1,720,962 research outputs found
The finishing stroke: Edgar Allan Poe's aesthetics of unity
No full textEdgar Allan Poe's tales are almost always divided into the two categories of detective and terror. This division has become an accepted generalization, so much so that many seem to have lost sight of the fact that the source of both the tales of terror and the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe is the same author with the same world view. The underlying anxiety of Poe's fiction is the pain of separation from, and a desire for reunion with, the divine source of creation. This anxiety is the source of tension, terror, madness, fragmentation, and death wish in Poe's tales. This idea, though variously explored in imaginative tales, finally manifests itself in the form of a serious philosophical statement in 'Eureka ' (1848). Both chronologically and philosophically, 'Eureka ' finalizes Poe's tales. In the form of a philosophical statement, ' Eureka' summarizes the anxiety of the tales. (Abstract shortened by UMI.
A "morbid attrait to beauty" elements of aestheticism in J. D. Salinger's Glass fiction
No full textThis thesis examines the ways that J. D. Salinger's later short fiction focusing on his Glass family characters draws on elements of Nineteenth-Century aestheticism as a means of claiming that the artist occupies a privileged spiritual position. Over the course of his Glass family stories, Salinger develops a coherent philosophy of art that emphasises individual
experiences of the beautiful giving meaning to life and art as the means by which these transitory experiences can be given permanence. Via the American Transcendentalist tradition, Salinger gives religious significance to the aesthetic impulse, producing a religion of art out of a love of beauty that posits the artist as a spiritual "seer" (SI 105) and art as a mystical calling. Although this spirituality has often led to interpretation of Salinger's later work as religious, Salinger diverges from the democratic and levelling elements of American transcendentalism, asserting the spiritually privileged position of the artist while simultaneously contradicting the generally agnostic character of aestheticism, merging the universalistic and individualistic religious faith of the transcendentalists with aestheticism's fixation on the beautiful. This transforms the artist who pursues aesthetic experience into a "God-seeker," an aesthetic saint who locates the divine in the actualization of their artistic vision
Ideological geography: Sandburg, Steinbeck, Dos Passos and space
No full textDepression era literature has never been the darling of the English department. Despite the tireless work of Americanists such as Janet Galligani Casey, Barbara Foley, and Alan Wald, the literature of the 1930s just seems to lack a certain cachet. However, as the economy continues to deteriorate and the nation sits precariously on the edge of a new Great Depression, there is no better time to revisit these texts than now. This thesis examines the ways in which Carl Sandburg‟ s The People, Yes, John Steinbeck‟ s The Grapes of Wrath, and John Dos Passos‟ The 42nd Parallel engage with the production and reproduction of capitalist- dominated space, highlighting the ways in which capitalist ideology manifests itself in the form of a dystopic material reality. However, as this thesis will also argue, there is also a highly problematic ambivalence toward capitalism in these texts, and this effectively blunts any prospects for the realization of utopic visions. In short, these authors look to the idealism of the American past for a cure to the ills of the nation in their own time, and what they find is a discourse which suggests that capitalist space and utopia are not mutually exclusive. However, this project extends beyond the 1930s, offering a brief history of American economics since the Great Depression, tracing a national trajectory in an effort to elucidate the factors that led to the current state of the nation. The problems facing America in our own time bear an alarming resemblance to those of the depression era, and there is an urgent need to analyze the qualities and the workings of space now, just as Sandburg, Steinbeck, and Dos Passos did then. However, it is only with a clear understanding of the past that we can hope to avoid replicating past failures and build a better tomorrow
Women's fulfillment as a question of privilege in Kate Chopin's The Awakening
No full textThis thesis examines Kate Chopin's infamous 1899 novel, The Awakening. Along with a few of her short stories – "Désirée's Baby," "Beyond the Bayou," and "The Story of an Hour" –which were earlier published in Vogue magazine, this work conceptualizes the role of privilege in protagonist Edna's ability to reach a point of fulfilment, as her pursuit of this fulfilment drives the narrative's plot. While her racial and economic privileges are the components that lead her to recognize her oppressions, such subjugations inhibit her liberation, eventually leading to her death by suicide.
The first chapter explores Edna's androgyny – both physical and emotional –as it relegates her to the margins of her gendered Louisiana society. However, the second chapter brings this marginality further into question by employing Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality. Though oppressed as a woman who does not wholly subscribe to feminine ideals of the time, Black, poor women of the narrative are oppressed by Edna. The third chapter then analyzes the novel's public reception, as well as the reception of Chopin's works when published in Vogue. By writing in the novel format, which inevitably addresses a more extensive male audience than that of a women's magazine, Chopin pushes the boundaries of what is acceptable storytelling, revealing temporal anxieties surrounding women's agency. Consequently, this thesis demonstrates that The Awakening has maintained its relevance over time, as it explicates the intricacies of the intersectional perspective before it became a theorized concept
Re-casting Sylvia Plath, plath's poetry as cultural confession
Get PDFgrantor:
University of Toronto"Re-casting Sylvia Plath: Plath's Poetry as Cultural Confession" provides a cultural critique of Plath's poetry, one that shifts focus away from recovering individualism or self-actualization to critiquing the formative fields of the social which rule subjectivity. Her late poems break from her early poems' fairy tale settings and preoccupation with self to a larger symbolic system which situates the self in the social. Most critics, however, fail to take seriously Plath's collective, social, and historical agenda. Instead they limit themselves to psychological, mythological, or biographical readings. It is precisely this refusal of Plath's to find refuge in traditional categories of individualism and the nuclear family which differentiates her from so many of those contemporaries with which she is regularly compared. The "confessional" poets, for example, examine how the psyche shapes our impressions of the world, whereas Plath, inversely, looks at how the outside world shapes the self. The dissertation, then, explores her poems as instances of dialogic process. The various voices in "'Three Women': A Poem for Three Voices" (March 1962) offer dimension and difference to counter the monotony and monologic of the world she inhabits, while "In Plaster" (18 March 1961) enacts a dialogue between the subject as a culturally created artifact and collective fantasies. Among these late poems, and most obviously in "A Birthday Present" (30 September 1962), individual identity is often unstable or shifting, threatening the surrounding illusions of self-containment. In such poems as "Daddy" (12 October 1962), "Lady Lazarus" (23-29 October 1962), and her series of bee poems (3-7 October 1962), Plath shows the invisibility of social forces, and the crushing effect of that invisibility, especially on women. Nevertheless, the poems do less to demonstrate the crushing of the authentic or "real" self by the patriarchal, than show the role of (social) fantasy in the construction of the subject.Ph.D
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Visual Arts
No full textExplores the influence of modern art on Hemingway and his writing, particularly Cézanne and the cubists. Discusses Hemingway’s break with the past and tradition as he embraced a sense of modernism in both his life and art, striving always to render truth in his writing as faithfully as the artist does through painting
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
- …
