Cross-cultural visions in African American modernism: from spatial narrative to jazz haiku

(print) ix, 251 p. ; 24 cmThe Chicago Renaissance, Theodore Dreiser, and Richard Wright's spatial narrative -- The cross-cultural vision of Ralph Ellison's Invisible man -- No name in the street : James Baldwin's exploration of American urban culture -- If Beale Street could talk : Baldwin's search for love and identity -- Jazz and Toni Morrison's urban imagination of desire and subjectivity -- Wright's The outsider and French existentialism -- Pagan Spain : Wright's discourse on religion and culture -- The African "primal outlook upon life" : Wright and Morrison -- The poetics of nature : Wright's haiku, Zen, and Lacan -- Private voice and Buddhist enlightenment in Alice Walker's The color purple -- Cross-cultural poetics : Sonia Sanchez's Like the singing coming off the drums -- James Emanuel's jazz haiku and African American individualismItem embargoed for five year

Cy Twombly. Image, Text, Paratext

The artworks of the US artist Cy Twombly (1928–2011) are considered to be hermetic and inaccessible. Pencil scribblings, explosions of paint, tumbling lines, overlapping layers of color, and inscriptions, geometrical figures, numerals, rows of numbers, words, fragments of quotations, and enigmatic work-titles present very special challenges to both researchers and viewers. In the interdisciplinary and transcultural research method of the Morphomata International Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Cologne, a conference was held in June 2012 that brought art historians together with renowned scholars of Egyptology, Archaeology, German, Greek, English, Japanese, and the Romance languages, i.e. all the fields and cultural spheres that were a source of inspiration for the œuvre of Cy Twombly. While these scholars inquire into the relation between title, work, and inscribed quotations, leading representatives of research on Twombly focus on the visual language and scriptural-imagistic quality of Cy Twombly’s work. Through comprehensive interpretations of famous single works and groups in all the artistic media employed by Twombly, the volume’s cross-disciplinary view opens up a route into the associative-referential visual language of Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly. Bild, Text, Paratext

Die Bildwerke des US-amerikanischen Künstlers Cy Twombly (1928–2011) gelten als hermetisch und schwer zugänglich. Bleistiftgekritzel, Farbballungen, taumelnde Linien, einander überlagernde Farbschichten und Einschreibungen, geometrische Figuren, Zahlen, Zahlenreihen, Wörter, Zitatfragmente und rätselhafte Bildtitel stellen Forscher wie Betrachter vor ganz besondere Herausforderungen. Gemäß der interdisziplinär-transkulturellen Forschungsmethode des Internationalen Kollegs Morphomata an der Universität zu Köln versammelte im Juni 2012 ein Kongress neben Kunsthistorikern auch namhafte Fachleute aus den Bereichen Ägyptologie, Archäologie, Germanistik, Gräzistik, Anglistik, Japanologie und Romanistik, d.h. all jenen Fachgebieten und Kulturkreisen, die eine Inspirationsquelle für das OEuvre Cy Twomblys darstellten. Befragen diese den Bezug zwischen Werktitel, Werk und eingeschriebenen Zitaten, so legen führende Vertreter der Twomblyforschung den Fokus auf Bildsprache und Schriftbildlichkeit bei Cy Twombly. Durch umfassende Deutungen berühmter Einzelwerke und Werkgruppen in sämtlichen von Twombly angewandten künstlerischen Medien erschließt der Band in einem fächerübergreifenden Blick einen Zugang zur assoziativ-referentiellen Bildsprache Cy Twomblys

Richard Wright and Haiku

https://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/facultybooks/24/thumbnail.jpgIn the last years of his life, Richard Wright, the fierce and original American novelist known for Native Son and Black Boy, wrote over four thousand haiku. In Richard Wright and Haiku, Yoshinobu Hakutani considers Wright the poet and his late devotion to the spare, unrhymed verse that dwells on human beings’ relationship to the natural world rather than on their relationships with one another, a strong departure from the intense and often conflicted relationships that had dominated his fiction. Wright was not the only famous American author to be attracted to the art of haiku. Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation novelist known for On the Road and The Dharma Bums, also explored the form and wrote many haiku. For guidance Wright and Kerouac both turned to the four-volume critical history and collection Haiku by R. H. Blythe. Wright went on to emulate such classic haiku poets as Basho, Buson, and Issa as well as the modernist Shiki. Richard Wright and Haiku is presented in two parts. In the first, Hakutani traces the genesis and development of haiku in Japan, discusses the role of earlier poets, including Yone Noguchi and Ezra Pound, in the verse’s development in Japan and in the West, and deals with both haiku and haiku criticism written in English. He goes on to describe how Wright acquired the theory and technique of haiku composition and offers a historical and critical study of Wright’s haiku. Integral to Hakutani’s analysis is an exploration of what Wright in his Black Power: A Record of Reactions in the Land of Pathos called “the African primal outlook upon life.” Hakutani delves into how this view inspired Wright to turn to first the study of and then the writing of haiku. In the final chapter of the first part, Hakutani invites readers to try seeing Wright’s haiku as “senryu,” or humorous haiku. This departure from the relentlessly serious lens through which nearly all of Wright’s work is viewed by critics helps to expand readers’ perspectives on the poems and on Wright himself. In part two, Hakutani presents a selection of Wright’s poems from Haiku: This Other World. Each of the selected haiku is accompanied by a note that will provide assistance in interpretation and offers such additional information as definitions of critical or technical terms and bibliographical details.</p

East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchanges from Yeats to Morrison

https://kent-islandora.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/facultybooks/110/thumbnail.jpgThis study traces the shaping presence of cultural interactions, arguing that American literature has become a hybridization of Eastern and Western literary traditions. Cultural exchanges between the East and West began in the early decades of the nineteenth century as American transcendentalists explored Eastern philosophies and arts. Hakutani examines this influence through the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. He further demonstrates the East-West exchange through discussions of the interactions by modernists such as Yone Noguchi, Yeats, Pound, Camus, and Kerouac. Finally, he argues that African American literature, represented by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and James Emanuel, is postmodern. Their works exhibit their concerted efforts to abolish marginality and extend referentiality, exemplifying the postmodern East-West crossroads of cultures. A fuller understanding of their work is gained by situating them within this cultural conversation. The writings of Wright, for example, take on their full significance only when they are read, not as part of a national literature, but as an index to an evolving literature of cultural exchanges.</p