The book presents a compelling argument for the importance of civility shaped by culture and art as a source of hope and redemption. Through eloquent storytelling, Frederick Turner addresses contemporary challenges, offering a thoughtful perspective that resonates in difficult times. The narrative is both beautifully expressed and deeply humane, encouraging readers to find solace and inspiration amidst sorrow.
Set in A.D. 2376, Frederick Turner's epic poem explores the evolution of American culture four centuries into the future. Through rich imagery and themes, it reflects on the nation's identity and values, capturing the essence of a transformed society while celebrating its historical roots. The work invites readers to contemplate the interplay between past and future, illustrating the resilience and adaptability of American culture over time.
The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior - Newly Revised and Edited With an Introduction and Notes by Frederick Turner
208 stránok
8 hodin čítania
The Autobiography of a Great Patriot WarriorThis book contains one of the most extraordinary and invaluable documents in the annals of Native American history--the authentic testament of a remarkable "war shaman" who for several years held off both Mexico and the United States in fierce defense of Apache lands. During 1905 and 1906, Geronimo, the legendary Apache warrior and honorary war chief, dictated his story through a native interpreter to S.M. Barrett, then superintendent of schools in Lawton, Oklahoma. As Geronimo was by then a prisoner of war, Barrett had made appeals all the way up the chain of command to President Teddy Roosevelt for permission to record the word of the "Indian outlaw." Geronimo came to each interview knowing exactly what he wanted to cover, beginning with his telling of the Apache creation story. When at the end of the first session, Barrett posed a question, the only answer he received was a pronouncement--" Write what I have spoken."Now Geronimo's narrative, with S.M. Barrett's original commentary, has been set in historical perspective by Frederick Turner's new introduction on the latest scholarship about the period. These elements combine in Geronimo: His Own Story to provide unique insights into the believes, customs, and way of life of a remarkable man and h is people.
In this groundbreaking interdisciplinary work, Frederick Turner presents a new theory of aesthetics based on the argument that beauty is an objective reality in the universe. He identifies the experience of beauty as a pancultural, neurobiological phenomenon. Drawing on recent work in a wide range of fields--ritual and dramatic performance, the oral tradition, paleoanthropology and human evolution, neurobiology, cosmology and theoretic physics, chaos theory and fractal mathematics--the book describes evolution as a self-organizing, emergent process that generates increasingly advanced forms of self-reflection, and proposes that the experience of beauty is the recognition of this evolutionary process and the reward for participating in it.The experience of aesthetic beauty, Turner says, is an adaptive function that drives evolution through sexual selection. Those individuals most sensitive to beauty survived surface cultural changes, excelled in mating rituals, and were participants in the positive evolution of the species. Turner shows how, as a result, neurotransmitters in the brain respond to certain inherited systems by which we appreciate beauty.Turner also presents the implications for theories of art and literature that follow from his identification of the inherent genres of human aesthetic experience. Forms of art cannot be arbitrary but must be rooted in our biological inheritance. This calls into question theories about modern art, and suggests that modernist culture turned its back on beauty in an attempt to repress and avoid the shame of humanness and our biological nature.This book breaks radically with contemporary positions in psychology, sociology, philosophy, and art, and offers an alternative to present trends in literary and critical theory. It should be of interest to a wide variety of readers, including the artistic community, critical theorists, students of oral traditions, philosophers, and aestheticians.
