Another Music
Subtitle: Polemics and Pleasures
By: John McCormick
Edition: First edition.
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 261
ISBN-13: 9781315082288
Subjects: Modern Literature; History and criticism
Description: "As the essays in this book attest, in a time of specialization John McCormick chose diversification, a choice determined by a life spent in many occupations and many countries. After his five years in the U.S. Navy in the Second World War, the academy beckoned by way of the G.I. Bill, graduate training, and a career in teaching. Prosperity in the American university at the time meant setting up as a "Wordsworth man," a "Keats man," or a "Dr. Johnson man": all chilling to the author. He chose self-exile in which he disguised himself as an "Americanist" saleable in Europe, and lectured happily in comparative studies: literature, history, and philosophy. Thus the broad range of this volume, both in subject matter and in the span of time it covers. The essays are divided into three sections. First are general and personal essays on a variety of topics, followed by work on individual writers, and third, writings on criticism and theory. A section on Santayana reflects his eight years of research for Santayana's biography. The writings on Spain and toreo (bullfighting) result from another long-held interest, together with the author's attempt to alter some of the romantic nonsense about the running of the bulls in Pamplona, too often the entire substance of what the general public knows about Spain. McCormick has long been convinced that without knowledge of bullfighting, the foreigner cannot comprehend arcane and wonderful aspects of the Spanish character. The coda, "Another Music," is an old man's attempt to solve the mysterious algebra of how the world turns now, and how the young appear to the aged. While the volume is diverse in its range of writers--from Whitman in America to Santayana in Europe, taken as a collectivity, these essays provide a sense of the grandeur as well as the decadent in twentieth century politics and aesthetics alike. Written with the literary taste and political non-conformity that still characterizes McCormick, the volume is a treat for the specialist (perhaps) and for the generalist (certainly)."--Provided by publisher.
Table of contents: title: Part, 1 General and Personal --; title: chapter The Berlin Uprising: Cold War Turning Point?  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter The United Snopes Information Service  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Federal Censorship  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Gott Mit Whom?  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter A Most Mysterious Disaster  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter On Taste  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Down Low and Hard Up  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Snobbery and the American Scene  -- John McCarmick; title: part, 2 Individual Writers --; title: chapter The Rational Shelley  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Walt Whitman: Orientalist or Nationalist?  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter The Urbane and the Urban: Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter An English Bohemian in Spain: Gerald Brenan  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Lorca in Our Time  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Philip Larkin: An American View  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter James Joyce and Hermann Broch: From Influence to Originality  -- John McCarmick; title: part, 3 Literary Criticism and Theory --; title: chapter Problems of "Poetic Prose" in English and French  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Down with Translation  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Toward a Comparative American Literary History  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Problems and Occasions for the American Scholar  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter A Novel of Ideas  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Santayana's Idea of the Tragic  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter The Last Puritan Once More  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Santayana's Reading of Freud  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter George Santayana and Ezra Pound  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Santayana's The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Mnemosyne  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Benedetto Croce's Æsthetic: An Introduction  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Franco, Spain, and the Third Reich  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter Antonio Ordóñez and Others  -- John McCarmick; title: chapter The Bullfight Gentrified  -- John McCarmick; title: part, Coda --; title: chapter Another Music -- John McCarmick.