Showing posts with label unity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unity. Show all posts
3.18.2014
3.15.2010
monotonous obstinacy
I feel sure of the fundamental and lasting unity of all that I have written or will write—and I am not talking of an autobiographical unity or unity of taste, which are trivialities—but of a unity of themes, vital interests, the monotonous obstinacy of one who feels sure that the very first day he has found the true world, the eternal world, and can do nothing but revolve around the great monolith and take off chunks and work at them and study them in every possible light.
—Cesare Pavese from “Work is Wearying,” quoted in The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Cesare Pavese’s Works (Cornell U. Press, 1968) by Gian-Paulo Biasin, translated by Yvonne Freccero.
—Cesare Pavese from “Work is Wearying,” quoted in The Smile of the Gods: A Thematic Study of Cesare Pavese’s Works (Cornell U. Press, 1968) by Gian-Paulo Biasin, translated by Yvonne Freccero.
11.26.2008
not a sandheap
S.H. Butcher, best known for his translations and commentary of Aristotle’s Poetics (New York, 1907)…wrote previously a survey entitled “Greek Literary Criticism” where he presented fully and clearly the significance of Phaedrus 264C*. After quoting the whole passage, Butcher says: “Here, observe, and for the first time, the law of internal unity is enunciated, as a primary condition of literary art—now commonplace, then a discovery...Organic as distinct from mechanical unity; not the homogeneous sameness of a sandheap, but a unity combined with variety, a unity vital and structural, implying mutual dependence of all the parts, such that if a part is displaced or removed, the whole is dislocated...From this point of view the unity and artistic beauty of a literary composition are found to reside in a pervasive harmony, a single animating and controlling principle.” (pp. 192-193)
[quoted from a delightful treatise on the subject of: Organic Unity In Ancient & Later Poetics (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1975) by G. N. Giordano Orsini]
*”Every discourse must be composed like, or in the likeness of, a living being, with a body of its own as it were, so as not to be headless or feetless, but to have a middle and members arranged in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”
[quoted from a delightful treatise on the subject of: Organic Unity In Ancient & Later Poetics (Southern Illinois U. Press, 1975) by G. N. Giordano Orsini]
*”Every discourse must be composed like, or in the likeness of, a living being, with a body of its own as it were, so as not to be headless or feetless, but to have a middle and members arranged in fitting relation to each other and to the whole.”
4.15.2007
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)