Kristen Case - Böcker

Why does William James matter for literary studies? And what can the practice of literary criticism bring to our reading of James? While James is widely credited as a founding figure for the fields of psychology, philosophy, religious studies, and progressive education, his equal significance for the field of literary criticism has been comparatively neglected. By modelling a variety of literary critical approaches to reading James and investigating James's equally various approaches to literature, this book demonstrates how his work historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study - namely, style, influence, and method. The volume's diverse contributions unfold and elaborate these three facets of James's literary critical paradigm as they manifest in the rousing character of his sentences, in the impactful disseminations of his formative relationships, and in his uniquely programmatic responsiveness to the urgent issues of his time.

Henry David Thoreau's thinking about a number of ​issues - including the relationship between humans and other species, just responses to state violence, the threat posed to human freedom by industrial capitalism, and the essential relation between scientific 'facts' and poetic 'truths' - speaks to our historical moment as clearly as it did to the 'restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century' into which he was born. This volume, marking the two-hundredth anniversary of Thoreau's birth, gathers the threads of the contemporary, interdisciplinary conversation around this key figure in literary, political, philosophical, and environmental thought, uniting new essays by scholars who have shaped the field with chapters by emerging scholars investigating previously underexplored aspects of Thoreau's life, writings, and activities. Both a dispatch from the front lines of Thoreau scholarship and a vivid demonstration of Thoreau's relevance for twenty-first-century life and thought, Thoreau at 200 will be of interest for both Thoreau scholars and general readers.

Innovative study that sees much of twentieth-century American poetry as enacting, in language, pragmatic philosophy.Wittgenstein wrote that "philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." American poetry has long engaged questions about subject and object, self and environment, reality and imagination, real and ideal that have dominated the Western philosophical tradition since the Enlightenment. Kristen Case's book argues that American poets from Emerson to Susan Howe have responded to the central problems of Western philosophy by performing, in language, the continually shifting relation between mind and world. Pragmatism, recognizing the futility of philosophy's attempt to fix the mind/world relation, announces the insights that these poets enact.Pursuing the flightsof pragmatist thinking into poetry and poetics, Case traces an epistemology that emerges from American writing, including that of Emerson, Marianne Moore, William James, and Charles Olson. Here mind and world are understood as inseparable, and the human being is regarded as, in Thoreau's terms, "part and parcel of Nature." Case presents a new picture of twentieth-century American poetry that disrupts our sense of the schools and lineages of modern and postmodern poetics, arguing that literary history is most accurately figured as a living field rather than a line. This book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and twentieth-century American poetry.Kristen Case is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington.

An immersive, beautifully illustrated revelation of Henry David Thoreau’s final project—a monthly almanac of natural phenomena.In the last years of his life, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a major new work, part scientific chart, and part re-envisioning of the way we experience the passage of time, Thoreau’s Kalendar was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of “general phenomena,” the Kalendar was an instrument for recording not just natural and weather-related phenomena, but also the hidden relations among them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can’t quite hold, rooted as we typically are in our own brief moment of linear time. Combining reproductions of Thoreau’s hand-drawn charts with transcriptions of the Kalendar’s text and essays by acclaimed poet and scholar Kristen Case, this gorgeously crafted volume illuminates the final project of one of America’s most treasured writers and naturalists and offers a timeless, transformative vision of how to live harmoniously with the living world around us.

The nineteenth century is often viewed as a golden age of American literature, a historical moment when national identity was emergent and ideals such as freedom, democracy, and individual agency were promising, even if belied in reality by violence and hypocrisy. The writers of this “American Renaissance”—Thoreau, Fuller, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson, among many others—produced a body of work that has been both celebrated and contested by following generations.As the twenty-first century unfolds in a United States characterized by deep divisions, diminished democracy, and dramatic transformation of identities, the co-editors of this singular book approached a dozen North American poets, asking them to engage with texts by their predecessors in a manner that avoids both aloofness from the past and too-easy elegy. The resulting essays dwell provocatively on the border between the lyrical and the scholarly, casting fresh critical light on the golden age of American literature and exploring a handful of texts not commonly included in its canon.A polyvocal collection that reflects the complexity of the cross-temporal encounter it enacts, 21 | 19 offers a re-reading of the “American Renaissance” and new possibilities for imaginative critical practice today.