Robert G. Eisenhauer's Books

Archeologies of Invective

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Focusing on specimens of discourse where criticism assumes a flagrantly bucolic persona, Archeologies of Invective investigates hitherto little acknowledged contexts of irony, aggressivity, and vilification. After considering briefly Lucilius and Horace, the author evaluates such diverse figures as Poggio Bracciolini, Quevedo, Dunbar, Poe, and Mencken before proceeding to sustained discussion of Goethe's Italian Journey, Werther, and the Invektiven. In terms of prime-time satiric virtuosity, Byron's Don Juan recycles pastoral animus, acting as a rogue-like mirror-text of the Schiller/Goethe Xenien of the late 1790s. Sidney's double sestina and Villon's Ballad of the Women of Paris are seen inaugurating the modern age, while, at the dawn of the avant-garde, Verlaine's Invectives sample Goethean and Villonesque attitude at a new level of recherché vulgarity. Low- and Highbrow, outlaw and Philistine resurface in Wyndham Lewis's Arcadian perspective on the artist-intellectual. Poets Robert Frost and Theodore Enslin are seen reinvigoratoring the edgily agrest scene of invective in America. Archeologies of Invective situates itself also with respect to a psychohistorical terrain - altered states of consciousness reflecting Faustian transition: the dislocation of the peasant class, the empowerment of women as a heterological state within a state, the advent of modern weaponry, and the rise of alcohol - whose genealogy becomes nothing short of a gin-eology. Stable notions of character give way to impersonal, pantomimic terms of art, such as caliber; the hero is displaced by the wanderer, thief, madman, and clown. Not limiting itself to the literary canon, Archeologies includes analyses of gangster films and sports legends in the context of Arcadian motivation. Finally, Eisenhauer places Philip Roth's American Pastoral within the arc of 19th-century pastoral fiction, locating a prosaic Nowadays in which criticism is still inscribed, as evidenced by Fish's explication of pastoral in the context of professional correctness.

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234

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Peter Lang

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ISBN 10

1433101645

ISBN 13

9781433101649

Parables of Disfiguration

Reason and Excess from Romanticism to the Avant-garde

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Parables of Disfiguration

Reason and Excess from Romanticism to the Avant-garde

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Parables of Disfiguration examines literary and cinematic texts from the Romantic period forward, offering fresh perspectives on the vicissitudes of reason and excess - seen as moments leading to a seizure by sophia (wisdom). Reading canonical works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also less familiar poems such as The Revolt of Islam, Robert Eisenhauer draws attention to a series of transits involving the operation of chance and the playful distortions of the scholarly anagram. Hart Crane and Walt Whitman are seen pursuing Dionysiac vocations in the attempt to advance a poetics of melancholy anatomy. Fellini's landmark film La Dolce Vita recuperates or «re-Vamps» Roman and more exotic (American) character-types, while parabolically excavating ancient names. Further essays are devoted to William Burroughs's representation of the Arab underclass (with reference to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz), Edward Dorn's Heideggerian epic Gunslinger, the city in twentieth-century utopian vision, and the concept of the ephemeral in modernist aesthetics. Parables of Disfiguration concludes by reading Wallace Stevens's wintry and complex «Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird» tropically - in the context of haiku verse, the Yucatán, Hunter Thompson's «Gonzo» journalism, Plutarch, and an exquisite vehicle combining excess with vindictive righteousness, the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle.

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426

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Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820478873

ISBN 13

9780820478876

After Romanticism

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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After Romanticism

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Discussing two cinematic interpretations of Terence Rattigan's play The Browning Version, Eisenhauer traces the use/abuse of names in the rhetoric of academic and political vilification. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aeschylus, Browning, Golding, and Adorno, he finds the current state of discourse in need of "heavy teaching," so that the repressed subject of democracy/tyranny can surpass the psychopathology of the Same." "Analyzing Fellini's radical revision of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the author suggests how inscrutability saves the audience from guilt because the viewer cannot arrive at apodictic certainty concerning the "subject screened." While Poe lampoons "the transcendentals" as a kind of disease, implying readerly guilt by association, and solidifying the letter T, Fellini, by valorizing theatrical illusion, fails to translate a text that teaches the reader more than he or she is prepared to know.

