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"Divination Fiction."
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The Cloisters : a novel
\"The Secret History meets Ninth House in this sinister, atmospheric novel following a circle of researchers as they uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York's famed Met Cloisters. When Ann Stilwell arrives in New York City, she expects to spend her summer working as a curatorial associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Instead she finds herself assigned to The Cloisters, a gothic museum and garden renowned for its medieval art collection and its group of enigmatic researchers studying the history of divination. Desperate to escape her painful past, Ann is happy to indulge the researchers' more outlandish theories about the history of fortune telling. But what begins as academic curiosity quickly turns into obsession when Ann discovers a hidden 15th-century deck of tarot cards that might hold the key to predicting the future. As the dangerous game of power, seduction, and ambition at The Cloisters turns deadly, Ann becomes locked in a race for answers as the line between the arcane and the modern blurs. A haunting and magical blend of genres, The Cloisters is a gripping debut that will keep you on the edge of your seat\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The I Ching and Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
This article addresses a gap in current Dickian criticism by undertaking a close reading of the twelve I Ching readings that interlace and undergird Philip K. Dick's celebrated breakthrough novel, The Man in the High Castle (1962). I argue that the I Ching is the device that (literally and figuratively) unifies the stylistic and philosophic dimensions of the novel. Following a summary of key critical approaches, I discuss the particularities of the I Ching as an oracle, followed by close readings of the novel's unique patterning based on its twelve core oracle consultations. This is postscripted by a discussion of the multiple implications for our understanding of High Castle. What is revealed are both the seams of physical construction of the novel and a set of synchronistic complementarities, alternating pairings, and other simultaneities that distinguish Dick's treatment of the uchronie genre from the classical diachronic and even Fredric Jameson's synchronic or Paul Alkon's “postmodern alternate history.” I conclude that despite critical ambivalence, including Dick's own, over its ambiguous ending, it is precisely this open-endedness, from which a multiverse of potential interpretations flow, that sustains the novel as an important one in modern literature.
Journal Article
The book that proves time travel happens
Twelve-year-olds Ambrose, Tom, and Frankie are transported to the boys' hometown of Freedom Falls, Ohio, in 1852 when Frankie blows her Romani family's magical trombone, and to return home they'll have to use both Morse code and the ancient form of divination known as the I-ching.
Book
Letting Sleeping Abnormalities Lie
Lovecraft would have been at the very least amused, but more than likely discouraged and then perhaps finally dismayed, that the subjects of his deepest nightmares could have become fodder for magical systems, games of divination, and the basis for worldviews. Since many of Lovecraft's stories concern themselves with the revealing or unveiling of realities seemingly hidden underneath the mundane appearances of external reality, and how practitioners of witchcraft, voodoo or other forms of \"non-mainstream\" spirituality seem to be tuned into these same planes of existence, it is a perfectly legitimate question, among others, to ask how Lovecraft actually portrayed the divinatory arts that such practitioners are often said to employ. [...]throughout the corpus of Lovecraft's work, there is almost no reference to cartomancy or palmistry, two well-known divination practices. According to his medical history, the man first began experiencing this superior being in dreams, and being unable to adequately describe this personality, given his limited intelligence and education (which is described in embarrassing classist and racist detail by Lovecraft), begins to experience a mental breakdown. According to Levenda, the anonymous author of the Simon Necronomicon \"borrowed\" an ancient scroll when he (and Levenda) came across it while covertly inspecting a cache of antiquities that had been delivered to one of the New York occult bookstores they frequented in the early seventies.
Journal Article
FACT AND FICTION IN PLATO'S ION
Plato's Ion develops a concept of fiction distinct from the mimetic accounts of poetry found in the Republic and Aristotle's Poetics. The dialogue dramatically exposes the fictionality of poetry by (1) revealing a disparity between propositional and poetic semantics, (2) identifying the paradox of belief in imaginary worlds, and (3) showing that fictional constructions emerge from novel arrangements of real-world facts. Ultimately, the Ion examines the fraught relationship between literature and the real world, and the peculiar nature of literary knowledge, which takes both fact and fiction as its objects.
