Poetics of the Hive


Book Description

"Cris Hollingsworth's waggle dance after scouting the rangiest field of literature--Virgil and Homer down to Milton and Swift, on to Plath and Byatt&#$151;leads you to where the nectar hides. . . . He wisely roams, extracting an anthology of poetry, prose, psychology, history&151;most of all, perception--that tops the bee's knees." --Paul West, author of The Secret Life of Words "Hollingsworth's wide-ranging exploration of the image of the hive is impressive. Poetics of the Hive and its panoply of references cannot fail to enrich university classrooms, especially those devoted to both the visual arts and literature." --Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art "Cris Hollingsworth's Poetics of the Hive . . . is complex, even daring in argument; I'm even more impressed by [his] skill at an increasingly rare critical art, the educing of argument from careful, often brilliant analytical reading of literary texts." --Thomas R. Edwards, executive editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review A study to delight the passionate reader, Poetics of the Hive tells the story of the evolution of the insect metaphor from antiquity to the multicultural present. An experiment in the &147;evolutionary biology&148; of artistic form, Poetics of the Hive freshly examines classic works of literature, offering a view of poetic creation that complicates our ideas of the past and its formative role in modern consciousness and world literature. In the first part of this lyrical synthesis of rhetoric, visual and postmodern theory, and cognitive science, Cristopher Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive. He traces the Hive's evolution in epic poetry from Homer to Milton, which establishes antithetical but complementary images of angelic and demonic bees that Swift, Mandeville, and Keats use variously to debate classical versus emerging ideas of the individual's relationship to society. But the Hive becomes fully psychologized, Hollingsworth argues, only when its use by Conrad and Wells to explore Europe's colonial imagination of the Other is transformed by Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition. Cristopher Hollingsworth is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University, Staten Island.




Poetics of the Hive


Book Description

"Cris Hollingsworth's waggle dance after scouting the rangiest field of literature--Virgil and Homer down to Milton and Swift, on to Plath and Byatt&#$151;leads you to where the nectar hides. . . . He wisely roams, extracting an anthology of poetry, prose, psychology, history&151;most of all, perception--that tops the bee's knees." --Paul West, author of The Secret Life of Words "Hollingsworth's wide-ranging exploration of the image of the hive is impressive. Poetics of the Hive and its panoply of references cannot fail to enrich university classrooms, especially those devoted to both the visual arts and literature." --Dore Ashton, author of A Fable of Modern Art "Cris Hollingsworth's Poetics of the Hive . . . is complex, even daring in argument; I'm even more impressed by [his] skill at an increasingly rare critical art, the educing of argument from careful, often brilliant analytical reading of literary texts." --Thomas R. Edwards, executive editor of Raritan: A Quarterly Review A study to delight the passionate reader, Poetics of the Hive tells the story of the evolution of the insect metaphor from antiquity to the multicultural present. An experiment in the &147;evolutionary biology&148; of artistic form, Poetics of the Hive freshly examines classic works of literature, offering a view of poetic creation that complicates our ideas of the past and its formative role in modern consciousness and world literature. In the first part of this lyrical synthesis of rhetoric, visual and postmodern theory, and cognitive science, Cristopher Hollingsworth reveals the structure behind his metaphor, redefining it as an aesthetically and philosophically potent tableau that he calls the Hive. He traces the Hive's evolution in epic poetry from Homer to Milton, which establishes antithetical but complementary images of angelic and demonic bees that Swift, Mandeville, and Keats use variously to debate classical versus emerging ideas of the individual's relationship to society. But the Hive becomes fully psychologized, Hollingsworth argues, only when its use by Conrad and Wells to explore Europe's colonial imagination of the Other is transformed by Kafka and Sartre into competing symbols of the modern self's existential condition. Cristopher Hollingsworth is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University, Staten Island.




The Poetics of Gardens


Book Description

This is an entirely different garden book: a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. There is a universality about the creation of gardens across time and in diverse cultures that has inspired this entirely different garden book: a playful and affectionate typology of gardens; a pattern book in which a score of landscapes and gardens are drawn, described, and analyzed not just as a bouquet of pleasures but as sources, lodes to be mined for materials, shapes and relationships, and ideas for transforming our own backyards. The Poetics of Gardens is a celebration of places and the gardens they can become. Most of the 500 sketches, axonometric drawings, and photographs were created especially for this book. They explore the special qualities of places and the acts that can transform them into gardens. The authors discuss the qualities that create the promise of a garden the shapes of land and water, the established plants, the light and wind, the climate and show how these can be organized to give a place a special meaning. And they pay particular attention to the "rituals of habitation" by which we imaginatively take possession of places on the surface of the earth. The Poetics of Gardens examines great gardens made in other places, with other climates, at other times from ancient Rome to modem England, from Ball to Botany Bay, from the court of Ch'ien Lung to the magic kingdom of Walt Disney to explore their devices and record their images, scents, and sounds. The authors discuss the adaptation of the great garden traditions of the past to North American soil and call together the creators of these gardens to speculate about how their patterns and ideas can be appropriated, transformed, and composed into places that come alive for us.




Monstrous Spaces: The Other Frontier


Book Description

The book is a collection of essays presented during the First Global Conference of Monstrous Geography held at Manchester College, Oxford, and examines monstrous geographies, or the other frontier, a space that runs counter to the socially constructed space of culture.




