Books by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, auto... more Edith Wharton was not only the author of novels and short stories but also of drama, poetry, autobiography, interior decoration, and travel writing. This study focuses on Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture in her travel writings. It shows how a network of allusions to travel writing and art history books influenced Wharton’s representations of architectural and natural spaces. The book demonstrates Wharton’s complex relationship to works of art historians (John Ruskin, Émile Mâle, Arthur C. Porter) and travel authors (Wolfgang Goethe, Henry Adams, Henry James) in the trajectory of her travel writing. Kovács surveys how the acknowledgement of Wharton’s sources sheds light both on the author’s model of aesthetic understanding and scenic architectural descriptions, and how the shock of the Great War changed Wharton’s travel destinations but not her symbolic view of architecture as a mediator of things past. Wharton’s symbolic representations of architecture provide a new key to her travel writings.
Lewiston, New York: Mellen., 2006
The book investigates the ways in which Henry James uses the term ‘the imagination’ in three diff... more The book investigates the ways in which Henry James uses the term ‘the imagination’ in three different discursive contexts: in his critical articles on novelists and literature, in his fictional production, and in his essays on American culture. The book differentiates the diverse meanings the term ‘the imagination’ has for James in different contexts and thereby places his novelistic project among those of American, French, English, and Russian writers of his age. The work offers a case study of the Jamesian ideas with some reference to his contemporary context.
In general, the Jamesian imagination proves to be a part of James’s contextual model of understanding. In his critical articles on other novelists, the imagination is mainly responsible for an active, profound transformation of impressions into a process of experience, and this quality of the imagination is referred to as moral. In the novels, the imagination retains its central role in the process of understanding, but understanding becomes a social affair of more than one person. The morality of the imagination in this social sense lies in the perceiver’s awareness of others’ versions of understanding and in making his choices as to which one he chooses to accept. In the essays on American culture, the implicit norm of the socially defined moral imagination leads James to pass harsh judgement on Americans he no longer understands. The term ‘the imagination’ is defined cognitively in the critical articles, but in the novels its function becomes a social one: for James the author, the imagination is not so much a faculty of personal experience and knowledge but one of social experience and of a communal production of knowledge. The moral aspect of the imagination becomes social in the novels, too, referring to the choices one makes in relations to others. In the essays on culture, this social ideal of imaginative understanding is applied through a discussion of American manners. The term ‘the imagination’ refers to the imagination of the author-narrator, the character, and the critic as well, and thereby expands to be an aspect of literary communication. In this way, the intellectual project James the critic outlined for himself as a novelist at the crossroads of American, French, and English traditions of the novel has evolved through the changes of his contextual model of understanding. For James the novelist and cultural critic, the project has become an imaginative processing of the moral aspects of social interactions.
Reviews
“Interest in the work of Henry James has remained strong even in an age of multicultural criticism. However, recent readings of James have shown a tendency to disregard the one aspect of his work that is crucial for an understanding of it: the role of the imagination. The imagination is crucial for James, not only as a source of artistic creativity, but, even more so, as a faculty that gives shape to our knowledge about the world ... Dr. Agnes Kovács rightly insists that in James’ world the word ‘moral’ refers to the quality of the imagination and its ability to grasp the real. His novels therefore explore the profoundly social nature of the imagination and describe characters which run into problems because of a lack of moral imagination. As is demonstrated in the last part of this study, it was a suspicion that James finally had about America. In going from James’ early essays on French realism to his ‘late’ views on America, this study thus also successfully links aesthetic theory and cultural criticism. It provides a welcome and needed addition to our understanding and appreciation of the work of James.” – (from the Preface) Professor Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet
