Kevin Ohi

Inceptions (eBook, PDF)

Literary Beginnings and Contingencies of Form

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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 "e;latency"e; 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.

---

Dieser Download kann aus rechtlichen Gründen nur mit Rechnungsadresse in A, B, BG, CY, CZ, D, DK, EW, E, FIN, F, GR, HR, H, IRL, I, LT, L, LR, M, NL, PL, P, R, S, SLO, SK ausgeliefert werden.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Fordham University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. April 2021
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780823294657
• Artikelnr.: 72424461

Autorenporträt

Kevin Ohi is Professor of English at Boston College.He is the author of three previous books, including, most recently, Dead Letters Sent: Queer Literary Transmission.

Inhaltsangabe

Exordium 1
Part I: Potentiality and Gesture
1 Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth: Henry James's New York
Edition Prefaces 23
2 "First Love": Gesture and the Emergence of Desire in Eudora Welty 50
Part II: Novels and the Beginnings of Character
3 Robinson Crusoe and the Inception of Speech 73
4 The Clock Finger at Nought: Daniel Deronda and the Positing of
Perspective 91
5 Proto-Reading and the Positing of Character in Our Mutual Friend 103
Part III: Our Stony Ancestry
6 Ovid and Orpheus 127
7 Wallace Stevens and the Temporalities of Inception and Embodiment 148
Part IV: Solitude and Queer Origins
8 "Epitaph, the Idiom of Man": Imaginings of the Beginning 177
9 Etiology, Solitude, and Queer Incipience 199
Acknowledgments 223
Notes 227
Index 283