Literary Theory and Sanskrit Poetics Language, Consciousness, and Meaning
| Author: | Haney, William | |
| Year: | 1993 | |
| Pages: | 208 | |
| ISBN: | 0-7734-9379-4 978-0-7734-9379-7 | |
| Price: | $179.95 + shipping | |
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Unlike the Western mode, Sanskrit poetics provides an understanding of language and consciousness based not on difference but on the coexistence of opposites. This study argues that the knowledge of meaning and expanded consciousness provided by Sanskrit poetics supplements deconstruction and poststructuralism. In contributing to the growing multicultural emphasis in scholarship, this book develops a comparative poetics between the European and Sanskrit literary traditions.
Reviews
"The last four chapters are separate essays on specific texts: Joyce's Ulysses, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Soyinka's ritual dramas. Written from the junction point between Sanskrit poetics and poststructuralist theories, these essays provide the reader with new and exciting visions of the possibilities inherent in these texts. . . . Haney's perspective is always suggestive and challenging . . . . this is an important book, one that is clearly written and carefully structured so as to lead the reader to contemplate new avenues of thought and experience in the conjoining of Western deconstruction and Eastern notions of self-referral." - Fredrick A. de Armas
"On the side of Western theory, Haney's command is particularly impressive: he provides an accurate digest of these approaches and moves between them with sureness. Besides its introduction to some basics of Sanskrit poetics, for readers with little exposure to critical theory, this study might serve as an instructive review of contemporary Western theory as well. . . . this is a work of unusual fluency, intellectual agility, and critical synthesis. . . . Haney's reconnoitering of this new critical terrain will be especially useful to comparatists, theorists, and students of modern literature." -- Alan D. Hodder
" . . . he manages to construct an alternative poetics out of this ongoing resistance, as well as analyze texts central to the Western literary tradition but in terms of his theory of interactive poetics. The result is a tour de force: an opening out of an impasse or aporia (between logocentric and its deconstruction) and the construction of a hybrid text. The original exegesis of works by Barthes, Joyce, Soyinka, Faulkner and Pynchon indicate the applicability of Haney's book to classroom instruction." -- Donald E. Pease
"On the side of Western theory, Haney's command is particularly impressive: he provides an accurate digest of these approaches and moves between them with sureness. Besides its introduction to some basics of Sanskrit poetics, for readers with little exposure to critical theory, this study might serve as an instructive review of contemporary Western theory as well. . . . this is a work of unusual fluency, intellectual agility, and critical synthesis. . . . Haney's reconnoitering of this new critical terrain will be especially useful to comparatists, theorists, and students of modern literature." -- Alan D. Hodder
" . . . he manages to construct an alternative poetics out of this ongoing resistance, as well as analyze texts central to the Western literary tradition but in terms of his theory of interactive poetics. The result is a tour de force: an opening out of an impasse or aporia (between logocentric and its deconstruction) and the construction of a hybrid text. The original exegesis of works by Barthes, Joyce, Soyinka, Faulkner and Pynchon indicate the applicability of Haney's book to classroom instruction." -- Donald E. Pease