Bøger af Jon Woodson

The Unknown in plain sight. It is a little-known fact that Rhode Island's best-known author, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the writer of tales of horror and fantasy, was personally familiar with a great many of the mysterious megalithic (large-stone) structures of New England. Even though Lovecraft's connection to the megaliths was advanced in Arkham House publication, The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces (1966), by researcher Andrew Rothovius, the small circulation of that book did not make much of an impact on the understanding of how the megaliths contributed to what Lovecraft wrote. In his essay, "Lovecraft and the New England Megaliths," Rothovius stated that "Howard Phillips Lovecraft appears to have had an intimate knowledge of these rock structures, and to have employed them as key props in many of his most powerful narratives" (8-9). In recent years, those antiquarians and researchers interested in the whereabouts of these large-stone structures have turned to Lovecraft's stories for guidance. So careful a worker was Lovecraft that even though he substituted fictional names for those of the New England anomalous artifacts that he visited, researchers have been able to use Lovecraft's fiction as a guide to the sites and have been able to locate a number of the stone circles and stone crypts that were so fundamental to his terrifying world-building.

The unstable has to be rendered somehow intelligible. These poems are seductions and traps. The anti-therapeutic catalogs, the killing jar, the whorl that is inescapable are rendered her like a walk-in closet.

It is 1932 and America is circling the drain. An army of desperate veterans has surrounded the Capitol, strikes dot the map, and breadlines are a common sight. To lighten the national mood the 10th Olympic Summer Games beckon from sunny, dazzling, otherworldly Los Angeles. Four young black sophisticates from Washington, D.C. decide to make the road trip despite the violent racial climate. A vivid assortment of characters, a beautiful racketeer, a moral philosopher, a ruthless mastermind, an ambitious religious leader, and a government agent cross paths with the little band of reckless adventurers as they try to reconcile their personal ambitions with the hypocrisy and failure of modern life. Summer Games is a darkly comic novel of suspense, literary ambition, geopolitical intrigue, and self-realization.

Everyone knows who MLK was. Hardly anyone knows that MLK was the creation of the breakaway American followers of the modern mystic G.I. Gurdjieff. Led by A.R. Orage, a large group of highly accomplished Americans intervened in history by creating a modern civil messiah. To do this they followed a plan laid down four thousand years ago by the priests of Horus and two thousand years ago by the Essene community. Orage's group of self-appointed spiritual supermen began in the early 1930s, and twice they failed. The third time they changed their strategy and the result was the charismatic civil rights activist, MLK. Ralph Ellison's unpublished second novel Three Days Before the Shooting hides an account of this daring scheme beneath layers of ciphers, myth, and literary dazzle. Concealed within the American Communist Party and other groups, a cadre of writers, intellectuals, editors, lawyers, artists, and publishers staged an Objective Drama that made MLK a towering moral leader. Only in the disordered pages of Ellison's esoteric, experimental novel is there a full account of this monumental project. Building on a decades-long course of research beginning with an audacious dissertation on Melvin B. Tolson, Jon Woodson has revealed the contents of Ellison's fascinating and profound work of genius. Jon Woodson's investigation of Ralph Ellison's second novel marks an important departure from the former approaches to Ellison's fiction. Previous scholarship on Ellison was grounded in either Ellison's own comments or derived from speculations that disguised their provisional nature through jargon, volume, and theory. Woodson argues that Ellison's surface text is always deceptive, so using Ellison's essays and notes to explicate his fiction is fruitless. Woodson has produced a reading of Three Days Before the Shooting that accounts for everything in the text by turning in each case to the texts that Ellison consulted in the writing of his novel. Woodson shows how Ellison invented new modes of encryption that surpassed those devices used in such indecipherable texts as Djuna Barnes's, Nightwood, William Faulkner's Pylon, and Mina Loy's Insel-novels with a deep kinship to Ellison's Three Days. Woodson's six notes address the materials at the core of Ellison's novel: Objective Art, Alchemical Cabala, Roman à Clef, Modern Civil Messiahs, Ancient Egypt, and Pseudo-Communism. Woodson provides the name of a real person for every character in Three Days Before the Shooting. This is all the more astonishing against the fact that no other scholar has discussed the novel as a one-for-one roman à clef. Jon Woodson's insights establish an entirely new understanding not only of Three Days Before the Shooting but for the complete Ellison oeuvre. Reviews of previous books: "Jon Woodson's Anthems, Sonnets, and Chants is a thoroughly engaging work. This is a major work of scholarship which genuinely breaks new ground in the field." -James A. Miller, professor of English and American studies, The George Washington University. Woodson has proven to be a scholar of immense originality in his choice of methods, topics and analyses. His dedication to mining and interpreting evidence is never in doubt, nor is his willingness to resist what he views as conventional academic readings. He is a 'critic's critic', who boldly follows paths of inquiry leading to fresh understandings. Lauri Ramey, Professor of English, California State University, Los Angeles. [Review of Anthems] Wasafiri, 2015.

The Zora Neale Hurston discussed in the essays collected in this volume bears no resemblance to the bodacious, womanist Zora Neale Hurston as she is commonly presented. Historically, the scholarly work on Hurston has been a matter of over-reaching, fantasy, projection, and wish fulfillment. These four essays refuse the critical discourses that have been used to misread so badly and to misconstrue so routinely Hurston's texts, to distort and overwrite her ideology, and to disfigure her identity. For the first time since Hurston's texts were revived in the 1970s, light is thrown comprehensively on the many problems raised by Hurston and her fiction and non-fiction writings. By contextualizing Hurston as a major figure in a lost literary movement, Oragean Modernism, these essays resolve the several contradictions that have made Hurston such a controversial and enigmatic cultural figure. This unprecedented Hurston is shown to have been a literary collaborator with William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.

The Emblematic Novel reveals the hidden system of alchemical emblems, Tarot cards, photographs, and paintings that are coded into Carl Van Vechten's novel The Blind Bow-Boy. Chapter Two shows that Van Vechten's esoteric novel was the template for a large number of canonical modernist novels including works by Faulkner, Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Chandler, John O'Hara, Thornton Wilder, Frank Yerby, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Thomas Wolfe, and many others. Chapter Three is a close reading of Nella Larsen's Passing that demonstrates its influence from Van Vechten and traces the system of Tarot cards, alchemical emblems, photographs, and paintings that make sense of its ambiguous surface text.Chapter Four reassigns Men, Marriage, and Me- the template for the modernist memoir- to the authorship of Zora Neale Hurston. Like the Van Vechten novel, Hurston's memoir-novel is written in code and contains a hidden system of esoteric symbols. The Emblematic Novel is an important intervention in the understanding of the modern novel. This reassessment is accomplished through factoring in major implications about a school of modernist writing that has until now remained out of sight. Given the poor understanding of a host of modernist writers, such as Nathaniel West, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Ralph Ellison, the discovery of a linking commonality in the esoteric solves many of the interpretive mysteries surrounding these and other writers. The Emblematic Novel contains a panoply of illustrations that relate to the surface narrative of the texts under discussion. Woodson's argument is grounded in the "conscious discrepancies" in the texts-intentional mistakes-that have remained beneath the notice of the literary scholars who have examined these texts. These intentional mistakes, along with the alchemical code that they point to, are convincingly brought to the surface through a detailed, irrefutable exposition.The Emblematic Novel is a critical tour de force that opens the door to modernism as an evocation of spiritual alchemy.