The Slumber of Apollo: Reflections on Recent Art, Literature, Language and the Individual Consciousness - Hardcover

Holloway, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521248043 ISBN 13: 9780521248044

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 1984

Synopsis

In this challenging 1993 book John Holloway explores one of the most significant aspects of contemporary culture, arguing that over the last hundred years or so there has been a radical change in the very nature of individual consciousness. He traces a crucial shift from an 'Apollonian' ideal of human involvement in the widest range of experience (implying a sense of the individual consciousness as spacious, orderly, and comprehensive) to a narrower and less integrated engagement with the world (and a more reductive conception of consciousness as random and fragmented). He plots this shift through a number of quite different fields: there are chapters on the visual arts, on colloquial language and slang, on cartoons, on political rhetoric, and on 'personality' studies by psychologists. He goes on to examine the work of certain literary figures (notably Hardy, Edwin Muir, Wyndham Lewis, Patrick White, John Cowper Powys, and Gary Snyder) who seem to have recognized, and registered in imaginative terms, the pervasive but generally unrecorded changes in consciousness for which the book is arguing.

About this title

Book Description

The author asserts that over the past 100 years there has been a radical shift in the nature of individual consciousness, from an "Appollonian" ideal of human involvement to a narrower and less integrated engagement with the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 1984
• ISBN 10: 0521248043
• ISBN 13: 9780521248044
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176