Another Music: Polemics and Pleasures

Capa
Transaction Publishers, 31 de dez. de 2011 - 261 páginas
As the essays in this book attest, in a time of specialization John McCormick chose diversification, a choice determined by a life spent in many occupations and many countries. After his five years in the U. S. Navy in the Second World War, the academy beckoned by way of the G. I. Bill, graduate training, and a career in teaching. Prosperity in the American university at the time meant setting up as a "Wordsworth man," a "Keats man," or a "Dr. Johnson man": all chilling to the author. He chose self-exile in which he disguised himself as an "Americanist" saleable in Europe, and lectured happily in comparative studies: literature, history, and philosophy. Thus the broad range of this volume, both in subject matter and in the span of time it covers. The essays are divided into three sections. First are general and personal essays on a variety of topics, followed by work on individual writers, and third, writings on criticism and theory. A section on Santayana reflects his eight years of research for Santayana's biography. The writings on Spain and toreo (bullfighting) result from another long-held interest, together with the author's attempt to alter some of the romantic nonsense about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, too often the entire substance of what the general public knows about Spain. McCormick has long been convinced that without knowledge of bullfighting, the foreigner cannot comprehend arcane and wonderful aspects of the Spanish character. The coda, "Another Music," is an old man's attempt to solve the mysterious algebra of how the world turns now, and how the young appear to the aged. While the volume is diverse in its range of writers--from Whitman in America to Santayana in Europe, taken as a collectivity, these essays provide a sense of the grandeur as well as the decadent in twentieth century politics and aesthetics alike. Written with the literary taste and political non-conformity that still characterizes McCormick, the volume is a treat for the specialist (perhaps) and for the generalist (certainly).

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Conteúdo

The Berlin Uprising
3
The United Snopes Information Service
17
Federal Censorship
33
Gott Mit Whom?
37
A Most Mysterious Disaster
47
On Taste
51
Down Low and Hard Up
57
Snobbery and the American Scene
61
Toward a Comparative American Literary History
135
Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar
145
A Novel of Ideas
149
Santayanas Idea of the Tragic
153
The Last Puritan Once More
165
Santayanas Reading of Freud
171
George Santayana and Ezra Pound
183
Santayanas The Sense of Beauty
199

Part 2
65
The Rational Shelley
67
Orientalist or Nationalist?
71
The Urbane and the Urban
85
An English Bohemian in Spain
91
Lorca in Our Time
95
Philip Larkin
103
James Joyce and Hermann Broch
115
Part 3
125
Problems of Poetic Prose in English and French
127
Down with Translation
131
Mnemosyne
205
Benedetto Croces Æsthetic
211
Franco Spain and the Third Reich
217
Antonio Ordóñez and Others
221
The Bullfight Gentrified
227
Coda
233
Another Music
235
Name Index
245
Another Music
251
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Página 72 - I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things...
Página 79 - What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see that if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.
Página 80 - The Americans, of all nations at any time upon the earth, have probably the fullest poetical Nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.
Página 72 - I sleep — I sleep long. I do not know it — it is without name — it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.
Página 81 - Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes. . . . Here are the roughs and beards and space and ruggedness and nonchalance that the soul loves.
Página 81 - His spirit responds to his country's spirit: he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes. Mississippi with annual freshets and changing chutes, Missouri and Columbia and Ohio and Saint Lawrence with the Falls and beautiful masculine Hudson, do not embouchure where they spend themselves more than they embouchure into him.
Página 241 - Give me the map there. — Know that we "have divided In three, our kingdom ; and 'tis our fast intent To shake all cares and business from our age ; Conferring them on younger strengths, while we Unburdened crawl toward death. — Our son of Cornwall, And you, our no less loving son of Albany, We have this hour a constant will to publish Our daughters' several dowers, that future strife May be prevented now.
Página 213 - Beauty in this physical reproduction of 'expression'. He says : 'Monuments of Art the stimulents of aesthetic reproduction are called beautiful things or physical Beauty. This combination of words constitutes a verbal paradox, for the beautiful is not a physical fact; it does not belong to things, but to the activity of man to spiritual energy'.
Página 72 - I do not know it— it is without name— it is a word unsaid, It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol. Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on, To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me. Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters. Do you see O my brothers and sisters? It is not chaos or death— it is form, union, plan— it is eternal life— it is Happiness.
Página 81 - When the long Atlantic coast stretches longer, and the Pacific coast stretches longer, he easily stretches with them north or south. He spans between them also from east to west, and reflects what is between them. On him rise solid growths that offset the growths of pine and cedar and hemlock...

Sobre o autor (2011)

John McCormick (1918-2010) taught American Studies at the Free University, Berlin, and later went on to become distinguished professor of comparative literature at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous works, including Bullfighting, American and European Literary Imagination, Catastrophe and Imagination, and Fiction as Knowledge.

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