Literary Epiphany Research Articles

Retour à Oxford avec Annie Ernaux: casting light on class migrant experience

The documents added to the new edition of Ernaux's Retour à Yvetot (2013, 2022), written during her student years, represent the process and affects of class transition, without the benefits of hindsight, experience, and the readings in sociology, particularly of Bourdieu, that inform her literary texts. I analyse them here both in relation to Ernaux's published works, particularly La Honte and Mémoire de fille and to the letters I wrote at a similar period and phase of my life, as a first-generation student at St Hugh's College, Oxford in the early 70s. At the time, like Annie Duchesne, 1 I had no political or sociological understanding of my experience; reading Ernaux 20 years later in the early 90s was a literary epiphany, illuminating my trajectory from a working-class culture of origin to a middle-class life and career. My engagement with Ernaux over 30 years has also involved a continuous correspondence with the writer, which I draw on here, illustrating the blurred boundaries between intimacy and research discussed by Fraser and Puwar (2008) . This mise en scène of my reading self is placed within the context of the wider communities of class migrant readers of Ernaux: the lay readers studied by myself and Isabelle Charpentier, Ernaux specialists in academe, and the younger writers discussed by Aurélie Adler in this special issue.

ANNIE DILLARD: THE MODERN MYSTIC

In her book titled Annie Dillard, Linda L Smith's writes that Pilgrim at Tinker Creek appears to be book about natural but reality is about God and his relationship to man (Smith, 1991, p.16). In my view, what characterizes Annie Dillard's writing about her surroundings in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is continuous vacillation between her detailed, fresh depiction of natural world and her speculative and mystical inclinations. This vacillation between material and spiritual vision is what establishes close affinity between her works andnineteenthcentury American Transcendentalism.Dillard's mystical vision can be shown in chapter two of her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, meditation on seeing. is matter of verbalization to great extent, says Dillard. Verbalization can call seen object into attention which,therefore, can be seen. Otherwise, would remain unseen, Seeing is of course very much matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes I simply won't see it (Dillard,2009, p. 40). Dillard thinks that secret of seeing is a pearl of great price (Dillard,2009,p. 43) and feels she is ready if only she could find someone to teach her art of doing so, to go through deserts in quest for knowing. Dillard looks for amystical, spiritual vision through which she can see light. She speaks of two kinds of seeing, literal and figurative. I focus on figurative seeing'which is more complicated than literal. This seeing' requires us to look with inner eyes and go beyond outward appearances to see what is hidden. This kind of seeing requires us to be mystics. It is kind of seeing which involves letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied (Dillard,2009, p. 41). This is state of mind that allows mind's muddy river to flow unheeded and to stare at the realm of real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance (Dillard,2009, p. 43) that is not tainted by cultural distortion inherent in language. These are moments of truly seeing and are described by Dillard as an experience of transcendence: Something broke and something opened. I filled up like new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw light like water. I was lip of fountain creek filled for ever; I was ether, leaf in zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone (Dillard,2009, p. 41). Dillard says, vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for moment when mountains open and new light roars in spate through crack, and mountains slam (Dillard,2009, p. 43).Dillard's experience seems very similar to that of Emerson's when his egotism disappears and he feels that he becomes transparent eye-ball(Emerson, 1983, p. 10). In her book Literary Epiphany in Work of Annie:The Space Between, Sandra Johnson discusses those illuminating moments. She says that modern poets work at creating such illuminated moments for reader while earlier poets intended only to convey that vision happened. A literary epiphany allows reader to share experienced moment while vision is just described by writer and recognized by reader as reader is unable to experience visionphysically(Johnson,1992, P.8). Dillard, thus adopts this nineteenth-century transcendental tradition but adds modern sense to by seeking to create illuminated moments in reader and going beyond mere description. W.T. Stace notes that what creates mystical experience is feeling of union with environment and this union may happen in two ways. The first way whichStace calls extrovertive vision or vision of natureis achieved when mystic undergoes unifying vision of reality and feels unified with surroundings but keeps personal awareness. The second type of mystical experience happens when person feels unitary consciousness and awareness. …

Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul. By Sharon Kim.

Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul. By Sharon Kim.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Eudora Welty’s “A Memory” and the Modern Literary Epiphany

COURTNEY BAILEY PARKER Baylor University A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman: Eudora Welty’s “A Memory” and the Modern Literary Epiphany PERHAPS BECAUSE EUDORA WELTY’S SHORT STORY “A MEMORY” WAS initially published in the Southern Review in 1937, three years prior to the beginning of her professional relationship with her agent Diarmuid Russell, critics have treated this faintly autobiographical piece as a kind of outlier. Indeed, Michael Kreyling does not address the story in Author and Agent since it was composed before Russell agreed to represent Welty in 1940. Diana Pingatore notes that critics have struggled to “detect any strong source of literary influence in the story either,” choosing instead to examine the story’s markers of Welty’s childhood in Jackson (Pingatore 93). Critics agree, however, on the notion that “A Memory,” which chronicles a daydreaming adolescent girl’s struggle to reconstruct her memory of first love on a noisy beach, depicts the development of an artist—maybe even, as Katherine Anne Porter suggests, the artistic gestation of Welty herself. In her introduction to the 1941 edition of A Curtain of Green, Porter designates “A Memory” as “one of the best stories,” singling out the young protagonist’s technique of peering through “small frames with [her] fingers” as “the gesture of one born to select, to arrange, to bring apparently disparate elements into harmony within deliberately fixed boundaries” (Porter 16; “A Memory” 92). The young protagonist of “A Memory” refers to herself as an amateur painter, not as a writer, but her “small frames” nevertheless function more as a method of observing “a person, or a happening” as opposed to tableaus for paintings (92). She describes the act of seeing as a means of reaching a “state of exaltation,” wherein each observation might stir up “a secret of life”: All through this summer I had lain on the sand beside the small lake, with my hands squared over my eyes, finger tips touching, looking out by this device to see everything: which appeared as a kind of projection. It did not matter to me what I 252 Courtney Bailey Parker looked at; from any observation I would conclude that a secret of life had been nearly revealed to me—for I was obsessed with notions about concealment, and from the smallest gesture of a stranger I would wrest what was to me a communication or a presentiment. (92-93) The young girl’s sensitivity to “a communication or a presentiment” through “the smallest gesture,” read alongside Welty’s lakeside setting, not only evokes a contemplative mode, but it is also reminiscent of the iconic Joycean epiphany exemplified in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. When Stephen Dedalus experiences his epiphanic vision of the young girl bathing on the strand, he recalls “a new wild life singing in his veins” as he muses about his own artistic calling (Portrait 170). The artist, James Joyce suggests in an earlier version of Portrait, understands epiphany as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” (Stephen Hero 211). In light of Joyce’s definition, Welty’s protagonist’s desire to “wrest” a “secret of life” from the “smallest gesture of a stranger” certainly strikes an epiphanic tone, perhaps to the extent that this trope is valuable for detecting a potential literary influence for this early story. Retrospectively, the relationship between these two moments is reflected powerfully in the imagination of literary modernism and its concern for the Romantic epiphany. But the relationship between these moments in Portrait and “A Memory” is more complex than shades of allusion: here I argue that Welty’s story would appear to revise this modernist myth to suit a view of artistic revelation that not only criticizes the subjectivity of the burgeoning artist, but also questions the idealized art object, replacing what Suzette Henke calls the beautiful “bird-girl” of Stephen Dedalus’s epiphany (66) with the vulgar, unruly bathers at Welty’s lakeside. Furthermore, a reading of these two moments suggests new queries about Welty’s position within literary modernism. Welty’s moment of epiphany revises...

Het uitgelezen uur - Couperus en de beleving van het heden

In this essay the author examines the relationship between the Present and the Happiness in the works of Louis Couperus. He also examines to what extent Couperus’ moments of happiness match the literary epiphany as defined by Van Halsema in his book Epifanie. It appears that around 1900 a turning point occurred in Couperus’ appreciation of the present. Before that time the term stood for everything that was small and insignificant. After that Couperus generated the idea that happiness comes from the acceptance of the present. In a series of variations on the theme Couperus unfolds his views on the connection of the present and happiness. The story ‘Jahve’ and the novel Antiek toerisme are of crucial importance for this relationship. In these two texts the acceptance of the present is a divine power that man must master. The epiphany character of the moments is initially weak. Only at the end of Couperus’ career as a writer do the moments of happiness get the character of an epiphany.

Edith Wharton and Epiphany

Although not typically associated with literary epiphany, Wharton was one of the first to recognize its significance to modernist fiction. In The Writing of Fiction, Wharton made epiphany central to her theory of fiction and used it to enter into a dialogue with the modernism she viewed from a critical distance. Wharton distinguishes between two different epiphanies: the moral epiphany and the modern epiphany, which stresses the materiality of aesthetic perception. Wharton links the discontinuity of modernist fiction with the ahistorical thrust of modern epiphany. She argues instead for continuity with the narrative patterns inherited from literary history, patterns that interpolated moral epiphanies. In Hudson River Bracketed and The Gods Arrive, Wharton develops a third form of epiphany, one that combines the aesthetics of modern epiphany with a subjective and historical continuity that has its roots in an older, perhaps more female, source of creative production.

Epiphany in autobiography: the quantum changes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.

