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Yeats and the Logic of Formalism deals with formalism as a
philosophy in Yeats's works and how that in turn affects both his
art and his politics. Vereen M. Bell's understanding of
""formalism"" and ""philosophy"" stems from a meditation by Yeats
in a manuscript note: ""Sometimes I doubt life's values behind my
own thought. They should have been there before the stream began,
before it became necessary for the work to create them."" In Bell's
reading, formalism is not simply a philosophy of art but a
philosophy of life as directed by art - an existential one at its
source. While Bell understands that formalism is not a
paradigm-shifting topic in today's theoretical debates, he does
attempt to reconsider the concept's credibility in the context of
other competing theoretical discourses. Bell invokes and elaborates
upon Edward Said's reading of Yeats as a special kind of colonial
subject. He revisits the issue of how much Yeats and Nietzsche have
in common and tries to show, in the manner of J Hillis Miller, that
the primordial is for Yeats what formalism ultimately sets itself
against. ""Yeats and the Logic of Formalism"" mediates between
older, more traditional readings of Yeats's work and recent
theoretical, often antagonistic readings in an effort to restore a
balanced perspective. The author centers most of his discussion on
the poetry itself to provide a total reading of Yeats's work. Early
in his career Yeats wrote: ""Hope and Memory have one daughter and
her name is Art."" Coded in the word Hope here - considering the
cultural and historical circumstances under which Yeats worked - is
what Bell believes is the meaning, existentially, of Yeats's
career.
Now back in print, Vereen M. Bell's The Achievement of Cormac
McCarthy was the first critical book devoted to an author who would
become one of the most celebrated American writers of the late
twentieth and early twenty-first century. Published in 1988, before
McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and had
his novels adapted into acclaimed films, Bell's study offered the
first systematic review of the author's work. According to Bell,
part of the difficulty of analyzing McCarthy's fiction is that the
novelist by design works against all conventional ways of seeing
and dealing with the world. Any formulaic readings, particularly
those associated with the traditional schemes of southern
literature, will be distorted. McCarthy's novels are provocatively
mysterious yet specific and vivid as well. They are also
freestanding and unclassifiable Bell shows how McCarthy transforms
the world through language, how he reconstitutes both urban and
rural settings so that otherwise barely articulate and unheroic
people live vividly in a context that is both modernist and
antimodernist. In this respect, Bell argues, McCarthy's work is
about the tension between visions of the world and the intractable,
opposing materiality of it, between the mysteriousness of an
individual's private engagement with experience and social
normality's tendency to flatten it out. At the same time, Bell
shows McCarthy's infatuation with the reality of evil, how the evil
in human form in his novels is as inexplicably gratuitous and
violent as the inhuman form of random and destructive natural
events. Such violence, for McCarthy, is built into existence and
cannot be evaded or rationalized away. With detailed readings of
McCarthy's first five novels—The Orchard Keeper, Child of God,
Outer Dark, Suttree, and Blood Meridian—Bell demonstrates the
novelist's faith in the protean capacity of language to disclose
the layered possibilities and richness of being. Widely cited by
scholars, Bell's book established many of the foundational critical
frameworks for approaching McCarthy's work. It is now available in
an affordable paperback edition.
The poems gathered here were composed by Donald Davie for his wife
Doreen, to whom he was married and devoted for fifty years. The
earliest of them were copied out by hand and presented to Doreen as
a tribute on the occasion of her 54th birthday, and this agarlanda
was then added to over the years. Of the 43 poems, ten are
published here for the first time, two others in new versions. They
span the five decades of the coupleas marriage, and because of this
portray an enduring but complex relationship as it changes over
time.
To some readers the poems will seem unusual as love poems because
they do not idealize love and marriage. Their strength lies in
their honesty and intimacy and in the openness to the pain and
self-understanding that both ardor and conflict (aWe, we throve on
frictiona) can produce. This is a relationship in which each knows
the other too well to be assuaged by a sentimental lyricism.
For this special edition, twelve of Doreenas photographs from their
travels together have been included, so that her sensibility may be
present, too, as an artist in her own right. Donaldas handwritten
poems are reproduced both in facsimile and in type.
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