Going Home Through Seven Paths to Nowhere: Reading Short-Stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and James - Softcover

Kallay, Katalin G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 9630580616 ISBN 13: 9789630580618

Publisher: Akademiai Kiado, 2004

Synopsis

"Dr. Katalin Kállay's Going Home Through Seven Paths to Nowhere: Reading Short Stories by Hawthorne, Poe, Melville and James is one of those rare combinations of intellectual brilliance, stylistic clarity, and sheer verve. The book reads a series of major works of American short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James as occasions for a "mode of reading in which the reader's aim is to establish an intimate relationship with the special arrangement of words in a text, governed by a trust in a happy coincidence of moments in which one might recognize the words' relevance to one's life."" Dr. Kállay calls this a "good encounter, a term she adopts from the writings of philosopher Stanley Cavell. ... In her detailed, theoretical introduction, Dr. Kállay lays bare her scholarly debt, primarily to the writings of Cavell himself and to the work of literary critic Wolfgang Iser, as she further develops and clarifies the idea of the good encounter. Here she identifies the good encounter with a particular trope, which appears within the tales themselves, and which also serves (like the term "good encounter"" itself) as a trope for the process of reading - what she calls "going home"". This is a process which, Kállay explains, consists of three separate "turns"": "the turn towards, the turn around in, and the turn away from the desired destination"" - which cumulatively gain access to the now returned-to home. ... Throughout the introduction, in discussions of a number of literary critics and theoreticians, Kállay deepens and clarifies her terms and the theoretical assumptions that inform them. Then, already in the introduction, she begins to apply her ideas to the reading texts themselves. The reading of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher"" is only the first in a series of such readings, which constitute the bulk of the book, all of which contain groundbreaking insights into the works discussed and fascinating "

About this edition

• Publisher: Akademiai Kiado
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 9630580616
• ISBN 13: 9789630580618
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160