The quantum changes of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are clarified by the partly overlapping concept of a literary epiphany. The qualities of an epiphany-intensity, resonance, and mystery-are much like the vividness and surprise of a quantum change (which also is felt to be beneficent and permanent). Epiphanic intensity and mystery reinforce the quantum attributes of love and lasting transformation in Dostoevsky's sudden memory of the motherlike tenderness of the peasant Marey. Tolstoy underlines the quantum effects of the embracing light seen in A Confession, but this epiphany is more abstract and attenuated than Dostoevsky's Diary episode. Tolstoy's earlier memoir shows how the shock of identity questioning introduces a complicating factor: the trauma of remorse. Clinical implications of the two authors' quantum-change accounts are discussed.

The Visionary Moment: A Postmodern Critique (review)

Maltby, Paul. 2002. The Visionary Moment. A Postmodern Critique. Albany: SUNY Press. $54.50 he. xi + 176 pp.It has become rather difficult of late to make an impact with book informed by theory and practice. The horizon of expectations for innovation has been significantly flattened both because theory seems to have settled into comfortable truisms and because readers in this age of growing insecurities have gravitated back to reassuring notions of narrative ordering. And yet, the attentive reader will be amply rewarded reading Paul Maltby's recent book that revises our consensual understanding about both traditional narratives of and the challenges to them. The author had already proven his capacity to reread imaginatively postwar fiction: his 1991 book, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon, reoriented discussions of postmodernism towards more rewarding sociocultural issues, retrieving dissident strain in what had up to then been regarded as an apolitical, quietist production.The Visionary Moment engages us in similar rethinking of key literary and cultural issues (representation, visionarism, subjectivity, truth) within sophisticated theoretical and analytical framework. Maltby's focus on (i.e., moments of sudden enlightenment that dramatically raise [our] spiritual awareness to the level of transcendent and redemptive order of knowledge [2002,1]) is doubly relevant: first, because it recognizes the persistence of visionary-redemptive strain in contemporary fiction; sec ondly because it brings to bear upon it the skeptical epistemology of postmodernism in way that allows both discourses to interact and challenge each other. This focus relocates the discussion of fiction in stronger cognitive framework, while at the same time moving us beyond generational divisions in contemporary writing, finding surprising commonalties in the works of Flannery O'Connor, Saul Bellow Jack Kerouac, Alice Walker, Paule Marshall, Raymond Carver, and Don DeLiIIo.While only DeLiIIo qualifies as postmodern fictionist, the other writers discussed in some detail also undercut certain narrative conventions (both modernist and realist), so that their use of does not simply reinforce the Romantic-modernist tradition of the literary epiphany (from Wordsworth through Browning and Hopkins to Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner [2002, 35]). As Maltby explains, their moments start from a critical situation or incident that upsets routine mindset (13). Furthermore, while these writers are interested in the eruption of higher order of meaning in the contingent, they tend to understate its significance, their moments being rendered in largely denotative terms, with minimal use of literary artifice (26). Their style is often hesitant, with the writer speaking from an unprivileged, culturally grounded position that reflects the post-1945 undermining of the writer's authority (27).While recognizing that the strain in contemporary fiction is significantly qualified, Maltby confronts it with critique in order to demystify its metaphysical vestiges that emphasize narratives of conversion, the preeminence of the nonrational cognitive faculty, the authority of inner experience and of the writer's endowed perspective, and the ideology of individual salvation (2002, 31). Maltby challenges the notion that the moments announce [their] own meaning, as if [they] were intrinsically significant [47]), arguing that they cannot be experienced outside of literature; literature itself supplying] the forms that enable us to encode certain subjective experiences as visionary (24). …

Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (review)

