No Small Parts Hoffman, Adina
Raritan,
04/2021, Letnik:
40, Številka:
4
Book Review
Recenzirano
Whether or not she's remembered today, all who knew her attest that over the course of the three decades she spent welcoming guests to her gracious, honeysuckle- and rose-encircled seaside house in ...Santa Monica, Viertel altered many lives. Viertels times and her life are held in affecting balance in this book, with both personal and public sagas playing out in genuinely cinematic fashion and with the literary equivalent of the movies' "deep focus," in which foreground, middle ground, and background are all viewed with the same sharp clarity. (Queen Christina and Anna Karenina are the best-known examples of movies in this free-spirited-but-doomedfemale-centric mode.) Lawrence Weschler is right to wonder, as he does in his insightful introduction to this new edition of her memoir, if Viertels scripts were informed by the grand sweep of her own life, or if her account of various heady episodes from her past took on its Hollywood tints only in retrospect. There's a farewell scene on a train platform, where an unshaven lover appears with a bouquet of violets as young Saikas train pulls away, and a dramatic return by horse-drawn carriage to her formerly well-appointed, now World-War-I-ravaged childhood home.
Breathless, halting memoir in fragments by the English stylist, friend and biographer of Aldous Huxley, and late-blooming novelist.Bedford begins in the middle of her life, in 1953, when she's in her ...early 40s, meandering happily in Switzerland and savoring the ...
The implications of developments in human genetics for Rawlsian theories of distributive justice are examined. Rawls would allow for genetic inequalities among individuals so long as those ...inequalities are to everyone's advantage and do not undermine fair equality of opportunity or equality of liberty.
Five “critical” utopias by Québec women writers ( L'Euguélionne and Le pique-nique sur l'Acropole by Louky Bersianik; Le silence de la Cité and Chroniques du Pays des Mères by Élisabeth Vonarburg and ...L'Espace du diamant by Esther Rochon) make up the corpus of this thesis which aims to explore how the three novelists exploit the possibilities of this particular form of contemporary utopian writing. For these authors, the transformation of society depends upon the transformation of the individual. We therefore propose to examine the ways in which Bersianik, Vonarburg and Rochon represent, through the experiences of their characters, the social construction of individual identity. For our corpus, this entails a study both of the representations of gender and of the role of language in the construction of identity. We explore gender from a feminist perspective by examining the initial dystopian situation of the individual living in society; we then analyze the positive (i.e. eutopian) process of change undergone by the individual. This thesis begins by exploring a definition of literary utopia. We then trace the major periods in the history of literary utopia to provide background for our corpus. In chapter two, we examine the ways in which Bersianik, Vonarburg and Rochon denounce, through their fictional representations of the individual, dystopian configurations of gender. In particular, we study various “structural” metaphors used by the authors to interrogate the social role of women and the status of the female body in patriarchal society. In chapter three, we examine the new configurations of social and sexual identity proposed by the authors. We then study the author's treatment of the role of language in the social construction of individual identity in chapter four. After defining “sociolect” and introducing “sexualect”, we apply these concepts to the study of the critique of sexist language and discourses of authority in our corpus. In chapter five, we explore how the authors employ discursive strategies, such as parody and “defamiliarization”, to alter language and thus inscribe female subjectivity in language (Bersianik and Vonarburg) and to liberate individuals from the imprisonment of authoritarian discourses (Bersianik, Vonarburg and Rochon). Lastly, we find that after having examined the human condition in dystopian societies, our authors propose social projects that are infinitely dynamic and mutable rather than fixed models of an ideal social state.
This dissertation explores the intersections of poetics and science in the texts of seven contemporary authors of speculative verse: Frank Herbert, Diane Ackerman, Thomas M. Disch, Robert Frazier, ...Andrew Joron, Roald Hoffmann and Frederick Turner. These authors' works illustrate that, contrary to prevailing Western philosophies, there is no necessary antagonism nor incompatibility between poetry and science. Analyses of their literary and theoretical texts also suggest that much stands to be gained from the collaboration of poetic and scientific epistemologies. Each discipline, for instance, can benefit from drawing upon the strengths of the other: there is value for the scientist in employing a poetic imagination and the freedoms of poetic language in both arriving at and articulating complex scientific theories; for the poet, science can reveal important aspects of the nature and experience of poetry—and scientifically-informed poets are more prepared to write verses with greater cultural relevancy. However, many of the texts this dissertation examines suggest that more thoroughly interdisciplinary efforts could produce greater benefits: Frazier and Joron contend that the active collaboration of two disciplines believed by many to be polar opposites might initiate trends toward intellectual and cultural cooperation on larger scales; Disch's work argues that a poetic-scientific epistemology is capable of providing a more robust understanding of—and more novel solutions to—humanity's most significant problems; and Ackerman and Hoffmann explore how interdisciplinary perspectives could give rise to a more species-sustaining ethical or spiritual vision. Much of the work of these seven poets, especially Herbert and Turner, also asks readers to consider how the synthesis of poetics and science might ultimately lead to extraordinary insights or powers. Though the most outrageous claims of the speculative poetry movement initially strike us as purely science fictional, some provide compelling symbols of the potential benefits of reconsidering the “two cultures” perspective and more thoroughly exploring the intersections of poetry and science.
