1 option
Inceptions : literary beginnings and contingencies of form / Kevin Ohi.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Ohi, Kevin, 1972- author.
- Series:
- Fordham scholarship online.
- Fordham scholarship online
- Language:
- English
- Subjects (All):
- Openings (Rhetoric).
- American literature--History and criticism.
- American literature.
- English literature--History and criticism.
- English literature.
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource (336 pages).
- Edition:
- First edition.
- Place of Publication:
- New York : Fordham University Press, 2021.
- Summary:
- From Henry James's New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot's epigraphs, from Ovid's play with meter to Charles Dickens's thematising of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens's abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin's, Carson McCullers's, and Eudora Welty's descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Inception introduces a fundamental contingency into texts and psyches alike: in the beginning, all could have been otherwise. For Kevin Ohi, the act of inception, and the potential it embodies, enables us to see making and unmaking coincide within the mechanism of creation. In this sense, 'Inceptions' traces an ethics of reading, the possibility of perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.
- Contents:
- Exordium
- Potentiality and gesture. Revision, origin, and the courage of truth : Henry James's New York Edition prefaces
- "First love" : gesture and the emergence of desire in Eudora Welty
- Novels and the beginnings of character. Robinson Crusoe and the inception of speech
- The clock finger at nought : Daniel Deronda and the positing of perspective
- Proto-reading and the positing of character in Our mutual friend
- Our stony ancestry. Ovid and Orpheus
- Wallace Stevens and the temporalities of inception and embodiment
- Solitude and queer origins. "Epitaph, the idiom of man" : imaginings of the beginning
- Etiology, solitude, and queer incipience.
- Notes:
- This edition also issued in print: 2021.
- Includes bibliographical references and index.
- Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on August 10, 2021).
- Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.
- ISBN:
- 9780823297252
- 082329725X
- 9780823294640
- 0823294641
- OCLC:
- 1243057147
The Penn Libraries is committed to describing library materials using current, accurate, and responsible language. If you discover outdated or inaccurate language, please fill out this feedback form to report it and suggest alternative language.