Description
A modernization of an old and celebrated art fairy tale (Kunstmärchen) by the German Gothic storyteller, E.T.A. Hoffmann.
As its title suggests, THE GOLDEN POT: A FAIRY TALE FOR OUR TIME is a modernization of an old and celebrated art fairy tale (Kunstmärchen) by the German Gothic storyteller, E.T.A. Hoffmann. It is a comic novel for children of all ages and tells the story of graduate student Anselm MacGregor, as he braves the perils of a spiritual journey from ignorance to enlightenment. The tale is set in the concrete jungle of the New Jersey/New York metropolitan area of today, a most unlikely, yet fascinating, locale for fairy-tale doings. Young Anselm, a penurious Ph.D. candidate in English literature at Empyrean U., lives on peanut butter sandwiches and is only too happy to take a part-time job transcribing old manuscripts in arcane languages to the computer for John Lindhurst, a local archivist. This becomes his psychospiritual apprenticeship, an ordeal involving him in many treacherous trials, including imprisonment in a glass bottle and the lures of two beautiful women who compete, at times necromantically, for his love.
Fiction.
Author Bio
As a career-long professor of German at Syracuse University, Dennis McCort specialized in German Romanticism, 19th-century German fiction, religion and/in literature and Franz Kafka. Much of his research focuses on common ground among these: e.g., his book, Going beyond the Pairs, a study of Romanticism, Zen Buddhism and deconstruction, is not only a study of East- West comparative literature and religion but considers the work of Franz Kafka as well. His articles have included such topics as the influence of Rilke and Zen on J. D. Salinger, the Zen style and spirit of Kafka's short fiction and the representation of madness in the fiction of E.T.A. Hoffmann. In 2017 he published A KAFKAESQUE MEMOIR with PalmArtPress, a personal narrative tracing the shaping influence of the mind and personality of Franz Kafka on a nine-year-long Jungian analysis he had undergone.
Author City: SYRACUSE, NY USA