Shadow-Line - Knowledge Bank - The Ohio State University

192 Pages·2006·11.09 MB·English

Martin Bock

Shadow-Line

Estrangement
ISBN 0-8142-0471-6

Martin Bock
Crossing the

Shadow-Line

The Literature
of Estrangement
Our culture conditions us to perceive the world in
ways consistent with its own teachings: we interpret
the world through a system of common values based
on the mores, religion, mythology, symbolism, and
literature of our culture. In Crossing the Shadow-
Line, Martin Bock explores the work of several
writers—Christian and non-Christian—whose
works are heretical in the sense that they explore
ways of seeing and knowing the world that depart
from the characteristic modes of perception of a
predominantly Christian culture.
While the dream vision and similar visionary
experiences have long been part of the Christian
literary tradition, major writers of the Romantic
period such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and
Thomas De Quincey used the imagery of opium
vision in their poems and prose fantasies. These
works are characterized by exaggerated sensation,
an animistic world in which the landscape comes
alive, and hallucinatory visions in which time and
space are elastic. The extraordinary way narrators
or characters see the world estranges them from
their culture and they become, in effect, heretical
visionaries.
In later writers, from the French Symbolists to
certain modern British and American novelists,
these visions become conventionalized in the disori­
enting journey. Unlike the circular journeys of the
Christian tradition, the journeys described by
Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Djuna Barnes, and

CROSSING THE SHADOW-LINE
Gustave Dore's illustration for Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
CROSSING
THE
SHADOW-LINE
The Literature of Estrangement
MARTIN BOCK
Ohio State University Press
Columbus
Copyright © 1989 by the Ohio State University Press.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bock, Martin, 1951­
Crossing the shadow-line : the literature of estrangement /
Martin Bock.
p. cm.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-8142-0471-6

1. English fiction—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Alienation (Philosophy) in literature. 3. Orientation (Psychology)
in literature. 4. Senses and sensation in literature. 5. English
literature—19th century—History and criticism. 6. American
literature—History and criticism. I. Title.
PR888.A42C76 1989
820'.9'353—dcl9 88-25075
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.
Printed in the U.S.A.
For my mother and father