Background
Cowart, David Guyland was born on December 22, 1947 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. Son of Eugene Guyland and Margaret Irene (Matthews) Cowart.
( "It is only the unimaginative who ever invents," Oscar ...)
"It is only the unimaginative who ever invents," Oscar Wilde once remarked. "The true artist is known by the use he makes of what he annexes, and he annexes everything." Converying a similar awareness, James Joyce observes in Finnegan's Wake that storytelling is in reality "stolen-telling," that art always involves some sort of "theft" or borrowing. Usually literary borrowings are so integrated into the new work as to be disguised; however, according to David Cowart, recent decades have seen an increasing number of texts that attach themselves to their sources in seemingly parasitic—but, more accurately, symbiotic—dependence. It is this kind of mutuality that Cowart examines in his wide-ranging and richly provocative study Literary Symbiosis. Cowart considers, for instance, what happens when Tom Stoppard, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, rewrites Hamlet from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters, or when Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea, imagines the early life of Bertha Rochester, the mad-woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. In such works of literary symbiosis, Cowart notes, intertextuality surrenders its usual veil of near invisibility to become concrete and explicit—a phenomenon that Cowart sees as part of the postmodern tendency toward self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. He recognizes that literary symbiosis has some close cousins and so limits his compass to works that are genuine reinterpretations, writings that cast a new light on earlier works through "some tangible measure of formal or thematic evolution, whether on the part of the guest alone or the host and guest together." Proceeding from this intriguing premise, he offers detailed readings of texts that range from Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," based on The Tempest, to Valerie Martin's reworking of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as Mary Reilly, to various fictions based on Robinson Crusoe. He also considers, in Nabokov's Pale Fire, a compelling example of text and parasite-text within a single work. Drawing on and responding to the ideas of disparate thinkers and critics—among them Freud, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Hillis Miller, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.—Cowart discusses literary symbiosis as Oedipal drama, as reading and misreading, as deconstruction, as Signifying, and as epistemic dialogue. Although his main examples come from the contemporary period, he refers to works dating as far back as the classical era, works representing a range of genres (drama, fiction, poetry, opera, and film). The study of literary symbiosis, Cowart contends, can reveal much about the dynamics of literary renewal in every age. If all literature redeems the familiar, he suggests, literary symbiosis redeems the familiar in literature itself.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0820315443/?tag=2022091-20
( Arches and Light demonstrates the depth and complexity ...)
Arches and Light demonstrates the depth and complexity of Gardner’s fiction, as well as his utterly consistent moral vision. Cowart argues that Gardner’s career, from The Resurrection to Mickelsson’s Ghosts, reveals an incremental mastery and a remarkable singleness of purpose.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809311275/?tag=2022091-20
( This fresh examination of Pynchon’s use of painting, fi...)
This fresh examination of Pynchon’s use of painting, film, music, and literature shows that his true art lies in humanistic allusions that stress the possibility of spiritually separating oneself from the modern wasteland. Cowart disagrees with critics who see Pynchon as a scientist writing about entropy, although Pynchon does illustrate the nihilistic world for which he is famous in allusions to painting and film, both of which mask a Void. But more important, these allusions call into question what is real and what is not. Through musical and literary allusions Pynchon suggests the speculative world, the world of unrealized possibility. Music hints at the dimensions of experience people miss because of the narrow range of experiences to which they are attuned. Literary allusions support and extend the almost mystical sense created by musical allusions, thus suggesting that in Pynchon’s view, human consciousness need not be trapped by entropic drift.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809309440/?tag=2022091-20
Cowart, David Guyland was born on December 22, 1947 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, United States. Son of Eugene Guyland and Margaret Irene (Matthews) Cowart.
Bachelor in English, University Alabama, 1969. Master of Arts in English, Indiana University, 1971. Doctor of Philosophy in English, Rutgers University, 1977.
With, Peace Corps, Ethiopia, 1969-1970; instructor, University of Southern California, Columbia, 1977-1979; assistant professor, University of Southern California, Columbia, 1979-1983; associate professor with tenure, University of Southern California, Columbia, 1983-1988; professor, University of Southern California, Columbia, since 1988. Bicentennial chair American studies U. Helsinki, 1992-1993. Chair American studies U. Odense, Denmark, since 1996.
( Cowart presents a study of international historical fic...)
( This fresh examination of Pynchon’s use of painting, fi...)
( Arches and Light demonstrates the depth and complexity ...)
( "It is only the unimaginative who ever invents," Oscar ...)
With United States Army, 1971-1973. Member Modern Language Association.
Married Georgia Ann Jackson September 5, 1970 (divorced January 1987). 1 child, Rachel Victoria. Married Elizabeth Cantey Heath, October 11, 1991.
1 child, Charles Simmons. 1 stepchild, Elizabeth Heath Carter.