“ ... this book opens a fresh and original perspective on James’s theoretical and fictional work – a work that has been discussed and analyzed from a myriad of theoretical angles. Dr. Kovács nevertheless manages not only to add but to also enrich the already huge and still expanding field of James scholarship ... the book, in its close and detailed readings of the texts, thus illustrates the different aspects and angles of James’s ‘civilizing project’ – the various, yet complementary answers James’s work gives to the idea in which the quality (the ‘art’) of life or living is linked to the quality (the ‘life’) of his art.” – Dr. Heinz Ickstadt, Professor Emeritus, Universität Berlin
“This is a truly original and highly sensitive contribution to James studies. The study offers a careful examination of the key concept of ‘imagination’ in a non-Romantic sense across a wide range of Jamesian texts, and patiently develops a case for regarding this faculty not as a merely private capacity for James, but as an intensely social predisposition, which forms the basis for a particular understanding of the moral.” – Professor Dr. Gert Buelens, Ghent University
"The book is a much needed addition to our understanding of James's work as well as a very helpful tool for students and scholars interested in a profound study of James's writings from the perspective of the imagination." - European Association for American Studies
Table of Contents
Preface by Winfried Fluck
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1. The Case of James
1. The Role of the Moral Imagination in Henry James’s Essays on Literature
Part 2. Imagination and Experience in the Novels
2. Limits of the Imagination
3. The Challenges of the Imagination
4. The Moral Function of the Imagination
Part 3. Imagination and Cultural Criticism
5. Critical Imagination in Nonfiction
Conclusion: The Moral Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ISBN10: 0-7734-5787-9 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5787-4 Pages: 376 Year: 2006
Papers in English and American Studies 18. Monograph series 7., 2010
The book is a collection of essays that introduces students to major disciplinary and methodologi... more The book is a collection of essays that introduces students to major disciplinary and methodological problems of studying American 'literature' today. It discusses changes of the field of American Studies in a set of brief historical surveys and then focuses on recent strategies of reading literature in cultural context. Yet the novels analyzed form form no general survey of American literary history. Rather, they provide examples of themes and issues that have been challenging scholars lately, and also offer an insight into the hermeneutics of literary response.
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=GyNgDgAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PT57.w.0.1.14_16&hl=hu
book chapters by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
L. W. Mazzano and S. Norton, eds. Contemporary AMerican Fiction in the European Classroom. New York: Palgrave., 2022
While travelling in France, James receives a particularly vivid impression of the Roman ruins at ... more While travelling in France, James receives a particularly vivid impression of the Roman ruins at Nîmes. The remains of the nymphaneum , the baths and the aqueduct, trigger his imagination and he senses "a certain contagion of antiquity in the air" (James LT 1993a : 198). At the end of his visit, during his stroll in a French garden, into which Roman elements have been incorporated, he falls into a kind of reverie: "it seemed to me that I touched for a moment the ancient world" (James LT 1993a : 200). At the same time he also creates an image of his own moment of illumination by describing himself as he looks into the eighteenth-century French fountain built on Roman foundations, making out the slabs of Roman stone at the bottom of the basin through the clean green water. He not only feels he is able to touch the ancient past but also refl ects on his own ability to create a connection to the past. This image of James glimpsing traces of the past recurs throughout his travelogue and brings together a picturesque scene, imaginative reconstruction and contemplation, historical interest and illumination , architectural ruins used and shaped by posterity, and, last but not least, reference to authorship. Through the use of these elements, James's A Little Tour in France constitutes an attempt to create imaginative personal impressions of past moments initiated by local sights. A Little Tour produces a view of rural France saturated with history and serves to prove the statement that France is not Paris. James travelled for six weeks from Touraine to Provence in central France, and the book represents his interest in French landscapes and views, Frenchness, French women, and the French past.
