In The Poetics of Fire, Pulitzer prize–winning journalist and Chicano author Victor M. Valle posits the chile as a metaphor for understanding the shared cultural histories of ChicanX and LatinX peoples from preconquest Mesoamerica to twentieth-century New Mexico. Valle uses the chile as a decolonizing lens through which to analyze preconquest Mesoamerican cosmology, early European exploration, and the forced conversion of Native peoples to Catholicism as well as European and Mesoamerican perspectives on food and place. Assembling a rich collection of source material, Valle highlights the fiery fruit’s overarching importance as evidenced by the ubiquity of references to the plant over several centuries in literature, art, official documents, and more to offer a new eco-aesthetic reading—a reframing of culinary history from a pluralistic, non-Western perspective.

This collection of papers responds to the question of whether a ritual at the end of a text can offer resolution and order or rather a complicated kind of closure. It reveals that ritual can bring but also can thwart closure by alluding to new beginnings. A ritual could be a perfect kind of ending but it hardly ever seems to be. In Flavian literature this is even more apparent because of the complicated political background under which these texts were produced. Ancient religious practices in the closing sections of Flavian texts help us create connections between endings and (new) beginnings, order and disorder, binding and loosening, structure and dissolution which reflects the structure of the Empire in Flavian Rome. Overall, this volume offers a new tool for studying literary endings through ritual, which promotes our understanding of Flavian culture and politics as well as creating a new perception of the use of religion and ritual in Flavian literature: instead of giving a sense of closure, this volume argues that ritual is a medium to increase complexity, to expose ritual actors and to project a generic riskiness of ritual actors also onto the epic actors who are acting before and mostly after a ritual scene.

This book represents the first English translation of Maaseh Merkabah, which is part of a body of early Jewish mystical texts known as palace (hekhalot) or chariot (merkabah) texts. Through a complex dialogue, a rabbi-teacher reveals to his student the techniques of ascent, methods for traveling up through the heavens by means of recitation of hymns. The teacher gives vivid descriptions of the heavenly realm, filled with flaming chariots and a chorus of angels engaged in praising the deity. The emphasis in the text is on language, on the correct recitation of the words to achieve the ritual. The particular focus is on the divine Name, which can be employed in unusual ways. The author relates the structures of the text to the linguistic idealogies. The complex structures of the text begin to unfold in light of the theories about the ritual function of language. The hymns include praise of the deity and voces magicae, words that have no semantic meaning, but draw attention to sounds of letters in God's name. Since God's name is used to create the world, the sounds of the name are creative, but the Name cannot be spoken. The hymns create a multiplicity of Name-equivalents, words that have the functional status of the divine Name and which can be employed in ritual. Voces magicae are not so much nonsense as they are logical extensions of the linguistic theory. The final chapter surveys recent theories of ritual language and then uses the conclusions from the study to refine the general issue of the relationship between the semantic meaning of words and their ritual efficacy. The dialogic structure of the text permits the reader to become the next student in a chain going back to the deity by means of Moses.

In times of political or social uncertainties the poet usually takes on the mantle of prophet, priest, or seer. He becomes not just the custodian of justice, but also the symbolic voice of the unified society. It is these unique and peculiar roles that Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Claude McKay (USA), and Jean Toomer (USA) used poetry as a medium to enunciate their anxieties, frustrations, doubts, hopes, and desires about the repressive systems in their respective countries.

Revision of thesis - University of Massachusets, 1981.

The transformation of Late Petrarchism from earlier stages reflects a profound shift in cultural values--a 'crisis of the Renaissance' that generated new perspectives in poetic theory and practice. Broadly, this book identifies a distinctive 'poetics of inconstancy' that came to the fore at the end of the sixteenth century and pervaded the love verse of the age. At the same time, as a study based on the inductive method, the book takes as its point of departure a single poet: Etienne Durand. Because of his frequently anthologized 'Stances a l'Inconstance,' Durand is often singled out as 'the poet of inconstancy.' This study, however, identifies the theme of universal change as a hallmark of Durand's contemporaries as well--a signal of a stylistic revolution that heralded the end of Renaissance verse.

Memory is one of the most pervasive and complex motifs in Anton Chekhov's prose. This book clearly demonstrates that memory is not only a dominant theme, but, more significantly, a structuring principle that shapes the poetic, temporal, and spatial composition of several of Chekhov's stories from 1887 to 1904, including some of his best known works, such as «The Bishop, » «The Lady with a Lapdog, » «The House with a Mezzanine, » and «The Black Monk». Chekhov and the Poetics of Memory examines various modes of memory - nostalgic, regenerative, commemorative - and traces their expression in the language of the journey, prayer, and artistic inspiration, shedding light on the centrality of the themes of spiritual growth and moral action in Chekhov's work. In considering the larger theoretical and cultural context of memory, this study breaks new ground in showing the impact on Chekhov's work of the Eastern Orthodox religious tradition, as well as Henri Bergson and other modernist notions of time and memory.