Robert G. Eisenhauer Knihy

Ode Consciousness explores the evolution of the ode over three millennia, bridging philosophy and literature while offering cross-cultural insights into a poetic logic shaped by intense sensuous cognition. Robert Eisenhauer delves into works by Henry Vaughan and modernist Frank O'Hara, emphasizing both the text and its underlying messages within a dialogical framework. The ancient Chinese ode, as translated by Karlgren and reinterpreted by Pound, connects sentience to nature, while the I Ching provides reflections on poetry and psychoanalysis. The emergence of the ode in the West parallels philosophical discussions on clarity and obscurity. Milton expands the esoteric dimensions, while Lovelace's imagery of a frozen grasshopper symbolizes the contrast between fleeting existence and enduring human connections. Coleridge's translation of the "Polish Horace" lays the groundwork for Keats and Shelley, enhancing the lyrical experience through themes of delay and intoxication. Jalal al-Din Rumi and the Arabic qasida embody a negative capability that encompasses both desire and nihilation. Affliction, significant in the Baroque, is examined alongside film noir, while Hegel's focus in Schiller's "Song of the Bell" reflects a broader effort to challenge the radical reimagining of the ode, particularly in the works of Klopstock and Hölderlin. The analysis also addresses Yeats's quest to merge Keatsian and Confucian sensibilities through

"Discussing two cinematic interpretations of Terence Rattigan's play The Browning Version, Eisenhauer traces the use/abuse of names in the rhetoric of academic and political vilification. Drawing on such diverse sources as Aeschylus, Browning, Golding, and Adorno, he finds the current state of discourse in need of "heavy teaching," so that the repressed subject of democracy/tyranny can surpass the psychopathology of the Same." "Analyzing Fellini's radical revision of an Edgar Allan Poe short story, the author suggests how inscrutability saves the audience from guilt because the viewer cannot arrive at apodictic certainty concerning the "subject screened." While Poe lampoons "the transcendentals" as a kind of disease, implying readerly guilt by association, and solidifying the letter T, Fellini, by valorizing theatrical illusion, fails to translate a text that teaches the reader more than he or she is prepared to know."

Aftermyths explores the complexities of literary and visual representation from 1870 to the early twentieth century, highlighting a spectrum from faux essentialism with ethnic nuances to a "cadence of decadence" that mirrors modernity's tensions. The author examines works by Henry James and Mark Twain alongside the cartoon innovations of Rudolf Dirks and Richard Felton Outcault, investigating themes of "decadence," "Americanness," and "Germanness." The use of pastoral language and foreign terms, often seen as archaic, reveals James's intricate discourse, while Twain's struggles with German illustrate a form of liberation rooted in minstrel-like performance and streetwise skepticism. Additionally, key concepts from Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project are applied to New York City post-1920, where figures like Mayor Jimmy Walker and urban planner Robert Moses embody contrasting Dionysian and Apollonian ideals at the nexus of epic, lyric, and drama. Outcault’s "Opera in Ryan's Arcade" highlights the divide between uptown and downtown, high art and low "un-art." The text also revisits Freud's notion of caricature as it relates to Nietzsche's concept of the "not yet determined animal," and draws parallels between two narratives of immortality, Grass's Flounder and Hamill's Forever, before concluding with insights on Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre.

With two essays focused on Wordsworth, this work reframes the discussion of Hesperian aesthetics initiated by Robert Eisenhauer, highlighting the complexities of translation at the intersection of high and low textual roads. It explores the relevance of Goethe's "Der Wandrer" in the context of autobiography and reexamines supernatural agency within the Literature of Power. Wordsworth's self-assertive reinterpretation of antiquity and modernity is invigorated through satire, pastoral themes, and sonnets. The third essay transitions from Pindarizing texts by Cowley, Goethe, and Hölderlin to Matthew Barney's films, emphasizing the mimetic enthusiasm of translators and replicators in creating a "full fan-experience." John Barth's analogy between metafiction and fractal geometry sparks a discussion of works by Thomas Browne, Friedrich Schlegel, a significant painting by Philipp Otto Runge, and Poe's interpretation of The Arabian Nights. The arabesque and grotesque are framed within a passionate exploration of art's utopian aspects, resonating with Nietzsche and contemporary novelists. Eisenhauer also analyzes Padgett Powell's Edisto, presenting it as a divergent mini-epic that reinvents the South and revisits the Literature of Power as a privileged, emancipative counterfacticity, paralleling the fictive worlds of Cable, Faulkner, and Günther Grass.

Parables of Disfiguration examines literary and cinematic texts from the Romantic period forward, offering fresh perspectives on the vicissitudes of reason and excess - seen as moments leading to a seizure by sophia (wisdom). Reading canonical works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, but also less familiar poems such as The Revolt of Islam, Robert Eisenhauer draws attention to a series of transits involving the operation of chance and the playful distortions of the scholarly anagram. Hart Crane and Walt Whitman are seen pursuing Dionysiac vocations in the attempt to advance a poetics of melancholy anatomy. Fellini's landmark film La Dolce Vita recuperates or «re-Vamps» Roman and more exotic (American) character-types, while parabolically excavating ancient names. Further essays are devoted to William Burroughs's representation of the Arab underclass (with reference to the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz), Edward Dorn's Heideggerian epic Gunslinger, the city in twentieth-century utopian vision, and the concept of the ephemeral in modernist aesthetics. Parables of Disfiguration concludes by reading Wallace Stevens's wintry and complex «Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird» tropically - in the context of haiku verse, the Yucatán, Hunter Thompson's «Gonzo» journalism, Plutarch, and an exquisite vehicle combining excess with vindictive righteousness, the Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle.

Paradox and Perspicacity: Horizons of Knowledge in the Literary Text enters into a dialogue with recent scholarship on a number of fronts. Taking into full account the role played by esotericism in shaping the thought of Leibniz, Cardano, and the Helmonts, Robert Eisenhauer elaborates Lessing's «cybernetic» view of historical evolution. The essay on Jean Paul's ars recombinatoria discusses how the discourses of travel, cosmology, and millennial speculation are applied to a Diderot-inspired project of encyclopedic emancipation, concluding with remarks on the author's pedagogical relevance to German-speaking Jews. At mid-century, Margaret Fuller's feminist texts place a Fourierist edge on the consensual reading of Richter, while The Blithedale Romance represents pastoral utopia as a site of mesmeric or, indeed, entropic dislocation. Henry James's The Europeans revisits «Blithedale» as a «ship of fools», where the vehicular provides a metaphor for fiction and narrative itself becomes identified with iconic distress. The remaining essays treat Pound in the context of gemology and courtliness, quasi-direct discourse in Dostoevsky, and the role of Zeno's paradox in Claude Simon's fiction.

Mythic Paradigms in Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts approaches literary and visual texts from the perspective of Hesperian identification and representation. Included is the first translation into English of Fichte's Supplement of 1801, a document whose content sheds light not only on the atheism controversy of the 1790s, but also on literary/philosophical polarizations in the «Republic of Letters». Condensed from the Hesperian atmospherics of Italy and Latin elegy, Faust II entails a Goethean celebration of auditory and visual sensation. In a text devoted to Shelley, Gregory Corso is seen elaborating a prosopopoeia involving Hypnos, god of sleep, a figure dispelling the effects of reading - the hypnoticon. Eisenhauer reads Hölderlin in the context of Pindar, philosophical idealism, and autobiographical projection.