Alchemization of the Mind

Ever since the Renaissance urge to modernize enforced irreverent reading of ancient and classical texts, the European mind resisted complete secularization. The new dissociated sensibility followed the processes of formal as well as conceptual alchemization. The papers collected in this volume map a wide range of cultural and literary discourses, from Reformation theology to reader-response criticism to modern fiction.

Autorentext

The Editors: Zbigniew Biäas is Professor of English at the University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. His recent publications include Mapping Wild Gardens and papers on colonial and postcolonial literature. Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski is Lecturer in American studies at the same university. He has published on South African fiction and American regional writing.

Inhalt

Contents: Sandy Feinstein: Refiguring Alchemy in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale - Liliana Barakonska: 'Compounds Strange' and 'Confused Lumps'. A Reading of Monstrosity - Nancy Nobile: Rousseau and Pedagogical Alchemy - Gwee Li Sui: Apocalypse and Apocatastasis: Perhaps, the Reformation According to Adolf von Harnack - Steven J. Joyce: The Dissociation of Discourse: Art, Transcendence, and Alchemization in Thomas Bernhard's Old Masters - Piotr Dziedzic: The Empire of Mind: The Theme of Dissociation in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow - Helmut F. Pfanner: Alfred Döblin and/or Thomas Mann? German Novelists at the Crossroads - Aleksandra Kieltucka: 'Surprise and Pleasure' or the Reader on the Hook - One Reader's Journey through the Fiction of John Hawkes - Leszek Drong: The Reader as Alchemist: Nietzschean Philology and Reader-Oriented Criticism - Agnieszka Golda: Longing for an Impossible Freedom. The Author and the Puppeteer. The Authorial Double in Postmodern Fiction - Ewa Macura: Bodily Dissociations: (In)Visibility and Distance in Oscar Wilde's Salomé - John Gilliver/Malgorzata Nitka: Sensibility Destabilized. Thomas Hardy's Poems of 1912-13 - Krzysztof Kowalczyk-Twarowski: Trains and Beasts. On American Regional Writing - Joanna Smiech: Facing Postcolonial Reality: Ngugi's The River Between.