Author : Blanche H. Gelfant
Release : 1995-01-27
Genre : Literary Collections
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Book Rating : 387/5 ( reviews)

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Cross-Cultural Reckonings - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Cross-Cultural Reckonings write by Blanche H. Gelfant. This book was released on 1995-01-27. Cross-Cultural Reckonings available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Blanche H. Gelfant's book Cross-Cultural Reckonings both demonstrates and questions the applicability of postmodern cultural and literary theories to realistic texts - to fiction and autobiographies valued for their truth. Drawing together an unusual combination of Russian, American, and Canadian writers, the various essays of this book provide new and original perspectives upon the puzzling issues of national identity, of historical change and continuity, of gender and the integrity of literary genres, the boundaries between text and context, and the underlying if overlooked conflicts between the postmodern critic's skepticism and a writer's belief in the transcendence of art and truth. To avoid the contingencies inherent in binary comparisons, the essays in this book seek a triadic form analogous to the triptych or polyptych of the visual arts. Multi-faceted, non-linear, and open-ended, such a form might allow the academic essay to recover a waywardness that traces back to Montaigne, cited in prefactory notes, and to the etymological meaning of the essay as an exagium or weighing, as an act of reckoning. A study at once elegant, erudite, and personal, Cross-Cultural Reckonings reckons with writers of different backgrounds and reputation in whom Gelfant discovers surprising affinities - among them the Russian writers Lydia Chukovskaya, Natalya Baranskaya, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn; Ethel Wilson, a highly reputed Canadian writer; the famous cross-cultural figure, Emma Goldman; and established as well as new or rediscovered American writers, such as Willa Cather, Saul Bellow, Arlene Heyman, and Meridel Le Sueur. These writers are discussed singly and in comparative essays, each of whichis discrete and self-contained, while all interconnect and reflect upon each other as exemplary demonstrations of cross-cultural literary criticism and the deferred final judgment that results from a weighing and reweighing of books.