378Philosophy and Literature Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature, by Bernd Magnus, Stanley Stewart, and Jean-Pierre Mileur; 284 pp. NewYork: Routledge, 1993, $52.50 cloth, $16.95 paper. This book sets out to tackle the formidable corpus of Friedrich Nietzsche from the points ofview ofboth literature and philosophy, to "bring conventionally marked 'philosophic' and 'literary' texts into conversation with one another in a way never done before" (p. 2) . I am not sure the authors are as innovative as they claim—after all, poststructural literary critics are continually straying into the textual territory once clearly marked "philosophic"—but it certainly proves to be a most fruitful enterprise with regard to Nietzsche. The authors' collaboration (Magnus is a philosopher, Stewart and Mileur are teachers of English) offers numerous insights into the vexed relationship of these disciplines, and most substantially, a provocative re-viewing of Nietzsche's eclectic work as—in effect—a complex, even tortuous allegory of writing. With this view in mind, the authors work hard to represent Nietzsche's seminal constructs—Eternal Recurrence, Will to Power, the Übermensch et al.— as so many textual strategies, occasions for the reader, in Roland Barthes's terms, to write herself into the experience of reading. This argument is elaborated through a series of provocative, detailed readings of Towards the Genealogy of Morals, Twilight of tL· Idols, and—most exhaustively—Thus Spake Zarathustra. The authors consider a number of pressing Nietzschean issues, including the narrator/speaker's relationship with his readers—"Some are born posthumously," observes Nietzsche modestly in Ecce Homo—the rhetorical tropes and ploys of his writing (chiefly, say the authors, the device of hyperbole) and—in sum—the radical kind of narrative that Nietzsche is writing. For example: in Twilight of the Idols, assert the authors, Nietzsche frustrates our deep-seated desire for narrative closure, creating instead "an alternative definition of the protagonist's place in an unfinished story which no one is writing, about characters with no specifiable or necessary traits, whose destiny cannot be known" (p. 74). In particular, the relation of reader to writing is marked, the authors tell us, by Nietzsche's own implicated sense of the world-as-text: "For Nietzsche seems to look on the world, not securely from without (as if it were a sort of artwork) , but ... as if from within an unfolding text whose alienness we must find a way to make our own" (p. 134). Accordingly, the constructs which Nietzsche "embodies" rather than "expresses" (in the author's terms) are spurs to the imagination of the (attentive, perhaps unborn) reader: "Rhetorically, the questions propounded [in TL· Gay Science or Thus Spake Zarathustra] insinuate that a bland or neutral response ('So who cares?') is impossible. Both fictive representations exclude apathy as an option" (p. 114). One of the most interesting aspects of the book, from the point of view of both philosophic and literary readers, is the "conversation" initiated between Reviews379 Nietzsche and various seminal figures in the English literary tradition. This is not to say that Magnus, Stewart, and Mileur assert "influences" on Nietzsche: they demonstrate, most effectively in some cases, that great literature embodies the complex constructs that Nietzsche is after—that Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence," say, or Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," reveal Eternal Recurrence, or an authorial Will to Power, to be the complex writerly strategies they are. And yet, there are problems with this cheerfully postmodern mode of exegesis. Try and textualize as one might, there are awkward problems for conduct contained in Nietzsche's writings—for example, his characterization of women is more (ethically) disturbing than our authors' rather blithe rhetorical concerns allow—and these problems remain after reading this study. To represent epistemology as literary epiphany reduces Nietzsche's claims to being a philosopher, in the sense of one who engages in serious, sustained attention to the problems of living—outside the text. Magnus, Steward, and Mileur may have given us a Nietzsche who is a marvelous writer—the only begetter of, say, Foucault and Derrida—but they may just have lost us a powerful agent who ventures beyond writing. And that would be a pity. University...

The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard; By Sandra Humble Johnson Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1992. 214 pp. $28.00

The Space Between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard; <i>By Sandra Humble Johnson</i> Kent, Ohio, Kent State University Press, 1992. 214 pp. $28.00

Book Review: The Space between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

Book Review: The Space between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

The Space between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

The Space between: Literary Epiphany in the Work of Annie Dillard

The space between: literary epiphany in the work of Annie Dillard

Annie Dillard, a practitioner of the literary epiphany, has become a representative of a neoromantic movement that combines the ecological interest of wilderness literature with the aesthetics of a highly stylized literature. This study of the Pulitzer prize-winning essayist considers her as wilderness philosopher, critic, and arch-romantic. Sandra Humble Johnson moves Dillard from the category of nature writer to the area of aesthetics as she examines the importance of literary epiphany - a distinctive type of illumination - to her work. She then explores how Dillard, through her own peculiar use of language, describes and creates these moments of illumination, or dots of self, for the reader. Johnson also reveals Dillard's relationship with other writers who practiced this same literary device: William Wordsworth in his spots of time, T.S. Eliot and his still points, and Gerard Manley Hopkins through his inscape. In addition, Johnson shows how the reader experiences a similar yet personal epiphany in sharing the writer's moment of illumination, and further interprets how Dillard's absorption with pain, violence, and beauty is resolved in the nature of language itself.

Epiphany and Browning: Character Made Manifest

The fortunes of epiphany indicate both recent historical disparities within literary criticism and current cultural disparities between academic and popular discourse. The contextualist practice of Wordsworth and Joyce, in contrast to the purist theory that arose with the New Criticism, suggests that epiphany is a narrative device underscoring the historical and cultural construction of character. This conception is borne out by the original Epiphany, in Matthew, which manifests divine personality to human eyes through an episode of cultural difference and accommodation. Robert Browning's historicist poetry uses comparable but secular means of manifesting personality. In his dramatic monologues “Karshish,” “My Star,” and ‘“Transcendentalism,”’ epiphanic themes serve as measures of their speakers’ cultural construction. In discerning the relative differentiae that characterize such speakers, Browning's readers encounter their own relativity to interpretive conditions. As these examples imply, the modern literary epiphany ultimately effects the hermeneutic manifestation of the reader.