TY  - BOOK
AU  - Ohi,Kevin
TI  - Inceptions: Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form 
SN  - 9780823294626
U1  - 808.3 23
PY  - 2021///]
CY  - New York, NY
PB  - Fordham University Press
KW  - American literature
KW  - History and criticism
KW  - Theory, etc
KW  - English literature
KW  - Openings (Rhetoric)
KW  - Literary Studies
KW  - Philosophy & Theory
KW  - Queer Theory
KW  - LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
KW  - bisacsh
KW  - Baldwin, James
KW  - Beginnings
KW  - Defoe, Daniel
KW  - Dickens, Charles
KW  - Eliot, George
KW  - Friedrich, Su
KW  - James, Henry
KW  - McCullers, Carson
KW  - Milton, John
KW  - Oppen, George
KW  - Ovid
KW  - Shakespeare, William
KW  - Stevens, Wallace
KW  - Welty, Eudora
KW  - Wordsworth, William
KW  - beginnings
KW  - birth
KW  - contingency
KW  - literary form
KW  - origins
KW  - potentiality
N1  - 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
N2  - 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
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823294657?locatt=mode:legacy
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/isbn/9780823294657
UR  - https://www.degruyter.com/document/cover/isbn/9780823294657/original
ER  -