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Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > From 1900
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American Tantalus - Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture (Hardcover)
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American Tantalus - Horizons, Happiness, and the Impossible Pursuits of US Literature and Culture (Hardcover)
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"American Tantalus "argues that modern US fictions often grow
preoccupied by tantalisation. This keyword might seem commonplace;
thesauruses, certainly, often lump it in with tease and torment in
their general inventories of desire. Such lists, however, mislead.
Just as most US dictionaries have in fact long recognised
tantalise's origins in "The Odyssey," so they have defined it as
the unique desire we feel for objects that (like the fruit and
water once cruelly placed before Tantalus) lie within our reach yet
withdraw from our attempts to touch them. On these terms, "American
Tantalus" shows, tantalise not only describes a particular kind of
thwarted desire, but also one that dominates modern US fiction to a
remarkable extent. For this term specifically evokes the yearning
to touch alienated or virginal objects that we find examined by F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Cade Bambara, Richard Wright and Toni
Morrison; and it also indicates the insatiable pursuit of the
horizon so important to Willa Cather and Edith Wharton among
others. This eclectic canon indeed "prefers" the dictionary to the
thesaurus: unreachable destinations and untouched commodities here
indeed tantalise, inviting gestures of inquiry from which they then
recoil. This focus, while lodging cycles of tantalisation at the
very heart of American myth, holds profound implications for our
understanding of modernity, and, in particular, of the cultural
genesis of the commodity as a form.
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