Transnational Americas: Home(s), Borders, Transitions, 2019
Toni Morrison's latest novel tells the story of a case of African American child abuse. The novel... more Toni Morrison's latest novel tells the story of a case of African American child abuse. The novel parallels Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) in its problematization of blackness, femininity, inferiority, and abuse. However, the perspectives of the novels are different, as Pecola's story is one of disintegration and social exclusion while Bride manages to fight disintegration. God Help the Child also evokes Morrison's Beloved (1987) in that it shows Bride's magical bodily tranformation. The paper investigates the role of African music and religious motifs in the storytelling related to Bride's experience of her blackness in God Help the Child in order to investigate their role in the story of Bride's social reintegration process. The paper claims that Bride's surprise healing in God Help the Child is the result of African witchcraft, a gesture similar to the communal Afro-Christian exorcising at the end of Beloved (1987). However, the pared down storytelling of the new novel makes the 'magic' effect and the final social integration little visible and even less motivated in the new novel.
The paper analyses what it names the 'rhetoric of unreality' in Wharton's travelogue In Morocco. ... more The paper analyses what it names the 'rhetoric of unreality' in Wharton's travelogue In Morocco. Wharton's ethnographic enterprise to record the fragile and magic historical continuity of the Middle Ages in the Morocco of 1918 provides a basically Orientalist account of the wartime French protectorate, its cities, markets, schools, rituals. Her account does not offer a feminized perspective even of the Oriental secret of secrets, the harem. The term 'the rhetoric of unreality' refers to the way Wharton's discourse fluctuates between descriptions of the realm of the magical Oriental past that is present and those of the factual present.
In her excellent biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee describes the role of the Cesnola Colle... more In her excellent biography of Edith Wharton, Hermione Lee describes the role of the Cesnola Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Wharton in general terms: "[i]t provides a fine example for Wharton of civilizations passing and succeeding each other, since the collection goes from the late Bronze Age through the successive arrivals in Cyprus of a great many 'foreigners': Phoenicians, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians and Greeks, even, legend has it, the heroes from the Trojan war, passing through on their way home" 1. Lee's commentary is made in relation to the appearance of the Collection in Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920), a novel about the passing of genteel civilization 2 in the US in the 1870s-90s. The novel was written right after the Great War that also threatened "the wiping out of an entire civilization." 3 This essay wishes to explicate the role of the Cesnola Collection as Wharton's case study for preserving and understanding objects of a civilization from the past in The Age of Innocence. It argues that the Cesnola Collection represents Wharton's general interest in the way the historical continuity of cultures can be maintained and experienced, and the story of Archer's decomposing world is one manifestation of this concern after the Great War. Karin Roffman's illuminating discussion of Wharton and nineteenth-century US museum culture examines the role of the Cesnola Collection for Wharton from a memory studies framework. Roffman explains that Wharton's use of the Cesnola in the Met as a prop in The Age forms part of her ongoing interest in museums and in the possibility of educating and elevating Americans culturally by exposing them to objects of material Ágnes Zsófia Kovács 540 4
Papers by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
Társadalmi nemek tudománya interdiszciplináris efolyóirat, May 15, 2024
Az alábbi gondolatmenet két sikeres nő: az amerikai Michelle Obama és a magyar Orsós Zsuzsanna él... more Az alábbi gondolatmenet két sikeres nő: az amerikai Michelle Obama és a magyar Orsós Zsuzsanna életrajzi narratívájában elemzi a társadalmi reprodukció jelenségét. Az összehasonlítás Orsós történetének inspirációjára jött létre: ő a pécsi székhelyű Bogdán János Alapítvány elnöke, a Pécsi Tudományegyetem biológusa, egyetemi adjunktus, rákkutató, az ország első roma PhD-hallgató MTA ösztöndíjasa, roma aktivista. A Bogdán János Alapítvány célkitűzése a hátrányos helyzetű gyermekek oktatásának és motiváltságának fejlesztése, egészségnevelése. Az Alapítvány, honlapja tanúsága szerint, az egyéni egészséggel kapcsolatos szokások változásán keresztül a résztvevők társadalmi helyzetének változtatását igyekszik segíteni (). A pécsi egészségnevelési projekttel kapcsolatban Orsós Zsuzsanna elnök gyakran szerepel a médiában és beszél saját életrajzi hátteréről, amely alapítványi munkáját is motiválja. Élettörténete sok hasonlóságot mutat Michelle Obama, a népszerű amerikai ex-First Lady széles körben ismert élettörténetével, amelyet Így lettem című, magyarul 2018ban megjelent