Gary Snyder, Alan Hovhaness, and Writing the Blast

This chapter examines the metaregional dimensions of the Pacific Northwest and the ways in which its very inscription as a region elucidates the fraught and contested relation between text and place in American literature. Elettra Bedon coined the term “metaregionalism” to describe a self-conscious manipulation of certain forms of dialect. On analogy with metafiction, metaregionalism might be said to foreground the assumptions involved in traditional ascriptions of place. The chapter first considers the epistemology of space before discussing how the Pacific Northwest was tackled in the writings of Gary Snyder, Ursula Le Guin, and Richard Brautigan. It also analyzes the fiction of William Gibson and Douglas Coupland; Gibson deploys Vancouver to achieve critical distance from the behemoths of U.S. capitalism, and Coupland brings his native Pacific Northwest into the wider oceanic orbit of Asia and Australasia in order to chart a generational passage away from domestic security and entitlement.

Download Full-text

Nature, Knowledge, and Protest

Moving the Social ◽

10.46586/mts.65.2021.149-163 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 65 ◽

pp. 149-163

Author(s):

Jan Kellershohn

Keyword(s):

West Germany ◽

Nuclear Movement ◽

Gary Snyder ◽

Versity Press

Melanie Arndt: Tschernobylkinder. Die transnationale Geschichte einer nuklearen Ka- tastrophe, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020, 499 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525- 35208-3. Nils Güttler: Alles über das Fliegen. Eine politische Wissensgeschichte des Frankfurter Flughafens, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 2020, 123 pp., ISBN: 978-3-85132-981-0. Katrin Jordan: Ausgestrahlt. Die mediale Debatte um „Tschernobyl“ in der Bundesrepu- blik und in Frankreich 1986/87, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018, 424 pp., ISBN: 978-3- 8353-3304-8. Stephen Milder: Greening Democracy. The Anti-Nuclear Movement and Political Envi- ronmentalism in West Germany and Beyond, 1968–1983, Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2017, 280 pp., ISBN: 978-1-107-13510-9. Christian Möller: Umwelt und Herrschaft in der DDR. Politik, Protest und die Gren- zen der Partizipation in der Diktatur, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020, 396 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525-31096-0. Martin Spenger: Green Beat. Gary Snyder und die moderne amerikanische Umweltbe- wegung, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020, 239 pp., ISBN: 978-3-525- 31098-4.

Download Full-text

R. Crumb

10.14325/mississippi/9781496831859.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

David Stephen Calonne

Keyword(s):

Charles Dickens ◽

Jack Kerouac ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Gary Snyder ◽

Spiritual Quest ◽

Jean Paul ◽

Book Of Genesis ◽

The Impact ◽

Jelly Roll

Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self is the first monograph to explore the intersection between Crumb’s love of literature, his search for the meaning of life and the ways he connects his own autobiography with the themes of the writers he has admired. Crumb’s comics from the beginning reflected the fact that he was a voracious reader from childhood and perused a variety of authors including Charles Dickens, J.D. Salinger, and, during his adolescence, Beat writers like Jack Kerouac. He was profoundly influenced by music, especially the blues, and the ecstatic power of music appears in his artwork throughout his career. The first chapter explores the ways Robert Crumb illustrates works by William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Charles Bukowski. The book continues with individual chapters devoted to Crumb’s illustrations of biographies of blues musicians Jelly Roll Morton and Charley Patton; Philip K. Dick; Jean-Paul Sartre; Franz Kafka; and concludes with an exploration of Crumb’s illustrations to the book of Genesis. In all his drawings accompanying literary texts, Crumb returns to a number of key themes regarding his personal spiritual quest such as suffering and existential solitude; the search for romantic and sexual love; the impact of entheogens such as LSD on his quest for answers to his cosmic questions. We discover that Crumb gradually embraces a mysticism rooted in his studies of Gnosticism. In the final chapter on the book of Genesis, readers may observe the ways Crumb continues his critique of monotheistic religion in a variety of subtle ways. Robert Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self concludes with an Epilogue which discusses Crumb’s present-day life in France and the ways he has continued to engage with spiritual and philosophical themes in his later work.

Download Full-text

The poetics of learning in the texts of Gary Snyder

10.12681/eadd/21715 ◽

2004 ◽

Author(s):

Βασίλειος Σταυρόπουλος

Keyword(s):

Alternative Education ◽

Transfer Of Learning ◽

Human Mind ◽

Physical Work ◽

Gary Snyder ◽

Poetic Tradition ◽

The Earth ◽

The World ◽

Essential Knowledge ◽

The One

The aim of this dissertation is to explore how the poetics of Gary Snyder constitute a valuable source of learning transmitted through performance and orality. The ethnopoetic approach specifies the way learning occurs in the mythic and poetic universe of Snyder. Preparation for a hunt becomes a proposal for alternative education, while the function of the shaman-protopoet broadens the scope of learning in every dimension of the world, both on the realistic and supernatural planes. Snyder demonstrates the passing on of the practice through a grand performative parable of a father-to-son instruction which is realized in constant dialogue with the old masters, for the betterment of the community. There is a personal dimension of learning that takes place as a result of enlightenment, based on the poetic physiognomy of tools on the one hand, and physical work with work rhythm, on the other hand. The performance of nature facilitates the transfer of learning and provides a multiplicity of remarkable levels of consideration regarding its ability to generate essential knowledge. Moreover, learning is not withheld, but is transmitted back to the community that needs it, in order to define the “how to be” on this planet. Finally, applying the ecocritical approach I comment on the significance of "old song and tale,” which constitutes the inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration, the great literary “compost” in the American poetic tradition. The poet becomes a seeker of learning in the flux of natural events, which he studies as a kind of performative, ever-fresh text. The challenge for the poet, as this thesis desciibes, is to become worthy of the apocalyptic knowledge nature offers to the adept seekers of the learning that inhabits the realm of wild landscape of the earth and the human mind.

Download Full-text