|
Showing 1 - 8 of
8 matches in All Departments
Surreal Beckett situates Beckett's writings within the context of
James Joyce and Surrealism, distinguishing ways in which Beckett
forged his own unique path, sometimes in accord with, sometimes at
odds with, these two powerful predecessors. Beckett was so deeply
enmeshed in Joyce's circle during his early Paris days (1928 - late
1930s) that James Knowlson dubbed them his "Joyce years." But
Surrealism and Surrealists rivaled Joyce for Beckett's early and
continuing attention, if not affection, so that Raymond Federman
called 1929-45 Beckett's "surrealist period." Considering both
claims, this volume delves deeper into each argument by obscuring
the boundaries between theses differentiating studies. These
received wisdoms largely maintain that Beckett's Joycean connection
and influence developed a negative impact in his early works, and
that Beckett only found his voice when he broke the connection
after Joyce's death. Beckett came to accept his own inner darkness
as his subject matter, writing in French and using a first-person
narrative voice in his fiction and competing personal voices in his
plays. Critics have mainly viewed Beckett's Surrealist connections
as roughly co-terminus with Joycean ones, and ultimately of little
enduring consequence. Surreal Beckett argues that both early
influences went much deeper for Beckett as he made his own unique
way forward, transforming them, particularly Surrealist ones, into
resources that he drew upon his entire career. Ultimately, Beckett
endowed his characters with resources sufficient to transcend
limitations their surreal circumstances imposed upon them.
Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours takes its primary
inspiration from the contemporary U.S. Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD) crisis in soldiers transitioning from battlefields
back into society. It begins by examining how ancient societies
sought to ease the return of soldiers in order to minimize PTSD,
though the term did not become widely used until the early 1980s.
It then considers a dozen or so Shakespearean plays that depict
such transitions at the start, focusing on the tragic protagonists
and antagonists in paradigmatic "returning warrior" plays,
including Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Antony
and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and exploring the psychological and
emotional ill-fits that prevent warrriors from returning to the
status quo ante after battlefield triumphs, or even surviving the
psychic demons and moral disequilibrium they unleash on their
domestic settings and themselves. It also analyzes the history
plays, several comedies, and Hamlet as plays that partly conform to
and also significantly deviate from the basic paradigm. The final
chapter discusses recent attempts to effect successful transitions,
often using Shakespeare’s plays as therapy, and depictions of
attempts to wage warfare without inducing PTSD. Through the
investigation of the tragedies and model returning warrior
experiences, Shakespeare’s Returning Warriors – and Ours
highlights a central and understudied feature of Shakespeare’s
plays and what they can teach us about PTSD today when it is a
widespread phenomenon in American society.
Shakespeare's Returning Warriors - and Ours takes its primary
inspiration from the contemporary U.S. Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder (PTSD) crisis in soldiers transitioning from battlefields
back into society. It begins by examining how ancient societies
sought to ease the return of soldiers in order to minimize PTSD,
though the term did not become widely used until the early 1980s.
It then considers a dozen or so Shakespearean plays that depict
such transitions at the start, focusing on the tragic protagonists
and antagonists in paradigmatic "returning warrior" plays,
including Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Othello, Macbeth, Antony
and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and exploring the psychological and
emotional ill-fits that prevent warrriors from returning to the
status quo ante after battlefield triumphs, or even surviving the
psychic demons and moral disequilibrium they unleash on their
domestic settings and themselves. It also analyzes the history
plays, several comedies, and Hamlet as plays that partly conform to
and also significantly deviate from the basic paradigm. The final
chapter discusses recent attempts to effect successful transitions,
often using Shakespeare's plays as therapy, and depictions of
attempts to wage warfare without inducing PTSD. Through the
investigation of the tragedies and model returning warrior
experiences, Shakespeare's Returning Warriors - and Ours highlights
a central and understudied feature of Shakespeare's plays and what
they can teach us about PTSD today when it is a widespread
phenomenon in American society.