önéletrajzírásában olvashatunk. Annál is inkább, mert Obama munkáscsaládból induló története is számos jótékonysági és alapítványi keretben működő szociális indíttatású projektnek (egészséges étkezés, sport, iskoláztatás, reintegráció) hátterül szolgál; melyek közül a párhuzam kedvéért Obama egészségnevelési projektére fogok fókuszálni. Az életút hasonlóságain mellett az interjúk és az önéletrajz műfaja úgy válik összevethetővé, hogy Sidonie Smith és Julie Watson (2017) definíciója értelmében mindkettőt életírásnak tekintem. A dolgozat azt a problémát járja körül, hogy Obama életrajzírásában és Orsós médianyilatkozataiban milyen önéletrajzi narratíva működik, és ez hogyan válik fontossá alapítványi egészségnevelési munkájuk szempontjából. Erre a kérdésre egyrészt adódhat az a meggyőzően egyszerű válasz, miszerint Obama és Orsós pozitív példát mutatnak fel olvasóik és hallgatóságuk
The paper interprets Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban against the backdrop of contempora... more The paper interprets Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban against the backdrop of contemporary multicultural identity prose by women. Against expectations about the possibility of healing and belonging in the feminine diasporic text, the novel problematizes the possibility and costs of healing, reconnecting, and reconciliation. The text represents how profoundly political and family history are interconnected on an individual level, and how the intersection of family, politics, and individual limits the scope of change for the protagonist.
Michelle Obama Így lettem (Becoming) című önéletrajzírása 2018-ban jelent meg, a kötet kb. 400 ol... more Michelle Obama Így lettem (Becoming) című önéletrajzírása 2018-ban jelent meg, a kötet kb. 400 oldal szövegét 63 darabból álló képmelléklet illusztrálja. A könyv a szerző társadalmi láthatatlanságának leküzdéséről szól. A dolgozat a szövegben és a fotómellékletben vizsgálja a láthatatlanság leküzdésének megvalósulását. Azt elemzi, hogyan viszonyulnak a képek a főszövegben megfogalmazott történethez. A főszövegben az elbeszélő hang jelentéskonstruáló szerepe a címben szereplő „létrejövés” (magyar fordítás: így lettem). Az elbeszélő „létrejövésének” folyamata alapvető témája az afroamerikai önéletrajzírói hagyománynak. Az elbeszélő énkonstrukciója narratív és vizuális performativitásnak eredménye. A képeken az énkonstrukció hangsúlyozottan női: előtérbe kerül a női test (a ruha, a mozgás, a mimika, a smink), valamint a hagyományos női privát szférába tartozó cselekvések (gyereknevelés, kertészkedés, főzés, lakberendezés, jótékonykodás, gyógyítás, sport) közéleti szerepe. A dolgozat am...
The AnaChronisT, 2001
The Sacred Fount (1901) is James's last novel before the novels of his so-called major phase and ... more The Sacred Fount (1901) is James's last novel before the novels of his so-called major phase and bears traces of the novels to follow. 1 James' s late novels hav e been labelled evasive in style, stylistically elaborate, reflecting a technical interest, providing a hermeneutic model of understanding, lately shown to be embedded in the social practices of the turn of the century .2 It seems that The Sacred Fount can be taken as a minimal model, not to say prototype, of the problems occurring in the late novels: the issues of detection, theories, artistic creation all appear in it. The reason why I selected The Sacred Fount to write about here is its apparent focus on one element of the issues above, the failure of comprehension, i.e. the narrator's apparent failure to actually find out anything. Following the focus reveals a complementary relation between detection and artistic creation in The Sacred Fount, which I think in turn paves the way for an approach to the late nov els. In The Sacred Fount the narrator's exploration of the illicit relations between members of the company remains fruitless. The novel has been read as an ambiguous text, as an experiment with form, a model of understanding, and
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Sep 1, 2003
HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific re... more HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Kovács Ágnes Zsófia Sweet Duplicity: Jamesian Moral Ambiguity in Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn Colm Tóib... more Kovács Ágnes Zsófia Sweet Duplicity: Jamesian Moral Ambiguity in Colm Tóibín's Brooklyn Colm Tóibín (1955) the internationally renowned Irish novelist published his sixth novel Brooklyn in 2009, which won the Costa Book award the same year. It relates the story of Eilis Lacey, a young Irishwoman who emigrates to the US looking for a better life in the 1950s. The book is a fascinating read both because of how it handles the problem of cultural difference between the US and Ireland of the 1950s and also because of the detached storytelling, the use of point of view limited to the perspective of one character, that allows for multiple readings of the same imaginative scenario. Incidentally, both themes, the negotiation of cultural difference and the limited point of view triggering diverse reactions tie the book in with Tóibín's other novels, his avowed psychological interest, the so called Jamesian legacy.
