The prose and the passion : anthropology, literature, and the writing of E.M. Forster
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The prose and the passion : anthropology, literature, and the writing of E.M. Forster
Manchester University Press , Distributed in the USA and Canada by St. Martin's Press, c1994
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [278]-292) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
What kind of a resource - ethnographic, theoretic and methodological - does literature represent to anthropology? In "The Prose and the Passion", Nigel Rapport suggests an answer by "reading" his own social research in a small English village through the writings of E.M. Forster. He zigzags between the voices of local inhabitants and the voices of fictional characters, between Forster's narrative voice and the author's own autobiographical one. Here is a polemical review of the recent "literary turn" in anthropology; and also a humanistic riposte to the reputed death of the author. Rapport describes how anthropology and literature share the same ethos. Both are self-conscious practices which derive, in Forster's own words, from "connecting prose and passion". Both demand that their individual authors make sense of their experiences in order to intuit those of others, and so to rewrite (and right) social reality. Rapport redefines the relationship between anthropology and writing and argues for a new understanding of "writing" as a universal cognitive reflection upon, and ordering of, individual experience.
Table of Contents
- Part 1: prefatory statements - the discursive context of the book, the genres of the book, the method of the book, the ethos of the book, the plan of the book
- introduction and discoveries, Forster and Wanet - Forster - dates in a life, a discovery of Forster, Clifton College, Polack's house and "Ernie", Forster as if an aphorist, Forster as a liberal, Forster as a social novelist, a discovery of Wanet. Part 2: the physicality of community belonging - relations between the Anglican vicar and his parishioners
- savages and animals - connexions and contrasts with proper social relations
- moments of individual being - Miss Raby and the Italian, Peggy and the blacks
- love and death, and the multiplicity of identity in English society
- reading reality - the path to a full knowledge of the person and the social world. Part 3: correspondences and conclusions - literature and anthropology.
by "Nielsen BookData"