Surreal Beckett situates Beckett's writings within the context of
James Joyce and Surrealism, distinguishing ways in which Beckett
forged his own unique path, sometimes in accord with, sometimes at
odds with, these two powerful predecessors. Beckett was so deeply
enmeshed in Joyce's circle during his early Paris days (1928 - late
1930s) that James Knowlson dubbed them his "Joyce years." But
Surrealism and Surrealists rivaled Joyce for Beckett's early and
continuing attention, if not affection, so that Raymond Federman
called 1929-45 Beckett's "surrealist period." Considering both
claims, this volume delves deeper into each argument by obscuring
the boundaries between theses differentiating studies. These
received wisdoms largely maintain that Beckett's Joycean connection
and influence developed a negative impact in his early works, and
that Beckett only found his voice when he broke the connection
after Joyce's death. Beckett came to accept his own inner darkness
as his subject matter, writing in French and using a first-person
narrative voice in his fiction and competing personal voices in his
plays. Critics have mainly viewed Beckett's Surrealist connections
as roughly co-terminus with Joycean ones, and ultimately of little
enduring consequence. Surreal Beckett argues that both early
influences went much deeper for Beckett as he made his own unique
way forward, transforming them, particularly Surrealist ones, into
resources that he drew upon his entire career. Ultimately, Beckett
endowed his characters with resources sufficient to transcend
limitations their surreal circumstances imposed upon them.
Cultures reveal themselves in how they react to death: how they
ritualize it, tell its story, heal themselves. Before the modern
period, death and dying seemed definitive, public and appropriate.
The industrial revolution, the Great War and the radical
re-envisioning of inner and outer reality after Marx, Darwin,
Nietzsche, Einstein, van Gennep and Freud destabilized cultural
norms and transformed the protocols of death and dying. In
Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise, first published in
1995, Alan Friedman traces the semiotics of death and dying in
twentieth-century fiction, history and culture. He describes how
modernist writers either, like Forster and Woolf, elided rituals of
dying and death; or, rediscovering the body as Lawrence and
Hemingway did, transformed Victorian 'aesthetic death' into modern
'dirty death'. And he goes on to show how, through postmodern
fiction and AIDS narratives, death has once again become cultural
currency.
Cultures reveal themselves in how they react to death: how they
ritualize it, tell its story, heal themselves. Before the modern
period, death and dying seemed definitive, public and appropriate.
The industrial revolution, the Great War and the radical
re-envisioning of inner and outer reality after Marx, Darwin,
Nietzsche, Einstein, van Gennep and Freud destabilized cultural
norms and transformed the protocols of death and dying. In
Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise, first published in
1995, Alan Friedman traces the semiotics of death and dying in
twentieth-century fiction, history and culture. He describes how
modernist writers either, like Forster and Woolf, elided rituals of
dying and death; or, rediscovering the body as Lawrence and
Hemingway did, transformed Victorian 'aesthetic death' into modern
'dirty death'. And he goes on to show how, through postmodern
fiction and AIDS narratives, death has once again become cultural
currency.
The Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa has been acclaimed throughout the
literary world as one of Latin America's finest writers, yet until
recently little has been written about his work in English. While
his work has the subject of an increasing flow of critical
commentary in Spanish and his major novels have been translated
into English, this is the first full-scale critical treatment of
Vargas Llosa published in the English language. These articles by a
number of established writers and critics appraise Vargas Llosa's
individual novels as well as the body of his work. The Time of the
Hero, The Green House, Conversation in The Cathedral, and Pantaleon
y las visitadoras are examined in order of publication, A second
group of more general essays ranges across Vargas Llosa's work and
explores pervasive themes and concerns. Two pieces by Jose Miguel
Oviedo serve as a coda. In a bilingual interview, Oviedo and Vargas
Llosa discuss Vargas Llosa's novel La tia Julia y el escribidor.
Oviedo concludes with a critical discussion of that novel. A Vargas
Llosa chronology compiled by the editors is also included. Most of
these essays originally appeared in 1977 as a special issue of
Texas Studies in Literature and Language. The concluding essay by
Oviedo was prepared especially for this edition.
In Forms of Modern British Fiction six individualistic and
strongminded critics delineate the "age of modernism" in British
fiction. Dating the age and the movement from later Hardy works
through the deaths of Joyce and Woolf, they present British fiction
as a cohesive, self-contained unit of literary history. Hardy
appears as the first of the modern British novelists, Lawrence as
the central, and Joyce and Woolf as the last. The writers and the
modern movement are framed by precursors, such as Galsworthy, and
by successors, Durrell, Beckett, and Henry Green-the postmoderns.
The pattern of the essays suggests a growing self-consciousness on
the part of twentieth-century writers as they seek not only to
refine their predecessors but also to deny (and sometimes
obliterate) them. The moderns thus deny the novel itself, a genre
once firmly rooted in history and forms of social life. Their works
do not assume that comfortable mimetic relationship between the
fictive realities of art and life. Consequently, there has now
evolved a poetics of the novel that is virtually identifiable with
modern fiction, a poetics still highly problematical in its attempt
to denote a medium in whose name eclectic innovativeness and
incessant revitalizing are proclaimed. Forms of Modern British
Fiction refines and advances the discussion of the modern novel and
the world it and we inhabit.
|
|