The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Nonpareil Book, 78): 10 (Nonpareil Books, 10)

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In a geography lesson or sequence of learning we can never present a place in all its glorious complexity. Any set of resources and images will always be grounded in time and the geographical imagination of the originator. Activities such as this help pupils become familiar with their own and others’ geographical imaginations. Multiple Identities Tchelitchew: an artist whose painting Cache-Cache turned up earlier on with reference to Finnegans Wake, finds a full chapter here: "Cache-Cache inspired parts of Eliot's Burnt Norton; William Carlos Williams's Paterson owes much to "Phenomena"; and some of the most mysteriously beautiful passages in Cocteau's Leone derive from Tchelitchew's doubled images." Any geography textbook or resource can only ever present a partial view of a place. Whenever we use place-based resources with our pupils there is the opportunity to develop their ability to ask critical questions, such as ‘What is missing?’ and ‘What else could be included?’.

The Man Without Contemporaries: a tribute to the memory of poet Osip Mandelstam & a discussion of his wife Nadezhda Madelstam's two memoirs, & Prof. Brown's critical studies on him. Many of you have done similar activities to the ones described above. In a crowded curriculum you may find it hard to justify the time that these activities take, but you should bear in mind that some research suggests these types of activities help to raise the standard of learning in geography classrooms. Whitman: a stellar essay, written with verve & feeling. "Whitman," Kafka told his friend Gustav Janouch, "belongs among the greatest formal innovators in the modern lyric.(...) He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. He said: 'Life is the little that is left over from dying.' So he gave his whole heart to every leaf of grass. I admire in him the reconciliation of art and nature. . . . He was really a Christian and with a close affinity especially to us Jews-he was therefore an important measure of the status and worth of humanity."The Geography of the Imagination The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, be­ tween a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicy­ cle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination. Man was first a hunter, and an artist: his earliest vestiges tell us that alone. But he must always have dreamed, and recognized and guessed and supposed, all skills of the imagination. Language itself is continu­ ously an imaginative act. Rational discourse outside our familiar territory of Greek logic sounds to our ears like the wildest imagination. The Do­ gon, a people of West Africa, will tell you that a white fox named Ogo frequently weaves himself a hat of string bean hulls, puts it on his impu­ dent head, and dances in the okra to insult and infuriate God Almighty, 3 In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America’s major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism. The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays by Guy Davenport – eBook Details When, in later years, I saw real archaeologists at work, I felt perfectly at home among them: diggers at Mycenae and at Lascaux, where I was shown a tray of hyena coprolites and wondered which my father would have kept and which thrown away, for petrified droppings from the Ice Age must have their range from good to bad, like arrowheads and stone axes. Guy Davenport is at home in the classical world of antiquity & is happiest when they find correspondences in the modern world, that's why, writers-poets like Pound, Joyce, Olson, Zukofsky, Welty, etc, find glowing treatment in this book. A single review can't really do justice to forty essays; hence, out of necessity, I'm giving you the highlights:

Charles Ives: Davenport calls him the "greatest (American) composer" ever & writes, "he considered Browning to be the great modern poet, and wrote a handsome, majestic overture in his honor- in twelve-tone rows, a dozen years before Schoenberg invented them."! And there's more: Absolutely everything, and them countable on the fingers of one hand, read in it over the years, has been practically forgot. Guy Davenport’s genius merits awe, but inspires excitement. His writing reminds us that our time is finite, and that the world’s offerings are infinite. Reading these essays will make you feel more alive.”Lccn 91053116 Ocr_converted abbyy-to-hocr 1.1.20 Ocr_module_version 0.0.17 Openlibrary OL1567553M Openlibrary_edition As a critic, Davenport shines as an intrepid appreciator, an ideal teacher. By preference, he likes to walk the reader through a painting or a poem, teasing out the meaning of odd details, making connections with history and other works of art. His must-have essay collections, The Geography of the Imagination and Every Force Evolves a Form, display his range: With a rainwater clarity, he can write about the naturalist Louis Agassiz or ancient poetry and thought... He can account for the importance of prehistoric cave art to early modernism or outline the achievements of Joyce and Pound. He can make you yearn to read or look again at neglected masters like the poets Charles Olsen and Louis Zukofsky and the painters Balthus and Charles Burchfield. He can send you out eagerly searching for C. M. Doughty's six-volume epic poem, The Dawn in Britain, and for the works of Ronald Johnson, Jonathan Williams and Paul Metcalf. In all this, his method is nothing other than the deep attentiveness engendered by love: that and a firm faith in simply knowing things. He conveys, to adopt his own words about painter Paul Cadmus, 'a perfect balance of spirit and information." Taken from lecture presented at Westminster Institute of Education, Oxford Brookes University on 4 March 2003). Review Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2014-10-16 14:07:43.135402 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA1153312 City New York Donor The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all a difference of imagination.

Davenport's apprenticeship of Pound served him well: his essays are prose ideograms- a succession of images in rapid cuts. He compresses in Cubist style. Being a painter & an illustrator himself, his mind keeps writing & painting in close proximity; hence a plethora of images & references to paintings in his work. The schoolroom was its own place, our home another, the red fields of the Savannah valley another, the cow pasture another, uptown, the movies, other people’s houses: all were as distinct as continents in disparate geological epochs. The sociology of the South has something to do with this, I think. All occasions had their own style and prerogatives, and these were insisted upon with savage authority. At Grannyport’s (thus her accepted name after its invention by us children) one never mentioned the moving pictures that played so great a part in my life, for Grannyport denied that pictures could move. It was, she said, patently illogical (she was absolutely right, of course, but I didn’t know it at the time), and no dime could ever be begged of her for admission to the Strand (Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers) or the Criterion (Flash Gordon, Tarzan) for these places were humbug, and people who went to them under the pitiful delusion that pictures can move were certainly not to be financed by a grandmother who knew her own mind.

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Haraway, D. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. Wie alles Metaphysische ist die Harmonie zwischen Gedanken und Wirklichkeit in der Grammatik der Sprache aufzufinden. Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language. (Wittgenstein, Zettel, 5 5 ) Guy Davenport's style is a captivating blend of scholarship & sophisticated charm. This book is truly a reader's delight—leading them on to more books, more art, more philosophy. Isn't that what the best of books do? A keeper surely!