Journal Article
Meitokuki: Earthquakes and Literary Fabrication in the Gunki Monogatari
This is a short introduction to a problem that affects two areas of research: historical seismology and medieval literature. The Meitokuki (1392-96), a gunki monogatari or battle narrative, reports an earthquake on the fifteenth day of the tenth month of the second year of Meitoku (1391). This report has been and is still accepted as legitimate. However, a full investigation of the sources adduced as proof of this earthquake's historicity leads to the conclusion that no contemporary records confirm the Meitokuki report. Furthermore, an analysis of the Meitokuki text as a gunki monogatari, which is a genre of historical fiction, demands a comparison of its earthquake report with those in other gunki monogatari. Such a comparison with those in the Kakuichi variant of the Heike monogatari (before 1371) and the Taiheiki (about the same decade) reveals a specific form as well as a function of the earthquake report as an omen of impending disaster. This study proposes that, of the three examples, only the Heike report is authentic and that the two others are fabrications based on it. This conclusion is important for two reasons. First, it identifies the earthquake report in gunki monogatari as a type scene, a traditional narrative unit not unlike the Homeric scenes of arming, embarkation, and reception of the guest, or indeed the gunfight or chase scene in Westerns. Second, it demonstrates the importance of the type scene in the development of the gunki monogatari as a genre of fiction.
Journal Article
PROPHETIC DISCOURSE IN THE NATURALIST NOVEL
Traditionally the naturalist novel has been seen as strongly influenced by positivism and by the scientific discourses of the turn of the nineteenth century. Curiously, this same positivism that incited scientific research about religion utimately allowed naturalism, so closely linked to the material world, to begin assimilating certain aspects of religious discourse into its own makeup. As Émile Durkheim stated toward the ending ofThe Elementary Forms of Religious Life(1912), “In fact, religion does not know itself. It knows neither what it is made of nor what needs it responds to. Far from being able to tell science what
Book Chapter
Tragical Dreamer: Some Dreams in the Roman Historians
There are many ways of classifying dreams. This paper is concerned with only one, perhapsthe most fundamental: one which also – we are told – captures the most important difference between modern and ancient dream-interpretation. Ancient audiences were primed to expect dreams to be prophetic, to come from outside and give knowledge, however ambiguously, of the future, or at least of the otherwise unknowable present. This sort of dream is hard to distinguish from the ‘night-time vision’, and indeed it is sometimes hard with dreams in ancient literature to tell whether the recipient is asleep or not. For moderns, especially but not only Freudians, dreams come from within, and are interesting for what they tell us about the current psychology of the dreamer: for Freudians, the aspects of the repressed unconscious which fight to the surface; for most or all of us, the way in which dreams re-sort our daytime preoccupations, hopes, and fears. This distinction between ancient and modern was set out and elaborated a few years ago by Simon Price; it was also drawn by Freud himself. At the risk of oversimplification, we could say the first approach assimilates dreams to divination, the second to fantasy - with all the illumination that, as we increasingly realize, fantasy affords into the everyday world, as it juggles the normal patterns of waking reality at the same time as challenging them by their difference.
Journal Article
Desire, Deceit, and Defeat in the Work of Roberto Arlt
The work of the Argentine writer Roberto Arlt (1900–1942), a contemporary of Jorge Luis Borges, and one of the pioneers of urban modernist fiction in Latin America, lends itself to a Girardian analysis—or, rather, a confrontation with the ideas of René Girard. For virtually all of Arlt’s literary protagonists (both in prose and in drama) are portrayed as shaping their identity with the help of literary, novelistic, or theatrical models, a kind of performative mimesis that is strongly reminiscent of the disjunction between idealism and reality, as we find it most famously inDon QuixoteandMadame Bovary.
Book Chapter