40 research outputs found
Common school education in Massachusetts : address at the dedication of the Chelsea high school house on Bellingham street, Jan. 2, 1873 /
No full textMode of access: Internet
"The Lamentation of a Vacuum Cleaner": Appliance Disappointments in John Cheever and Richard Yates
No full textThis article examines the representation of domestic appliances in a selection of short stories by John Cheever (a man who famously feared and mistrusted all electrical appliances), and Richard Yates (the son of an alcoholic regional sales representative for General Electric) published between 1947 and 1981, examining the ways in which these realist narratives challenge and indeed dismantle the idealised depictions of appliances in post-war radio, magazine ads, and television sitcoms (the majority of which were sponsored by the very same appliance brands that appeared in said sitcoms’ storylines). What I call Cheever and Yates’s “appliance disappointments” provide a counter to the optimistic narratives of the television sitcom and become, in these texts, props in the dramatization of post-war white working- and middle-class anxiety. I argue that these texts merit particular attention in light of recent developments in American studies that have shed light on the imbrication of television, consumer culture, and Cold War politics. In Cheever’s fiction, shiny new washing machines and hand-held electric mixers malfunction in ways that explicitly recall the explosive potential of the atomic bomb while Yates’ more straightforwardly autobiographical fiction form part of a very explicitly sullen, shabby backdrop from which they throw into relief the characters’ vanquished aspirations. Cheever and Yates’s appliance narratives draw attention to both authors’ acute awareness of the extent to which domestic life post-1945 revolved around gadgets (both televised and real) and their acknowledgement of such gadgets’ status as veritable actors in the drama of particularly white middle-class domesticity.© 2020, Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. The attached document (embargoed until 10/08/2021) is an author produced version of a paper published in TEXTUAL PRACTICE uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. The final published version (version of record) is available online at the link. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. We suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it
Metonymy and metaphor in the fiction of John Cheever
No full textJohn Cheever has been categorized by critics as an American realist. This paper challenges that assumption through the use of Roman Jakobsen's distinction between metaphoric and metonymic writing. In Jakobsen's poetics, the metonymic and metaphoric poles are opposed. The former describes discourse in which the objective world is depicted through contiguous phenomena, a mode of writing that Jakobsen ascribes to realism. The metaphoric pole reveals "equivalences" selected by the author to denote how phenomena are similar, not merely contiguous. Cheever's narratives show a gradual evolution away from metonymic writing toward metaphoric. As David Lodge has explained, this evolution can have a muted impact on the realistic text if the author draws his figurative language from the field of contiguities, or context, of a setting; Cheever's fiction illustrates this process. This paper also points out that Cheever's adoption of metaphoric prose occurred more rapidly after publication of his first novel, and that his use of metaphoric strategies allowed him to bring order to, or aestheticize, the narrative predicaments of his characters
New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families
No full textIn his essay on Tennessee Williams, the author reveals an artist profoundly tormented by his sister\u27s mental illness. Through the relationship between W.B. Yeats and his father, he examines a world of family relations, and in Roddy Doyle\u27s writing on his parents illuminates an Ireland reinvented. From John Cheever\u27s journals he makes fresh this darkly comic misanthrope and his intimates. Educating an intellectual woman, Cheever remarked, is like letting a rattlesnake into the house. In pieces that range from the importance of aunts (and the death of parents) in the English nineteenth-century novel to the relationship between fathers and sons in the writing of James Baldwin and Barack Obama, the author illuminates the intimate connections between writers and their families, but also articulates the great joy of reading their work.https://corescholar.libraries.wright.edu/dlpp_all/1451/thumbnail.jp
My Schools and My Scholars
No full textArticle reminiscing upon the author\u27s work in at Canandaigua Academy. Includes John Reading\u27s poem Dulce Domum and its translation by Mr. Stevenson, Home, Sweet Home, plus tributes (prose and a latin poem) to Mr. Ezekiel Cheever, along with correspondence quotes from pupils and their parents
In Hawthorne\u27s Shadow: American Romance from Melville to Mailer
No full text“The world is so sad and solemn,” wrote Nathaniel Hawthorne, “that things meant in jest are liable, by an overwhelming influence, to become dreadful earnest; gaily dressed fantasies turning to ghostly and black-clad images of themselves.” From the radical dualism of Hawthorne’s vision, Samuel Coale argues, springs a continuing tradition in the American novel. In Hawthorne’s Shadow is the first critical study to describe precisely the formal shape of Hawthorne’s psychological romance and to explore his themes and images in relation to such contemporary writers as John Cheever, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, John Gardner, Joyce Carol Oates, William Styron, and John Updike. When viewed from this perspective, certain writers—particularly Cheever, Mailer, Oates, and Gardner—appear in a new and very different light, leading to a considerable reevaluation of their achievement and their place in American fiction.
