Literary Criticism
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
The Butterfly Hatch
Literary Experience in the Quest for Wisdom: Uncanonically Seating H.D
Richard Vytniorgu is a Midlands3Cities Fellow and teaches English at the University of Leicester. Between 2014–17 he was a Midlands3Cities–AHRC PhD candidate at De Montfort University, where he has also taught literary theory. He has published on personalism, modernism, and literary theory in Modern Language Review, Humanities, and Educational Journal of Living Theories. He is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and is currently on the editorial board for Peer English.
Some of H.D.’s most oft-quoted lines have to do with the meaning and value of words; they are conditioned to hatch butterflies. Yet rather than seeking merely to understand how H.D. represented the meaning and value of words, this volume uses ‘the butterfly hatch’ as a metaphor for thinking more broadly about the capacity of literary experience to hatch transformed persons – ‘butterflies’ in quest of wisdom in university English studies. Dislodging H.D. from her usual modernist context, this book positions her as a thinker and reads her autobiographical prose and recently published work of the 1940s for its ability to offer new insights into such pertinent and interconnected areas as literary contexts, imagination, and personal and social transformation.
H.D. has, in her own words, always been 'uncanonically seated', resistant to rigid classification; the texture of her work celebrates internal, existential resonances that evidence the emergence of personality. The author capitalizes on this facet of H.D.’s work and uncanonically seats her in conversation with the neglected literary theorist, Louise Rosenblatt (1904–2005), whose transactional contribution uniquely fuses critical theory, politics, philosophy, and educational vision.
This book synthesizes the work of H.D. and Rosenblatt to create an emergent personalist theory of literary experience in the quest for wisdom, crystallizing links between philosophical anthropology, aesthetics, pedagogy, and the politics of human relations. Benefiting from access to unpublished material housed at Columbia, New York, and Yale universities, Vytniorgu combines analysis and theorizing to offer a significant, pedagogically-inflected intervention in literary studies, arguing that university English studies must incorporate critical and pedagogical vantages which open a window on wisdom as well as knowledge.
| Hardback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-937-1 |
| Hardback Price: | £50.00 / $69.95 |
| Release Date: | December 2018 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 200 pp. 229 x 152 mm |
| Illustrated: | No |
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction |
An Uncanonical Direction |
One |
Foregrounding Individual Experience |
Two |
Personalizing Literary Experience |
Three |
The Palimpsest of Imagination |
Four |
The Role of the Literatus |
Five |
Wisdom in the University |
Six |
Personalities in Quest |
Conclusion |
Literary Studies and (Re)vivification |
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Vytniorgu throws down the gauntlet. Assailing the current top-down, information-dispensing approaches to reading in university English studies, he ingeniously has the creative writings of HD dialogue with the theoretical work of Louise Rosenblatt, to fashion dramatic alternatives.
Gordon M. Pradl, Professor Emeritus, New York University
This book addresses several profound questions. Why do we read? Can literature develop wisdom? What do we mean by ‘education’? Articulating complex ideas with refreshing clarity, Vytniorgu’s study makes original contributions to the fields of modernist literary studies, philosophy, and pedagogical theory, in the process developing a timely case for the humanities and extending the boundaries of literary studies.
Sarah Parker, Lecturer in English, Loughborough University
The book is a brilliant and urgent call for new interventions in both the study and teaching of literature. Vytniorgu, whose indebtedness to the theory and practice of Louise Rosenblatt is everywhere evident, promises readers greater self-knowledge and enhanced understanding of some of the central existential issues of life. The book upends most established approaches to both the study and teaching of literature, especially those that remove the person from readings of texts and ignore crucial concepts such as wisdom. The Butterfly Hatch is an indispensible work, therefore, for educators, students, and nonprofessional readers interested in learning about themselves and the world from their encounters with literature.
Elizabeth A. Flynn, Professor Emerita, Michigan Tech University
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