Rhetoric of metamorphosis.

Title

Identifier

AAI9959240

identifier

9959240

Creator

Weiss, Lou.

Contributor

Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano

Date

2000

Language

English

Publisher

City University of New York.

Subject

Literature, Comparative | Literature, Slavic and East European

Abstract

An exegesis of an artist's work gives him his second birth---the birth to become the man for whom death gave him birth---the birth with which we commit History upon him. The tyranny of the created over creator---he stares from his letters, books, and death, caged in verbal prison---a model initiating the original it was to reproduce.;Can Schulz be "historicized" in his own idiom of ongoing creation, and what would biography then mean to him?---He teaches us that---" Cinnamon Shops is a biological novel---a spiritual genealogy---because it displays a birth certificate, going back to that very depth, where dispersed, biography looses itself in a mythological hallucination. With Cinnamon Shops, I have tried to find my own private mythological genealogy---to construe some mythical generation of forebears, a fictitious family from which I truly came.";Creating a creator from his creation is but a myth about reality, if bankrupting reality Schulz hadn't shown that a myth can not be a concluding product of mythologization---The Second Book of Genesis---is already the myth's improvisation of us---that our fabulation of any life becomes our hallucination about that inspiring myth which improvises us. This descent of truth from fiction is central to Schulz's work, life, death, biography. Let the drama of entering Schulz's letters be the experience that his ideas weren't limited to theoretical heresies against reality---that his aesthetics was actually the live recipe for his death---the agent actively bracketing the intrusion of history, ignoring the Holocaust without a single mention, dueling in metaphysical seductions on the brink of his death.;If we could then master Schulz's zero-constancy principle and learn that "hunger for reality if contained in a dream," we may accord him the privilege of portraying him with History-in-vagabondage-of-a-future-tense. Rather than letting the "historical" glossification take its course and thumbing the pages of his face invent its subject on its own terms as biographies do, we should take our unique opportunity to continue creating Schulz in his own idiom. We should consider his pseudoflora and pseudofauna existing fraudulently on the margins of the limitless possibilities of being and learn from Schulz about the centrality of word to his genius and our art of memory about him; and we need to read in his Mythization of Reality that "poetry is mythologization---reproduction of myth about the world:" we should let him reassure us that "out side of the myth we cannot go" because "speech is a metaphysical organ of man (and) reality if a shadow of a word."

Type

dissertation

Source

PQT Legacy Restricted.xlsx

degree

Ph.D.

Item