Neohelicon 44, no. 3. 541-562., 2017
Reading Wharton's two nonfiction texts about France together provides the possibility of comparin... more Reading Wharton's two nonfiction texts about France together provides the possibility of comparing a prewar travelogue to a war report on French culture. Wharton's precise descriptions and sound method of visual interpretation of moral value in A motor-flight (1908) become problematized in descriptions of war damage in Fighting France (1915). A motor-flight provides several examples of continuity in French material culture offering the chance of a meaningful use of the past. In Fighting France, visits to the war zone show the damage done to civilized landscapes , historical monuments, houses, cathedrals that are destroyed or ruined, offering only chances to think of the scope of the losses in cultural terms, meditations on the lost sense of the past. Images of destruction are linked to this loss of historical continuity. Visits to the trenches show the war as a menace difficult to visualize for the traveller. Here the main effect of the war seems to be the continual threat to secure reflexes and habits of the old reality that is being replaced by war.
AMERICANA E-Journal VOLUME XIV, NUMBER 2, FALL 2018, 2018
interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and p... more interests include late 19th-century proto-modern fiction, conversions of literary modernism and postmodernism, popular fiction genres, contemporary multicultural American fiction, theories of narrative, and methods of American Studies. Her current research into travel writing involves re-mapping travel texts by Edith Wharton. She has published two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (Mellen, Abstract: Michelle Obama's Becoming has become the best known memoir by an ex-First Lady ever. Traditional as the First Lady's role and the First Lady's memoir genre are, Becoming has shifted the terms through which to define both. Instead of the insider's story about the public husband by the domestic wife it represents the basic American story of a self-made strong woman invested in the life of the community. This paper reads Becoming and charts its statements about finding one's voice, opting to work for the community, and choosing hope over despair as not so much a personal but rather as a communal story of a not so well definable group. To get a better glimpse of the actual appeal of the story, the paper investigates where this project comes from, what its modes of existence are, how it is circulated, what subject positions it determines. Becoming can be read as political commentary in the sense of antebellum autobiographical slave narratives that had aimed to trigger political change by personal testimony. Another intertextual influence can be African American women's fiction and autobiography where the theme of finding one's voice in the context of double oppression is vital. The story defines the subject position of an 'empowered' black feminine subject. Michelle Obama's Becoming represents an ultimate dream: the story of a working class African American girl who becomes the rst lady of the US. Although the book develops a special American rags to riches plot, the story covers not only the journey of becoming the First Lady, but also that of becoming a person with a voice and a project. In Becoming this project means a focus on change on many levels. I argue that 'change' in the text has both personal and political implications: I want to focus on how the personal and political senses of the term are represented in the autobiographical narrative. In order to look into the
Uploads
Books by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
In general, the Jamesian imagination proves to be a part of James’s contextual model of understanding. In his critical articles on other novelists, the imagination is mainly responsible for an active, profound transformation of impressions into a process of experience, and this quality of the imagination is referred to as moral. In the novels, the imagination retains its central role in the process of understanding, but understanding becomes a social affair of more than one person. The morality of the imagination in this social sense lies in the perceiver’s awareness of others’ versions of understanding and in making his choices as to which one he chooses to accept. In the essays on American culture, the implicit norm of the socially defined moral imagination leads James to pass harsh judgement on Americans he no longer understands. The term ‘the imagination’ is defined cognitively in the critical articles, but in the novels its function becomes a social one: for James the author, the imagination is not so much a faculty of personal experience and knowledge but one of social experience and of a communal production of knowledge. The moral aspect of the imagination becomes social in the novels, too, referring to the choices one makes in relations to others. In the essays on culture, this social ideal of imaginative understanding is applied through a discussion of American manners. The term ‘the imagination’ refers to the imagination of the author-narrator, the character, and the critic as well, and thereby expands to be an aspect of literary communication. In this way, the intellectual project James the critic outlined for himself as a novelist at the crossroads of American, French, and English traditions of the novel has evolved through the changes of his contextual model of understanding. For James the novelist and cultural critic, the project has become an imaginative processing of the moral aspects of social interactions.
