20th century
A01=Fanny Howe
art and literature
Author_Fanny Howe
bewilderment
Category=DCF
Category=DNL
contemporary philosophy
doubt
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
existential
faith and doubt
faith and religion
female authors
gender issues
imagination
language
literary criticism
literary critics
literary essays
making art
meditations
memoir
motherhood
nonfiction
nonfiction essays
overcoming doubt
poetry
political perspective
political thought
power of language
power of the mind
race issues
racism
role of art
social justice
Product details
- ISBN 9780520238404
- Weight: 272g
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 25 Nov 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In times of great uncertainty, the urgency of the artist's task is only surpassed by its difficulty. Ours is such a time, and rising to the challenge, novelist and poet Fanny Howe suggests new and fruitful ways of thinking about both the artist's role and the condition of doubt. In these original meditations on bewilderment, motherhood, imagination, and art-making, Howe takes on conventional systems of belief and argues for another, brave way of proceeding. In the essays 'Immanence' and 'Work and Love' and those on writers such as Carmelite nun Edith Stein, French mystic Simone Weil, Thomas Hardy, and Ilona Karmel - who were particularly affected by political, philosophical, and existential events in the twentieth century - she directly engages questions of race, gender, religion, faith, language, and political thought and, in doing so, expands the field of the literary essay. A richly evocative memoir, "Seeing Is Believing", situates Howe's own domestic and political life in Boston in the late '60s and early '70s within the broader movement for survival and social justice in the face of that city's racism.
Whether discussing Weil, Stein, Meister Eckhart, Saint Teresa, Samuel Beckett, or Lady Wilde, Howe writes with consummate authority and grace, turning bewilderment into a lens and a light for finding our way.
Fanny Howe is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. Among her books of poems are Gone: Poems (California, 2003), Selected Poems (California, 2000), Forged (1999), Q (1998), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), and The End (1992). She is the winner of the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for Poetry and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Selected Poems was also one of the Village Voice's Best Books of the Year and was nominated for the Griffin Trust Prize.
