Another Music: Polemics and PleasuresTransaction Publishers, 31 dic 2011 - 261 pagine 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). |
Sommario
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 |
251 | |
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aesthetic American artist beauty Brandenburger Tor Brenan British Broch Bulldog bullfighting bulls contemporary criticism Croce culture D. H. Lawrence death defined definition diction difficult East Eliot Emerson English essay Ezra Pound fact Falange fiction figure final finally find fine fire first five foreign Freud George Santayana German historian idea influence intellectual Iris Murdoch Joyce Joyce’s language Larkin Last Puritan Lemp letters literary history literature living Lorca Ludens matadors mean mind moral nature never novel Office officers official old age Oliver Oliver’s one’s Ordofiez Philip Larkin philosophy poem poet poetic poetry political Potsdamer Platz Pound Praz prose reader reflects remains romantic Russian Schlafwandler sense sexual Shelley ship significance snobbery social Spain Spanish specific style T. S. Eliot taste theory things thought tion tradition tragedy tragic translation truth turn U-boat USIA verse Vopos Walt Whitman West Berlin Whitman words writes young