Reviews
“Interest in the work of Henry James has remained strong even in an age of multicultural criticism. However, recent readings of James have shown a tendency to disregard the one aspect of his work that is crucial for an understanding of it: the role of the imagination. The imagination is crucial for James, not only as a source of artistic creativity, but, even more so, as a faculty that gives shape to our knowledge about the world ... Dr. Agnes Kovács rightly insists that in James’ world the word ‘moral’ refers to the quality of the imagination and its ability to grasp the real. His novels therefore explore the profoundly social nature of the imagination and describe characters which run into problems because of a lack of moral imagination. As is demonstrated in the last part of this study, it was a suspicion that James finally had about America. In going from James’ early essays on French realism to his ‘late’ views on America, this study thus also successfully links aesthetic theory and cultural criticism. It provides a welcome and needed addition to our understanding and appreciation of the work of James.” – (from the Preface) Professor Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet
“ ... this book opens a fresh and original perspective on James’s theoretical and fictional work – a work that has been discussed and analyzed from a myriad of theoretical angles. Dr. Kovács nevertheless manages not only to add but to also enrich the already huge and still expanding field of James scholarship ... the book, in its close and detailed readings of the texts, thus illustrates the different aspects and angles of James’s ‘civilizing project’ – the various, yet complementary answers James’s work gives to the idea in which the quality (the ‘art’) of life or living is linked to the quality (the ‘life’) of his art.” – Dr. Heinz Ickstadt, Professor Emeritus, Universität Berlin
“This is a truly original and highly sensitive contribution to James studies. The study offers a careful examination of the key concept of ‘imagination’ in a non-Romantic sense across a wide range of Jamesian texts, and patiently develops a case for regarding this faculty not as a merely private capacity for James, but as an intensely social predisposition, which forms the basis for a particular understanding of the moral.” – Professor Dr. Gert Buelens, Ghent University
"The book is a much needed addition to our understanding of James's work as well as a very helpful tool for students and scholars interested in a profound study of James's writings from the perspective of the imagination." - European Association for American Studies
Table of Contents
Preface by Winfried Fluck
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1. The Case of James
1. The Role of the Moral Imagination in Henry James’s Essays on Literature
Part 2. Imagination and Experience in the Novels
2. Limits of the Imagination
3. The Challenges of the Imagination
4. The Moral Function of the Imagination
Part 3. Imagination and Cultural Criticism
5. Critical Imagination in Nonfiction
Conclusion: The Moral Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ISBN10: 0-7734-5787-9 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5787-4 Pages: 376 Year: 2006
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=GyNgDgAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PT57.w.0.1.14_16&hl=hu
book chapters by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
Papers by Agnes Zsofia Kovacs
In general, the Jamesian imagination proves to be a part of James’s contextual model of understanding. In his critical articles on other novelists, the imagination is mainly responsible for an active, profound transformation of impressions into a process of experience, and this quality of the imagination is referred to as moral. In the novels, the imagination retains its central role in the process of understanding, but understanding becomes a social affair of more than one person. The morality of the imagination in this social sense lies in the perceiver’s awareness of others’ versions of understanding and in making his choices as to which one he chooses to accept. In the essays on American culture, the implicit norm of the socially defined moral imagination leads James to pass harsh judgement on Americans he no longer understands. The term ‘the imagination’ is defined cognitively in the critical