American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge
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American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge by Ronald E Martin
In this challenging work, Ronald E. Martin analyzes the impulse of major nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writers to undermine not only their inherited paradigms of literary and linguistic thought but to question how paradigms themselves are constructed. Through analyses of these writers, as well as contemporaneous scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and visual artists, American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge creates a panoramic view of American literature over the past 150 years and shows it to be a crucial part of the great philosophical changes of the period. The works of Melville, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, followed by Crane, Frost, Pound, Stein, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Aiken, Stevens, and Williams, are examined as part of a cultural current that casts doubt on the possibility of knowledge itself. The destruction of concepts, of literary and linguistic forms, was for these writers a precondition for liberating the imagination to gain more access to the self and the real world. As part of the exploration of this cultural context, literary and philosophical realisms are examined together, allowing a comparison of their somewhat different objectives, as well as their common epistemological predicament.
Martin, Ronald E.: - Ron Martin is Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Delaware. He received his B.S. degree in Geology from Bowling Green State University, M.S. from the University of Florida, and the Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of California at Berkeley. His present research focuses on the evolution of plankton and the biosphere, marine-terrestrial interactions, and the formation of fossil assemblages, especially those of microfossils, and their use in deciphering past climate and sea-level change; microfossils as bioindicators of ecosystem health; and geoarchaeology. He worked as a biostratigrapher for Unocal in Houston prior to coming to Delaware in 1985. He has served as Associate Editor of Palaios, Editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research, President of the North American Micropaleontological Section of the Society for Sedimentary Geology (SEPM), and is the author of One Long Experiment: Scale and Process in Earth History (Columbia University Press), Taphonomy: A Process Approach (Cambridge, UK), and editor of Environmental Micropaleontology: The Application of Microfossils to Environmental Geology (Kluwer Academic/Plenum Press, NY). He teaches courses in paleontology, stratigraphy, and Earth systems, and has been nominated for the University of Delaware excellence in Teaching Award several times.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780822311256 |
| ISBN 10 | 0822311259 |
| Title | American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge |
| Author | Ronald E Martin |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
| Year published | 1991-04-12 |
| Number of pages | 416 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |