The Elsewhere Community - Softcover

Kenner, Hugh

3.72

67 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0887846076 ISBN 13: 9780887846076

Publisher: House of Anansi Pr, 1998

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Acclaimed literary critic Hugh Kenner examines Western culture's insatiable need for stimulation encountered elsewhere - from the eighteenth century's Grand Tour, to the self-imposed exile of modernist writers, to the disembodied global journeys the Internet avails us today. Kenner brings to this fascinating study knowledge of a wide array of disciplines.

Hugh Kenner has written on topics ranging from geodesic domes to Bugs Bunny, but is perhaps best known for The Pound Era, his definitive study of Ezra Pound's life and work.

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About the Author:

Hugh Kenner was a teacher and author 25 books, including The Pound Era, Dublin's Joyce, and the 1997 CBC Massey Lectures, The Elsewhere Community. He died in 2003.

Review:

"Though this homage to the transforming personal encounter may be minor Kenner, it is always readable, charming, and inspiriting. Ideally The Elsewhere Community will send a few readers, at least, on to the critic's greater works--or back to the master spirits to whom he has devoted his life."--Book World, The Washington Post

"The five mesmerizing chapters first saw life as a series of talks delivered on CBC Radio. Their presence in print lets alert readers sit and listen with grateful excitement to the elegant, generous and brilliantly stimulating Hugh Kenner."--San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle

"The theme of Hugh Kenner's new book is travel: an experience for modern authors, it is a value in the imaginative consciousness of modernist writers especially, and the excitement it exerts in their texts is recreated here by a critic who is doubtless their foremost commentator. But the book also tells--or retells--the stories of Kenner's own sojourns, in particular his meetings and interactions with the primary characters of first-generation modernism. Pound and Eliot, Wyndham Lewis and William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore: the legends live here with some of the vivid intimacy of the student's initial exposure. Kenner is in every sense of the term a fellow-traveler with these characters, and he is also a sufficiently important figure to make this account of his own formative ground a compelling piece of intellectual and literary history."--Vincent Sherry, Department of English, Villanova University

"Hugh Kenner is one of the great literary critics of the twentieth century. But he is first and foremost a story teller, and like the story tellers he admires most--Joyce, Beckett, Pound--he knows that great stories always come in quirky, surprising forms. The Elsewhere Community is a great story--the story of how, in the process of inventing himself, Hugh Kenner also invented literary modernism."--James Longenbach, Professor of English, University of Rochester

"While much scholarly work has become so dense as to become unreadable, Mr. Kenner's prose has retained the humor and elan that have defined his writing since his first book, a 1947 study of Chesterton."--The New York Observer

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