“‘In That New World Which Is The Old’: New World/Old World Inversion In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World” examines the inversion of the concepts Old World, specifically associated with England, and ...New World, specifically associated with America, in the novel Brave New World. After examining and denotatively defining the terms Old World and New World, this thesis argues that the New World/Old World inversion in Huxley's dystopian novel exists because of Anglo-American cultural and political events of the 1920s and early 1930s, namely, the United States' rise as a military, political, and cultural superpower following World War I and Great Britain's concurrent early imperial dissolution and declining political power. Specifically, I argue that the New World/Old World inversion of Brave New World stands as Huxley's attempt, whether inadvertent or deliberate, to check the progress of modernity and the shift of political, economic, and military power from Europe to America, that is, from the old World to the New. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)
The thesis examines the paradoxes in Herbert's poetry and attributes the many contradictions and vacillations within The Temple to Herbert's own “spiritual conflicts” as a Christian poet. The thesis ...explores the poems as interconnected expressions of Herbert's dual nature as Christian-Poet. The thesis discusses over sixty of Herbert's poems, concentrating on close readings and intratextual connections. Chapter One reviews critical approaches to Herbert's poetry and outlines the study. Chapter Two examines Herbert's life and the expression of his struggles in poetry. Chapter Three discusses Herbert's poetry itself and comments on the deceptively simplistic style. Chapter Four explores the conflict between the worlds of the Christian and the poet. Chapter Five concludes that, more than merely an artistic exercise or catechistic tool, Herbert's poetry accurately records the duality of the poet's spiritual journey.
Resch attempts to take a step towards critically evaluating the diversity of the psychedelic experience as portrayed in German literature since WWII. He briefly examines the relevant aspects of works ...by Ernst Junger, Jorg fauser, Bernward Vesper, and Rainald Goetz to know the extent of using drugs as an underlying theme in the analyzed works demand or, as the case may be, obstruct a uniform approach to literary interpretation. However, he opines that the lack of words to adequately express what might be outside the normal field of imagination--and indeed articulation--can be frustrating.
This study was undertaken to explore the composing process of two Spanish-speaking professional women and its relationship to the coherence or lack of coherence which appeared in their written texts. ...Two Argentine women of comparable age and educational background were asked to compose aloud (Emig, 1971) during four writing sessions. All sessions were conducted individually. Both subjects were trained in the use of the composing aloud method previous to the investigation. They were interviewed at length twice, once to ascertain that they fit the criteria set out beforehand, and once after the writing sessions were over to gather information on their writing history. Tapes from the composing aloud sessions were transcribed and coded with Perl's (1978) categories. Written material (notes and compositions) were typed exactly as in the original. Compositions were divided according to Lieber's (1979) functional units and functional roles. Themes and rhemes (Halliday, 1967, 1968; Lybbert and Cummings, 1969) were identified and plotted on a graph similar to Scinto's (1977) in order to analyze textual relationships. A schema in four parts was developed: intention, encoding interpretation, editing and revising. This schema served as a framework to observe how the successful strategies aided the smooth flow of the composing process and how the unsuccessful strategies hindered the achievement of the writer's intentions. The major successful strategies observed were: note-taking as a way of generating meaning, narrowing down the topic, use of cohesive devices, revision to match text with meaning, appeal to authority, editing to insert connectives, and addition of concrete examples. The major unsuccessful strategies found were: avoiding a clear intention before writing, using strategies from other mediums of expression such as painting, lacking a narrow topic, ambivalent feelings about a topic and tangents which affected coherence, use of their native language as a source, language switching, overgeneralization from other discourse types, reliance on lexical cohesion to achieve textual coherence, not reading completed drafts and not writing second drafts, and lack of editing and revision.
