Transcribing the Territory; or, Rethinking Resistance
A Study in Classic American Fiction
©2012
Monographs
281 Pages
Series:
Warsaw Studies in English Language and Literature, Volume 6
Summary
Inspired by Martin Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, this study presents a quasi-phenomenological close reading of Herman Melville’s most famous novella Bartleby the Scrivener and Mark Twain’s most famous novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is meant as a broad critique of both cultural and intellectual rhetoric of recalcitrance, estrangement and awayness that has long predominated within interpretations of American literature. The study refers selectively to the works of such classic authors as James F. Cooper, Washington Irving, R. W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Donald Barthelme. As an extended intertextual footnote, Transcribing the Territory advances also a more positive existential appreciation of the ostensibly forbidding landscape of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous romance The Scarlet Letter.
Details
- Pages
- 281
- Publication Year
- 2012
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783653019698
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631635407
- DOI
- 10.3726/978-3-653-01969-8
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2012 (October)
- Keywords
- Martin Heidegger Herman Melville Bartleby being-in-the-world existential phenomenology individual vs. society Mark Twain American stereotypes
- Published
- Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2012. 281 pp.
- Product Safety
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