The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #59418 Message #1584386
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
16-Oct-05 - 11:17 PM
Thread Name: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
Subject: RE: BS: The Mother of all BS threads
This morning I stumbled upon an interesting essay that I've been dipping into all day when I have a few minutes. Here's a brief excerpt and a link:
The paper is called Raymond carver's "epiphanic moments"
1. Carver and the Realist Epiphany
Carver's interest in the rhetoric of the sudden illumination is well-known. In his autobiographical sketch "On Writing," he emphasized his indebtedness to a line from a story by Chekhov he reportedly liked so much that he pinned it on the wall beside his writing desk: it reads, "'... and suddenly everything became clear to him."' Carver was intrigued, he said, by the "hint of revelation that's implied" (Fires 23). If the notion of a "hint of revelation" is understood in the romanticist or modernist terms on which recent aesthetics (Beja, Langbaum, Nichols), phenomenologies (Bidney, Patterns), and typologies (Tigges) of literary epiphany tend to focus, it refers to the charging of external reality with a sense of transcendental significance that, on the one hand, makes a text's narrative agent see matters in a radically new light, but that, on the other, cannot be translated into a logical proposition or concept. This "revelation," then, remains at the level of a non-semantic sense of the "whatness of things" and at best branches into multiple meanings.
I think this has practical applications here at the MOAB.