articles, but in the novels its function becomes a social one: for James the author, the imagination is not so much a faculty of personal experience and knowledge but one of social experience and of a communal production of knowledge. The moral aspect of the imagination becomes social in the novels, too, referring to the choices one makes in relations to others. In the essays on culture, this social ideal of imaginative understanding is applied through a discussion of American manners. The term ‘the imagination’ refers to the imagination of the author-narrator, the character, and the critic as well, and thereby expands to be an aspect of literary communication. In this way, the intellectual project James the critic outlined for himself as a novelist at the crossroads of American, French, and English traditions of the novel has evolved through the changes of his contextual model of understanding. For James the novelist and cultural critic, the project has become an imaginative processing of the moral aspects of social interactions.
Reviews
“Interest in the work of Henry James has remained strong even in an age of multicultural criticism. However, recent readings of James have shown a tendency to disregard the one aspect of his work that is crucial for an understanding of it: the role of the imagination. The imagination is crucial for James, not only as a source of artistic creativity, but, even more so, as a faculty that gives shape to our knowledge about the world ... Dr. Agnes Kovács rightly insists that in James’ world the word ‘moral’ refers to the quality of the imagination and its ability to grasp the real. His novels therefore explore the profoundly social nature of the imagination and describe characters which run into problems because of a lack of moral imagination. As is demonstrated in the last part of this study, it was a suspicion that James finally had about America. In going from James’ early essays on French realism to his ‘late’ views on America, this study thus also successfully links aesthetic theory and cultural criticism. It provides a welcome and needed addition to our understanding and appreciation of the work of James.” – (from the Preface) Professor Winfried Fluck, Freie Universitaet
“ ... this book opens a fresh and original perspective on James’s theoretical and fictional work – a work that has been discussed and analyzed from a myriad of theoretical angles. Dr. Kovács nevertheless manages not only to add but to also enrich the already huge and still expanding field of James scholarship ... the book, in its close and detailed readings of the texts, thus illustrates the different aspects and angles of James’s ‘civilizing project’ – the various, yet complementary answers James’s work gives to the idea in which the quality (the ‘art’) of life or living is linked to the quality (the ‘life’) of his art.” – Dr. Heinz Ickstadt, Professor Emeritus, Universität Berlin
“This is a truly original and highly sensitive contribution to James studies. The study offers a careful examination of the key concept of ‘imagination’ in a non-Romantic sense across a wide range of Jamesian texts, and patiently develops a case for regarding this faculty not as a merely private capacity for James, but as an intensely social predisposition, which forms the basis for a particular understanding of the moral.” – Professor Dr. Gert Buelens, Ghent University
"The book is a much needed addition to our understanding of James's work as well as a very helpful tool for students and scholars interested in a profound study of James's writings from the perspective of the imagination." - European Association for American Studies
Table of Contents
Preface by Winfried Fluck
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part 1. The Case of James
1. The Role of the Moral Imagination in Henry James’s Essays on Literature
Part 2. Imagination and Experience in the Novels
2. Limits of the Imagination
3. The Challenges of the Imagination
4. The Moral Function of the Imagination
Part 3. Imagination and Cultural Criticism
5. Critical Imagination in Nonfiction
Conclusion: The Moral Imagination
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ISBN10: 0-7734-5787-9 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-5787-4 Pages: 376 Year: 2006
https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=GyNgDgAAQBAJ&pg=GBS.PT57.w.0.1.14_16&hl=hu