Seth Rogoff

Kendrick Perkins

Education of Kendrick Perkins

Every so often a novel appears that demands a paradigm shift, that redefines what literature is and what its powers may be. This is such a work. A novel of seemingly modest dimensions, it relates, in scrupulously direct, clear, and naturalistic prose, a story of the tense reunion of two old friends in a Maine bar. That story, and the stories nested within it, while fascinating, are hardly melodramatic; not much happens of more consequence than the refilling of a beer glass. And yet, by the novels conclusion, the reader will be faced with a dilemma as unexpected and perplexing as any thriller could provide, and as piercing, substantial and profoundly involving as anything in the work of literatures great psychologists. The first reading of this book is an unforgettable, shocking surprise; and each re-reading brings new rewards.

A Preface

First, the Raven

This book traces the intersection of dreams and power in order to analyze the complex ways representations of dreams and paradigms of dream interpretation reinforce and challenge authoritarian, hierarchical structures. The book puts forward the concept of the dreamscape as a pre-representational space that contains anarchistic attributes, including its instability or chaotic nature and the lack of a stable or core selfhood and identity in its subjects. The book situates this concept of the dreamscape through an analysis of the Daoist notions of the transformation of things Band hundun (chaos) and the biblical concept of tehom (the deep). Using this conceptual framework, this book analyzes paradigmatic moments of dream interpretation along a spectrum from radical, anarchist assertions of the primal dreamscape to authoritarian dream-texts that seek to reify identity, define and establish hierarchy, and support coercive relationships between unequal subjects. The books key figures include William Blake, Robert Frost, Jacob and Joseph from Genesis, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Jean Rhys, Franz Kafka, and the neurobiologist J. Allan Hobson Seth Rogoff is a novelist and a scholar of literary and cultural analysis. He is the author of the novels First, the Raven: a Preface (2017) and Thin Rising Vapors (2018). He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Amsterdams Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), The Netherlands, and is currently a lecturer in history and English at the University of Southern Maine, USA, and a member of the MFA faculty at Maine College of Art. .

The Politics of the Dreamscape

Fiction. THIN RISING VAPORS by Seth Rogoff (author of FIRST, THE RAVEN: A PREFACE) is a richly psychological novel about enduring yet fragile friendship and the allure of nature and faith. Ezra Stern hasn't seen his best friend from childhood and college in the six years since Abel suddenly quit a successful career in New York to live alone in a cabin in the Maine woods. In late November, Ezra receives a letter from an estate lawyer telling him that Abel has died and that he has inherited the deceased's property in the lakeside town of Casco. That evening, as the first blizzard of the year approaches, Ezra leaves the city for Abel's house. Over the next seven days, Ezra searches to understand his friend's reclusive life and mysterious death by poring compulsively over Abel's voluminous posthumous papers, typed on an old Remington manual. As Ezra becomes increasingly immersed in Abel's writings, the coherence of the story of Abel's life builds and disintegrates in successive swells. Ezra discovers in the center of what had been familiar something irremediably alien, and in the heart of that total otherness--the unbearably intimate.

Seth Rogoff

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