David Price | Suffolk County Community College (original) (raw)
Papers by David Price
This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats... more This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Utilizing a theoretical lens provided primarily through the writings of Jacques Derrida and an historical context established by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the paper argues that the literary texts of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce deconstruct a Western cultural history of a transcendent-immanent binary and seek to revive elements of the transcendent as a cure to the consequences of the dominant materialist-immanent worldview of Enlightenment modernity. This paper relies on the distinction between twentieth century literary modernism and modernity, seeing literary modernism as an avant-garde movement that experiments with style and a more responsive, adaptable, de-centered, view that is suspicious of the stratified, hierarchical, mechanistic view of modernity, a view of human life which can lead to a flattened and oppressive view of reality and the universe. Modernity, beginning around 1500 according to Taylor, in its emphasis on rationality and the empirical, and its de-emphasis on belief in the spiritual or enchanted, has a had negative effect, a sense that something is missing in twentieth century views of life that these works seek to address. Ultimately, these works produce moments of the transcendent in their fragmented twentieth century view of the world that do not coalesce into a stratified view but allow for the incorporation of elements of both the immanent and transcendent.
In "Twentieth-Century Fiction and The Black Mask of Humanity," Ellison's thoughts reflect modern ... more In "Twentieth-Century Fiction and The Black Mask of Humanity," Ellison's thoughts reflect modern motifs concerning history, language, and identity. In particular, he wants to take about humanity, how it's portrayed, and how it is a confluence of historical developments as well. To summarize, he looks at the "Negro" both as an individual human in his particularity, and how that identity is shaped by larger forces of history, politics and media. Ellison's "Invisible Man" is hard to grasp because he is so many things; his identity is constantly changing, and while Negro and modern aspects of his identity are flushed out at times, they are not all encompassing. There is a double meaning to the invisibility of the "Invisible Man;" his invisibility is due to both the Negro and modern aspects of his identity. But the identity of the "Invisible Man" is paradoxical because if identity is existential, coming out and defining one's self as something, then this definition pre-supposes a world that is stable and the invisible man occupies an unstable, illusory world, thus he is unable to be seen in and his existence is unrecognizable in an unstable, illusory world. Thus he creates an identity that orders the chaos of the outside world by telling his own story.
This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats... more This dissertation examines the binary of transcendence and immanence in the poetry of W. B. Yeats, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. Utilizing a theoretical lens provided primarily through the writings of Jacques Derrida and an historical context established by Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, the paper argues that the literary texts of Yeats, Pound, and Joyce deconstruct a Western cultural history of a transcendent-immanent binary and seek to revive elements of the transcendent as a cure to the consequences of the dominant materialist-immanent worldview of Enlightenment modernity. This paper relies on the distinction between twentieth century literary modernism and modernity, seeing literary modernism as an avant-garde movement that experiments with style and a more responsive, adaptable, de-centered, view that is suspicious of the stratified, hierarchical, mechanistic view of modernity, a view of human life which can lead to a flattened and oppressive view of reality and the universe. Modernity, beginning around 1500 according to Taylor, in its emphasis on rationality and the empirical, and its de-emphasis on belief in the spiritual or enchanted, has a had negative effect, a sense that something is missing in twentieth century views of life that these works seek to address. Ultimately, these works produce moments of the transcendent in their fragmented twentieth century view of the world that do not coalesce into a stratified view but allow for the incorporation of elements of both the immanent and transcendent.
In "Twentieth-Century Fiction and The Black Mask of Humanity," Ellison's thoughts reflect modern ... more In "Twentieth-Century Fiction and The Black Mask of Humanity," Ellison's thoughts reflect modern motifs concerning history, language, and identity. In particular, he wants to take about humanity, how it's portrayed, and how it is a confluence of historical developments as well. To summarize, he looks at the "Negro" both as an individual human in his particularity, and how that identity is shaped by larger forces of history, politics and media. Ellison's "Invisible Man" is hard to grasp because he is so many things; his identity is constantly changing, and while Negro and modern aspects of his identity are flushed out at times, they are not all encompassing. There is a double meaning to the invisibility of the "Invisible Man;" his invisibility is due to both the Negro and modern aspects of his identity. But the identity of the "Invisible Man" is paradoxical because if identity is existential, coming out and defining one's self as something, then this definition pre-supposes a world that is stable and the invisible man occupies an unstable, illusory world, thus he is unable to be seen in and his existence is unrecognizable in an unstable, illusory world. Thus he creates an identity that orders the chaos of the outside world by telling his own story.