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Inceptions : Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form / Kevin Ohi.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2021]Copyright date: ©2021Description: 1 online resource (336 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780823294626
  • 9780823294657
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 808.3 23
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources:
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Exordium -- PART I. POTENTIALITY AND GESTURE -- PART II. NOVELS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF CHARACTER -- PART III. OUR STONY ANCESTRY -- PART IV. SOLITUDE AND QUEER ORIGINS -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index
Summary: The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that noncoincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the nontrivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work— its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way, the fact that they must begin renders our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity.From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin’s, Carson McCullers’s, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Inception introduces a fundamental contingency into texts and psyches alike: in the beginning, all could have been otherwise.For Kevin Ohi, the act of inception, and the potential it embodies, enables us to see making and unmaking coincide within the mechanism of creation. In this sense, Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, the possibility of perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number URL Status Notes Barcode
eBook eBook Biblioteca "Angelicum" Pont. Univ. S.Tommaso d'Aquino Nuvola online online - DeGruyter (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Online access Not for loan (Accesso limitato) Accesso per gli utenti autorizzati / Access for authorized users (dgr)9780823294657

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Exordium -- PART I. POTENTIALITY AND GESTURE -- PART II. NOVELS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF CHARACTER -- PART III. OUR STONY ANCESTRY -- PART IV. SOLITUDE AND QUEER ORIGINS -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Index

restricted access online access with authorization star

http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_16ec

The beginning is both internal and external to the text it initiates, and that noncoincidence points to the text’s vexed relation with its outside. Hence the nontrivial self-reflexivity of any textual beginning, which must bear witness to the self-grounding quality of the literary work— its inability either to comprise its inception or to externalize it in an authorizing exteriority. In a different but related way, the fact that they must begin renders our lives and our desires opaque to us; what Freud called “latency” marks not only sexuality but human thought with a self-division shaped by asynchronicity.From Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces to George Eliot’s epigraphs, from Ovid’s play with meter to Charles Dickens’s thematizing of the ex nihilo emergence of character, from Wallace Stevens’s abstract consideration of poetic origins to James Baldwin’s, Carson McCullers’s, and Eudora Welty’s descriptions of queer childhood, writers repeatedly confront the problem of inception. Inception introduces a fundamental contingency into texts and psyches alike: in the beginning, all could have been otherwise.For Kevin Ohi, the act of inception, and the potential it embodies, enables us to see making and unmaking coincide within the mechanism of creation. In this sense, Inceptions traces an ethics of reading, the possibility of perceiving, in the ostensibly finished forms of lives and texts, the potentiality inherent in their having started forth.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 25. Jun 2024)