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228

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Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

1433103524

ISBN 13

9781433103520

Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts approaches literary and visual texts from the perspective of Hesperian identification and representation. Included is the first translation into English of Fichte's Supplement of 1801, a document whose content sheds light not only on the atheism controversy of the 1790s, but also on literary/philosophical polarizations in the «Republic of Letters». Condensed from the Hesperian atmospherics of Italy and Latin elegy, Faust II entails a Goethean celebration of auditory and visual sensation. In a text devoted to Shelley, Gregory Corso is seen elaborating a prosopopoeia involving Hypnos, god of sleep, a figure dispelling the effects of reading - the hypnoticon. Eisenhauer reads Hölderlin in the context of Pindar, philosophical idealism, and autobiographical projection.

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404

Publisher

Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820472522

ISBN 13

9780820472522

The Fate of Translation

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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The Fate of Translation

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

With two essays devoted to Wordsworth, The Fate of Translation reframes the discussion of Hesperian aesthetics initiated in Robert Eisenhauer's Mythic Paradigms, suggesting how the question of translation poses itself at the crossing of textual high- and low-roads: on the one hand, in the critical and scholarly debate concerning the relevance of Goethe's «Der Wandrer» (in the English version by William Taylor) to the primal/primary scene of autobiography and, on the other, in the reprojection of supernatural agency (numen) in the context of the Literature of Power. Confrontational deixis and a hermeneutic counterturn energize Wordsworth's self-assertive resensing of antiquity and modernity via satire, pastoral, and the sonnet. The third essay, ranging from Pindarizing texts by Cowley, Goethe, and Hölderlin to the films of Matthew Barney, shifts the focus to mimetic enthusiasms among translators and replicators of the «full fan-experience.» John Barth's intriguing analogy between metafiction and fractal geometry serves as the catalyst for a reading of texts by Thomas Browne and Friedrich Schlegel, a major painting by Philipp Otto Runge, and The Arabian Nights as malignly received by Poe. The arabesque and grotesque are seen as engaged in a problematics of passion at the utopian end of art, a consensualist paradigm akin to the Dionysian liberation of the subject/player/fan in baseball - one whose field of implication includes Nietzsche and contemporary novelists. Eisenhauer reads Padgett Powell's Edisto as a declamatory mini-epic divergent in its muthos from the tradition of the «American hieroglyphic». Edisto's fictive reinvention of the South suggests a revisiting of the Literature of Power as priviledged, emancipative counterfacticity of «other truth» congruent with the fictive worlds of Cable, Faulkner, and Günther Grass.

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276

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Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820463434

ISBN 13

9780820463438

Ode Consciousness

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Ode Consciousness

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Ode Consciousness examines a preeminent literary form in its three-thousand-year history, navigating between philosophy and literature, offering cross-cultural perspectives on a poetic logic informed by polar intensities of sensuous cognition. Making a double incision on the corpus, Robert Eisenhauer interprets works by Henry Vaughan and the modernist Frank O'Hara, foregrounding the text, but also the text(-ile) message, and the dialogical weave of enunciation. The ancient Chinese ode, translated by Karlgren and estranged by Pound, anchors sentience in the flora and fauna of physical nature, and the I Jing or Book of Changes offers insights on poetry, psychoanalysis, and aleatoriness per se. The rise of the ode in the West is contemporary with that of a philosophical discourse concerning clarity and obscurity of thought. While Milton widens the esoteric scope, Lovelace concretizes ode consciousness through the image of a frozen grasshopper («green ice»), whose non-longevity is contrasted with the human capacity for survival through friendship. Translating the «Polish Horace» (Sarbiewski), Coleridge prepares the ground for the lyricism of Keats and Shelley, raising the neural stakes through passages of lingering, delay, and intoxication. A negative capability inclusive of desire as well as nihilation inhabits Jalal al-Din Rumi and the Arabic qasida. Affliction, a key concept for the Baroque, is discussed in the context of film noir, while Hegel's privileging in the Aesthetics of Schiller's «Song of the Bell» is seen as part of a larger attempt to censure the radical re-Pindarization and revolutionary retexting of the ode, most notably in Klopstock and Hölderlin. The author analyzes the role played by impersonality in Yeats's attempt to recrystallize Keatsian and Confucian sensibility through «annotated seeing» and the opening of windows of clairvoyant perception. Eisenhauer also suggests parallels between O'Hara's autumnal glimpses of New York City at the height of modernism and Keatsian sensibility. Ode Consciousness concludes by examining the return of the repressed in the graphic novels of Osamu Tezuka, thereby enriching our understanding of the ode's perennial relevance.

