseph Sylvester, Kafka, Thoreau, along with some imaginary Frenchmen and Scandinavians, among others. Calculating the infinite in the finite, tracing geometries of desire, placing the obdurate world in an uncustomary light, each of these stories opens out its own world. Without giving up the plot or character of the traditional short story, Guy Davenport's inventions are complex events in which ideas and cultural history are a kind of music to which the characters dance. Despite the fractal, syncopated collage of his narrative style, Davenport's prose is objective, terse, and transparent. A constant theme in this book is the transmission of the past as an imaginative act; hence the title, Falstaff's dying vision of "a table of green fields," probably a mishearing of his recitation of the Twenty-third Psalm, corrected by editors to "he babbled of green fields," a symbol of all fiction, an art that must be exact about the uncertain.

Guy Davenport’s story collection A Table of Green Fields (New Directions, 1993) was praised for its amazing artistry and “stratospheric” literary intelligence (Kirkus Reviews). As The Washington Post noted, “It draws one in with its austere, beautifully formal sentences, its rich pattern of memory.” In Davenport’s follow-up collection, The Cardiff Team, the stories continue in this vein, their texts a wondrous collage of persons, events, and ideas from cultural history. The central theme is that of tribeless people joining, or trying to join, a team, a tribe, or a society. In “The Messengers,” Franz Kafka visits the Jungborn Health Spa in the Harz mountains and tries to feel comfortable in his own skin. In “Boys Smell Like Oranges,” a soccer team of boys from Henry de Montherlant’s Les Olympiques is its own contained tribe. The Cardiff Team perfectly displays Guy Davenport’s illustrious prose and his audacity; confirming The New Yorker’s assertion that his is “among the very few, truly original voices now audible in American letters.”

“One of the most sinuous stylists and searching minds of the twentieth century.”—Washington PostForty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport provides links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything ever written, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.Davenport serves as the reader’s guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Moore, Eudora Welty, Louis Zukovsky, and many others. Each essay is a tour of the history of ideas and imagination, written with wit and startling erudition.This Nonpareil edition includes a new introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

“The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination.The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes.”—Guy DavenportModernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called “assemblages”—lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, The Guy Davenport Reader offers the first true introduction to the far-ranging work of this neglected genius.

In his 1989 book on Balthus—the storied and controversial artist who worked in Paris throughout the twentieth century—Guy Davenport gives one of the most nuanced, literary, and compelling readings of the work of this master. Reading it today highlights the change in perspectives on sexuality and nudity in art in the past thirty years.Written over several years in his notebooks, Davenport’s distinct reflections on Balthus’s paintings try to explain why his work is so radical, and why it has so often come under scrutiny for its depiction of girls and women. Davenport throws the lens back on the viewer and asks: is it us or Balthus who reads sexuality into these paintings? For Davenport, the answer is clear: Balthus may indeed show us periods in adolescent development that are uncomfortable to view, but the eroticization exists primarily on the part of the viewer. Arguing that Balthus’s figures are erotic only if we make them so, and that their innocence is more present than anything pornographic in them, Davenport posits that the paintings hold up a mirror to our own perversities and force us, difficultly, to confront them. He writes, “The nearer an artist works to the erotic politics of his own culture, the more he gets its concerned attention. Gauguin’s naked Polynesian girls, brown and remote, escape the scandal of Balthus’s, although a Martian observer would not see the distinction.” Davenport’s critique helps us understand Balthus in our times—something we need more than ever as we crucially confront sexual politics in visual art.

Esteemed writer and translator Guy Davenport's brilliant story collection, first published in 1979, is recognized today as a classic of American fiction. Written with tremendous wit, intelligence, and verve, the stories are based on historical figures whose endeavors were too early, too late, or went against the grain of their time.