Mr. Coale’s long interviews and conversations with John Cheever, John Gardner, William Styron, and others have provided insights and perspectives that make this book particularly valuable to students of contemporary American literature. Coale links contemporary writers to an on-going American romantic tradition, represented by such earlier authors as Melville, Harold Frederic, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and Carson McCullers. He explores the distinctly Manichean matter of much American romance, linking it to America’s Puritan past and to the almost schizophrenic dynamics of American culture in general. Finally, he reexamines the post-modernist writers in light of Hawthorne’s “shadow” and shows that, however similar they may be in some ways, they differ remarkably from the previous American romantic tradition.
Samuel Coale, professor of English at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, is the author of John Cheever and Anthony Burgess.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_north_america/1021/thumbnail.jp
The Realistic Dilemma of Suburban Life: Upon John Cheever’s Work Bullet Park as an Example for American Middle-Class Families
No full textBullet Park is a novel written by American novelist John Cheever in the mid-late 20th century that echos the suburban life of American middle-class families after World War II. As a fictional suburban town, the distinctive existence of Bullet Park is like a utopia attempting to hinder the invasion of real society. The men and women in the town live a glamorous life whilst conceding numerous unknown secrets. Cheever constructs the story into three chapters through the strategy of fragmented writing: Nails, Hammer, and the intersection of Nails and Hammer. The novel fully embodies the hypocritical persona of American middle-class families in social communication, the long-standing disorder & dilemma within the families and the generalized spiritual crisis that exists among the stratum who are lingering in agony. The author combines the personal growth experience of Cheever amid some relevant stories occurs to the protagonists inside to analyze the perplexity and floundering of American middle-class society, families, and individuals during that sensitive period, i.e., the period of “Counter-culture Movement”
DNA fusion gene vaccination mobilizes effective anti-leukemic cytotoxic T lymphocytes from a tolerized repertoire
No full textThe majority of known human tumor-associated antigens derive from non-mutated self proteins. T cell tolerance, essential to prevent autoimmunity, must therefore be cautiously circumvented to generate cytotoxic T cell responses against these targets. Our strategy uses DNA fusion vaccines to activate high levels of peptide-specific CTL. Key foreign sequences from tetanus toxin activate tolerance-breaking CD4+ T cell help. Candidate MHC class Ibinding tumor peptide sequences are fused to the C terminus for optimal processing and presentation. To model performance against a leukemia-associated antigen in a tolerized setting, we constructed a fusion vaccine encoding an immunodominant CTL epitopederived from Friend murine leukemia virus gag protein (FMuLVgag) and vaccinated tolerant FMuLVgag-transgenic (gag-Tg) mice. Vaccination with the construct induced epitopespecificIFN-c-producing CD8+ T cells in normal and gag-Tg mice. The frequency and avidity of activated cells were reduced in gag-Tg mice, and no autoimmune injury resulted. However, these CD8+ T cells did exhibit gag-specific cytotoxicity in vitro and in vivo. Also, epitope-specific CTL killed FBL-3 leukemia cells expressing endogenous FMuLVgag antigen and protected against leukemia challenge in vivo. These results demonstrate a simple strategy to engage anti-microbial T cell help to activate epitope-specific polyclonal CD8+ T cell responses from a residual tolerized repertoire
Housebreakers and Peeping Toms: Voyeurism in John Cheever’s Early Suburban Stories
No full textLes années 1950 marquent un moment transitoire significatif dans la carrière de John Cheever puisqu’il commence dès lors à s’intéresser à la représentation de la banlieue – une transformation que le magazine The New Yorker, qui publiait la majeure partie de ses textes, avait également opérée à la même période. Ce changement est évident dans des nouvelles comme “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” et “The Cure”, deux textes de « jeunesse » dans ce nouveau champ d’investigation où l’on sent le penchant de l’auteur pour le voyeurisme et la flânerie – tendances qui révèlent une vision conflictuelle de la banlieue et une sensibilité urbaine encore vive. En enquêtant et en naviguant à travers la banlieue, les personnages aliénés de Cheever font souvent écho à leur expatriation de la ville et illustrent les afflux des classes moyennes de la ville vers les banlieues. Le profond désir de flâner que l’on retrouve chez les personnages reflète, comme le montre cet article, un phénomène urbain qui est transféré dans un environnement périphérique – environnement dépourvu du pouvoir de l’anonymat propre à la ville tout en présentant le spectacle relatif à toute consommation.
[Machine Generated English Translation]
The 1950s marked a significant transitional moment in John Cheever\u27s career as he began to take an interest in the representation of the suburbs - a transformation that The New Yorker magazine, which published most of its writing, had. also operated at the same time. This change is evident in short stories like “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Cure”, two texts of “youth” in this new field of investigation where one feels the penchant of the author for the voyeurism and the strolling - trends that reveal a conflicting vision of the suburbs and a still lively urban sensibility. As they investigate and navigate through the suburbs, Cheever\u27s insane figures often echo their expatriation from the city and illustrate the influx of the city\u27s middle classes to the suburbs. The deep desire to wander that we find in the characters reflects, as this article shows, an urban phenomenon that is transferred to a peripheral environment - an environment devoid of the power of anonymity proper to the city while presenting the relative spectacle. for all consumption
