General & Miscellaneous Literary Criticism, Types of Art, Art by Subjects, European Art

The Wind and the Source

Name: The Wind and the Source
Author: Allen S. Weiss
ISBN: 9780791464908

by Allen S. Weiss

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Overview

What does it mean to love a landscape? Why do certain authors have a predilection for specific landscapes? Why might one be fascinated by a landscape in which one would never wish to live? How does the lay of the land fashion the form of the poem? How does the wind infuse the breath? In The Wind and the Source, Allen S. Weiss explores the role of a significant yet elusive feature of the French landscape in literature, philosophy, and art: the legendary, mysterious, monolithic Mont Ventoux. This is not a book about picturesque, touristic Provence, but about the manifestation of an extreme limit of the imagination that happens to have Provence as its site, as its fantasyland. Weiss is concerned with the vicissitudes of the desire to write about a landscape, the desire to write in a landscape, and perhaps most curiously, the desire to write against a landscape. This is a book about love of the landscape, and abstraction from it; it is an account of how a mountain became a myth, and how an aesthetic and literary study became a metaphysical quest.

Synopsis

Explores the role of a significant yet elusive feature of the French landscape in literature, philosophy, and art.

About the Author, Allen S. Weiss

Allen S. Weiss teaches in the Departments of Performance Studies and Cinema Studies at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Feast and Folly: Cuisine, Intoxication, and the Poetics of the Sublime, also published by SUNY Press.