Occidental Ideographs: Image, Sequence, and Literary History
This new approach to literary history locates the historicity of a literary work of art in the visual image that initiates the work and is fundamental to it, a visual metaphor of which the text is the verbalization. It demonstrates that such a fundamental metaphor and the attendant verbalization form the Occidental counterpart of that Japanese or Chinese art which combines a poem and a painting in one presentation to the perception of the reader-viewer. The study demonstrates that all the six American novels considered (Cooper to McCullers) share the essential elements of a singe verbal-visual metaphor, the evolution of which one may use as the central thread in literary history.
"This book is a valuable, original study, exploring how the novelist's original visual image shapes and affects each novel. Within the field of studies of the creative process this book should make quite an impact . . . . In the larger, overlapping fields of aesthetics studies and literary history, [it] could stand beside studies by R. W. B. Lewis, Richard Chase, and Dorothy Van Ghent. . . . It is occasionally almost unnerving to see, in a novel I've taught 5-7 times, new interpretive aspects revealed. The chapters on Cooper, Hawthorne, Twain, James, and Faulkner are outstanding. One should not teach or re-teach these novels if ignorant of this approach." Reader's Evaluation by Professor James Bun, State University of New York, Buffalo.
"Pour Franklin Rogers, les six romans américains qu'il a choisi d'étudier . . . ont pour origine une image qui s'est imposé à l'imagination de leur auteur . . . . Cette image est . . . l'équivalent occidental . . . de l'idéogramme chinois . . . . Avec une merveilleuse addresse, Rogers retrouve cet idéogramme dans tous les romans considérés et d'autres encore . . . le fil d'Ariane que faufile toute la littérature américaine . . . . On ne peut que lire avec admiration cet ouvrage prodigieusement ingénieux et stimulant où l'on retrouve avec tous ses dons le très original critique visual de Painting and Poetry . . . ." Etudes Anglaises, Professor Roger Asselineau, University of Paris-Sorbonne