Honeyland


Book Description

The fourth volume in the Docalogue series, this book explores the significance of the documentary Honeyland (2019) in relation to documentary ethics, the representation of human and animal relations, environmental studies, genre theory, and documentary distribution. The film, focused on a Turkish-speaking woman in Macedonia who cultivates bees to produce honey through an ancient and environmentally sustainable method, raises important questions about the place of humans and economic activity within the broader ecosystem. The documentary also prompts critical reflection about the relationship between observation and storytelling, how the film festival circuit allows certain films to reach a wide audience, the ethics of ethnographic representation, the relationship between human and insect life, and to what extent film can allow us to experience others’ life-worlds. By combining five distinct critical perspectives on a single documentary, this book acts both as an intensive scholarly treatment of the film and as a guide for how to analyze, theorize, and contextualize a documentary text. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of documentary studies, as well as those studying film and media more broadly.




American Poets and Poetry [2 volumes]


Book Description

The ethnically diverse scope, broad chronological coverage, and mix of biographical, critical, historical, political, and cultural entries make this the most useful and exciting poetry reference of its kind for students today. American poetry springs up out of all walks of life; its poems are "maternal as well as paternal...stuff'd with the stuff that is coarse and stuff'd with the stuff that is fine," as Walt Whitman wrote, adding "Of every hue and caste am I, of every rank and religion." Written for high school and undergraduate students, this two-volume encyclopedia covers U.S. poetry from the Colonial era to the present, offering full treatments of hundreds of key poets of the American canon. What sets this reference apart is that it also discusses events, movements, schools, and poetic approaches, placing poets in their social, historical, political, cultural, and critical contexts and showing how their works mirror the eras in which they were written. Readers will learn about surrealism, ekphrastic poetry, pastoral elegy, the Black Mountain poets, and "language" poetry. There are long and rich entries on modernism and postmodernism as well as entries related to the formal and technical dimensions of American poetry. Particular attention is paid to women poets and poets from various ethnic groups. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy Smith are featured. The encyclopedia also contains entries on a wide selection of Latino and Native American poets and substantial coverage of the avant-garde and experimental movements and provides sidebars that illuminate key points.




The Poetics of Space


Book Description

A beloved multidisciplinary treatise comes to Penguin Classics Since its initial publication in 1958, The Poetics of Space has been a muse to philosophers, architects, writers, psychologists, critics, and readers alike. The rare work of irresistibly inviting philosophy, Bachelard’s seminal work brims with quiet revelations and stirring, mysterious imagery. This lyrical journey takes as its premise the emergence of the poetic image and finds an ideal metaphor in the intimate spaces of our homes. Guiding us through a stream of meditations on poetry, art, and the blooming of consciousness itself, Bachelard examines the domestic places that shape and hold our dreams and memories. Houses and rooms; cellars and attics; drawers, chests, and wardrobes; nests and shells; nooks and corners: No space is too vast or too small to be filled by our thoughts and our reveries. In Bachelard’s enchanting spaces, “We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” This new edition features a foreword by Mark Z. Danielewski, whose bestselling novel House of Leaves drew inspiration from Bachelard’s writings, and an introduction by internationally renowned philosopher Richard Kearney who explains the book’s enduring importance and its role within Bachelard’s remarkable career. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.




Bee Journal


Book Description

Bee Journal is a startlingly original poetry sequence: a poem-journal of beekeeping that chronicles the life of the hive, from the collection of a small nucleus on the first day to the capture of a swarm two years later. It observes the living architecture of the comb, the range and locality of the colony; its flights, flowers, water sources, parasites, lives and deaths. These poems were written at the hive wearing a veil and gloves, and the journal is an intrinsic part of the kinetic activity of keeping bees: making 'tiny, regular checks' in the turn around the central figure of the sun, and minute exploratory interventions through the round of the year. The book is full of moments of revelation - particularly of the relationship between the domestic and the wild. In attempting to record and invoke something of the complexity of the relationship between 'keeper' and 'kept' it tunes ear and speech towards the ecstasy of bees, between the known and the unknown. Because of its genesis as a working journal, there is here an unusual intimacy and deep scrutiny of life and death in nature. The language itself is dense and clotted, the imagery thrillingly fresh, and the observing eye close, scrupulous and full of wonder. Bee Journal is one of the most unusual and exciting poetry debuts in years.




The Francis Daniel Pastorius Reader


Book Description

Francis Daniel Pastorius was one of the first German settlers to Pennsylvania and a touchstone figure of German-American cultural heritage. This monumental anthology presents a selection of his many writings in one volume. Pastorius sailed to North America as a Pietist but found a unique home among the Quakers in Pennsylvania. Within this early modern religious context, he was a lawyer, educator, and community leader; a polymath; and a prolific writer and collector of knowledge. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Pastorius held one of the largest manuscript collections in North America and wrote voluminously in multiple languages. His collecting, curation, and dissemination represents a unique look at the ways information was stored, processed, and utilized during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in both North America and Europe. This rich selection of Pastorius’s writings on religion, education, gardening, law and community, and the colony of Pennsylvania—as well as letters, poems, and numerous encyclopedic and bibliographic works—shows the mind of a true humanist in action. Pastorius’s works have long been important to the archival study of early German settlement and the Atlantic world. Now available together, transcribed, translated, and annotated, his writings will have widespread significance to the study of early American literature and history.




The Poetics of the Common Knowledge


Book Description

The Poetics of the Common Knowledge focuses on Descartes, Hegel, Freud, and the information theorists, on the one hand, and the poets of the American avant-garde, on the other. This book is a call literally for a new poetry, a new making that manifests the possibility for sense-making in a postmodern condition without universals or absolutes. In such a poetry, fragmentation bespeaks not brokenness but the richness of the world apprehended without the habits of recognition.