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282

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Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

1433107333

ISBN 13

9781433107337

Paradox and Perspicacity

Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Paradox and Perspicacity

Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Paradox and Perspicacity: Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text enters into a dialogue with recent scholarship on a number of fronts. Taking into full account the role played by esotericism in shaping the thought of Leibniz, Cardano, and the Helmonts, Robert Eisenhauer elaborates Lessing's «cybernetic» view of historical evolution. The essay on Jean Paul's ars recombinatoria discusses how the discourses of travel, cosmology, and millennial speculation are applied to a Diderot-inspired project of encyclopedic emancipation, concluding with remarks on the author's pedagogical relevance to German-speaking Jews. At mid-century, Margaret Fuller's feminist texts place a Fourierist edge on the consensual reading of Richter, while The Blithedale Romance represents pastoral utopia as a site of mesmeric or, indeed, entropic dislocation. Henry James's The Europeans revisits «Blithedale» as a «ship of fools», where the vehicular provides a metaphor for fiction and narrative itself becomes identified with iconic distress. The remaining essays treat Pound in the context of gemology and courtliness, quasi-direct discourse in Dostoevsky, and the role of Zeno's paradox in Claude Simon's fiction.

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360

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Peter Lang

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ISBN 10

0820474967

ISBN 13

9780820474960

Aftermyths

Hysteria, Colloquialism, and Caricature in the Age of Doubt

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

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Aftermyths

Hysteria, Colloquialism, and Caricature in the Age of Doubt

By: Robert G. Eisenhauer

Aftermyths investigates fault-lines in literary and visual representation from 1870 to the early twentieth century as they range from a faux essentialism, often with ethnic overtones, to a «cadence of decadence» reflecting the dissensions of modernity. Reading Henry James and Mark Twain with side-glances to the cartoon revolution of Rudolf Dirks and Richard Felton Outcault, Robert Eisenhauer delves into the archive of frontier or histrionic «decadence, » «Americanness, » and «Germanness.» Pastoral idiom and foreign words, «incomprehensible to us as so many dead languages, » reflect Hesperian micrology on the part of the Übergossiper James, a discursive «katzenjammer» effect, while Twain's difficulties with German exemplify a strategy of emancipation informed by minstrel-like showmanship and a river or streetwise skepticism. In addition, Eisenhauer applies key concepts of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project to New York City after 1920. Mayor Jimmy Walker and urban planner Robert Moses are seen as Dionysian and Apollonian instances contesting the meta-arcades of Manhattan at the intersection of epic, lyric, and drama. Outcault's «Opera in Ryan's Arcade» vernacularizes the difference between uptown and downtown, high art and low «un-art.» With the premise that Freud's definition of caricature in Totem and Taboo remains valid, Aftermyths goes on to investigate the bear as a mimetic paradigm for Nietzsche's «not yet determined animal» homo sapiens. Finally, Eisenhauer suggests affinities between two fictions of immortality, Grass's Flounder and Hamill's Forever, before returning to the downtown scene for remarks on Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

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274

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Peter Lang

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820486973

ISBN 13

9780820486970

Book's by Robert G. Eisenhauer

Archeologies of Invective

Archeologies of Invective

Parables of Disfiguration

Parables of Disfiguration

After Romanticism

After Romanticism

Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts

The Fate of Translation

The Fate of Translation

Ode Consciousness

Ode Consciousness

Paradox and Perspicacity

Paradox and Perspicacity

Aftermyths

Aftermyths

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