Modern American Prose

4 Key excerpts on "Modern American Prose"

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  Prose of the World

  Modernism and the Banality of Empire

  • Saikat Majumdar(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  It is the eighteenth century that is marked by the rise of the novel and the emergence of narrative realism, the period that also saw the etymological—and perhaps also to a certain extent, conceptual—emergence of the motifs of banality and boredom in the sense we understand them today. 35 In the system of aesthetic value emergent in the culture of the Enlightenment, an evaluative link increasingly came to be drawn between the concept of “prose” as a certain way of looking at the world and as a certain kind of discourse. As pointed out by Michal Peled Ginsburg and Lorri G. Nandrea, foundational here is Hegel’s observation on “the world of prose and everyday” as one of contingency, where the individual is limited by circumstances and context: “As that which prevents individuals from teleologically realizing an implicit internal totality, ‘prose’ impedes transcendence. In contrast to ‘the look of independence and total life and freedom that lies at the root of the essence of beauty,’ moreover, ‘prose’ is a kind of ugliness.” 36 This connection between genre and value is embedded in the OED annotations on the word “prose,” which derives from the Latin prosus, meaning “straightforward, straight, direct.” Ginsburg and Nandrea refer to obvious links between the dictionary meaning of the word as “the ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure,” and its figurative definition of “plain, simple, matter-of-fact, and (hence) dull or commonplace expression, quality, spirit, etc.” 37 The generic and the evaluative meanings of the term “prose” are set up in a relationship of mutuality around semiotic structures of contingency, necessity, and nontranscendence

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  Persian Prose

  A History of Persian Literature, Vol V

  • Bo Utas(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • I.B. Tauris

    (Publisher)

  Âyande (The Future) was a magazine dedicated to literary research. It began to be published by Mahmud Afshâr (1893–1983) in 1925. The declared aim of the publication was ensuring the “national unity of Iran”. A number of scholars, including Forughi, Dashti, Kasravi and Dowlatâbâdi were among the contributors. The journal had a second lease of life after the Iranian Revolution of 1979 when Mahmud Afshâr’s son, Iraj Afshâr (1925–2011), one of the foremost and prolific scholars of contemporary Iran, resumed its publication until 1994.

  14 . Conclusion

  Our study of various forms of modern prose in Persian literature informs us of the great variety to be found in the works of Iranian writers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Literary genres such as novels, short stories, plays, and literary criticism, in their modern forms, were absent from classical Persian literature. Their introduction into Persian literature was the result of gradual familiarization with European culture.

  The main characteristic of modern Persian prose, in the period discussed, is its tendency towards simplicity and lucidity and its avoidance of abstruseness and artificiality. The new generation of Iranian writers noticed that the bureaucratic or “secretarial” prose had atrophied and become devoid of clear meanings. Because of the reasons and factors to which we have already referred in numerous instances, Persian prose gradually distanced itself from bombastic expressions and embraced straightforward expression of concepts and meanings. It should not be overlooked that this development was, to some extent, influenced by the fact that Iranian writers had learned European languages and translated literary works from those languages. They noticed that, in order to express a concept, they needed precision in the field of using Persian words as equivalents for European ones. This, in turn, led to the development of their talent in the field of choosing accurate words and avoiding repetitions, strings of synonyms and long-winded expressions. They learned to use language solely for the purpose of conveying meanings and concepts, devoid of ornamental flourish.

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  English Prose of the Seventeenth Century 1590-1700

  • Roger Pooley(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Introduction: Reading Seventeenth-Century Prose      

  This book is an introduction to the great richness and variety of prose texts in England over a hundred and ten year period. The history of prose has necessarily to be a more miscellaneous affair than a history of poetry, or drama, or the novel, simply because of that variety. It is more than a history of changes in style; it has to attend to changes over a wide band of genres and ideas, too. Even more than other kinds of literary history, it has to be aware of changes in politics, religion, philosophy and science, not least because many of these changes were initiated in the prose writings themselves.

  From the perspective of our own time, the history of prose could be written as a history of deliberate hiddenness. As Godzich and Kittay argue: ‘prose … does not offer itself to view, and plays what could be described as a game of self-concealment’.1 That in itself might be an incentive to write a history of what would rather hide: The Hidden Textuality of the Unliterary. So, this text may look like a Herbal, or an account of an experiment with an air-pump, but in fact it is an intervention in the history of a wider discourse about science or nature (by ‘discourse’ is meant a way of writing on a subject which defines the limits of that subject, acceptable methods, questions, decorum and so on). A mirror image of this approach would be to start from the standard of ‘fine writing’ as literature — the prose which advertises itself as good prose — and organise seventeenth-century prose according to a division, between utilitarian texts and those in art prose, Bacon versus Browne perhaps.

  There are problems with such a division, even allowing for those pieces that would recalcitrantly straggle the divide. One is that the concept of ‘literature’ is rather anachronistic, so that one cannot imagine a seventeenth-century writer or reader wondering whether, say, a particularly impressive sermon might be a work of literature. A notion of ‘literature’ in that sense is really only intelligible from the second half of the eighteenth century. What we do find is a sermon connoisseur like Pepys remarking that Mr Messums ‘made a very good sermon; but only, too eloquent for a pulpit’.2

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  British Prose Poetry

  The Poems Without Lines

  • Jane Monson(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  https://​doi.​org/​10.​1007/​978-3-319-77863-1_​21 End Abstract

  In recognition of the modernist prose poem in English originating with the avant-garde writers of the early 1920s, this essay follows on from Murphy’s discussion of key British influences during this time, and draws attention to transatlantic figures and influences. Prominent among the poets I discuss are Gertrude Stein , William Carlos Williams , Mina Loy , Lee Harwood , Roy Fisher , Gael Turnbull and several others.1 Beginning with Stein, in her influential essay , Narration: Lecture 2 (1935), she describes one of the characteristics of modernist writing and discusses the place of prose poetry . Stein begins by referring to a sign she read ‘as we rode on a train from Atlanta to Birmingham’: ‘Let’s make our flour meal and meat in Georgia’, and asking herself, ‘Is that prose or poetry and why.’2 She concludes, ‘Well believe it or not it is very difficult to know whether that is prose or poetry and does it really make any difference if you do or do not know. This.’3 One might be forgiven for thinking that this is either a refusal to grapple with that thorny question, or a justification of her own method of writing. I think the latter is more pertinent. Using the example of the Old Testament, she points out, ‘In the beginning there really was no difference between poetry and prose in the beginning of writing in the beginning of talking in the beginning of hearing anything about anything.’4 She rejects the idea of writing necessarily having a beginning, middle and end: ‘Sentences are contained within themselves and anything really contained within itself has no beginning or middle or ending’5 and, by extension, she rejects a binary difference between prose and poetry. Referring to the Making of Americans , she writes: ‘I called it this and this is what is happening, American writing has been an escaping not an escaping but an existing without the necessary feeling of one thing succeeding another thing of anything having a beginning and a middle and an ending.’6

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