1,722,973 research outputs found
The Wild Bunch: Scourges or Ministers?
No full textWhen The Wild Bunch first appeared in the summer of 1969, it created something of a scandal with its raw, unleavened violence and hyper-realistic treatment of the western subject matter. This treatment seemed to scorn deliberately the usual dictates of the western genre, a traditional repository of American values which called for idealized if not mythological handling. Americans used to finding genteel gunfights and unambiguous morality in their westerns were shocked by Peckinpah’s depiction of the west as a squalid, messily bloody place, marked not by the confrontation of good and evil but by layers of badness. Where the traditional western offered, at the safe distance of legend, a morality corresponding to the perceived moral clarity of the Second World War, Peckinpah’s western reflected the moral ambiguity and discomfort of the war in Vietnam. Setting his film in the early twentieth century rather than the idealized post-Civil War period common in earlier westerns, Peckinpah suggested an incipient but recognizably modern world that is still very much with us.This essay first appeared in The New Orleans Review 18.3 (Fall 1991).Peer reviewe
Hurt into Poetry: The Political Verses of Seamus Heaney and Robert Bly
No full textOne of the stubborn issues in modern poetry is the question of its proper, or most effective, political role. Since the time of the romantics, poets have tended by nature and habit toward inwardness, but certain exigent occasions, wars and revolutions, have continually “hurt” them into public utterance. Still there is always an uneasiness attending these public occasions, a sense that the true business of the poet lies elsewhere. Modern poets have only rarely played an active part in the public events surrounding them, and they have been likely to waver between Shelley’s injunction to act as “unofficial legislators” and Yeats’s more sobering advice: “I think it better that in times like these / A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth / We have no gift to set a statesman right.”This essay first appeared in The New Orleans Review 19.3-4 (Fall & Winter 1992).Peer reviewe
The Legacy of Babel: Language in Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion
No full textIt has become fairly commonplace to assert that film, like music, transcends the nationality of its audience.1 Stanley Kauffmann has argued that film “is the only art involving language that can be enjoyed in a language of which one is ignorant.” This depends, of course, on the role language plays in a particular film, the extent to which it functions as an integral part of a film’s meaning, and the way it functions with the film’s other constituents. In some films a foreign language provides a real barrier to full appreciation, while in other films the language may play a relatively insignificant role (as in opera) and do little to hinder the viewer’s appreciation beyond focusing his attention on other, perhaps more important, elements. In polyglot films the issue of language is seemingly most transparent. We are exposed to languages as we encounter them in life. Awash in such a Babel, we are frustrated not by an artistic barrier but by the conditions of life itself.In fact, the polyglot text is a conscious artistic strategy feigning linguistic nat- uralism, and we should attend carefully to its motive and function. The polyglot text of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, for instance, is the central constituent of the film’s meaning.Peer reviewedThis essay first appeared in The New Orleans Review 15.2 (Summer 1988)
The Halo Upon the Bones: R.S. Thomas’s Journey to the Interior
No full textSince the appearance of The Stones of the Field in 1946, Thomas has written over twenty volumes of poetry, most recently Preparations for an A-Men, published by Macmillan in 1985. Although Thomas has confined himself to the rather narrow compass of the lyric, within this compass his growth and range have been remarkable. Thomas’s development may usefully be seen in terms of his continuing exploration of place, his Welsh surroundings first, and later the subtle and interior terrain of the spirit.Peer reviewe
Jere Nash Interview with Gene Triggs
No full textInterview conducted by author Jere Nash with Gene Triggs, former Vice President of Mississippi Chemical Corporation, in the process of writing Mississippi Politics: The Struggle for Power, 1976-2006. Topics covered include running Paul B. Johnson Jr.\u27s campaign in 1963; Rubel Phillips; Mississippi Marketing Council; William Winter; John Bell Williams; Jimmy Carter; Owen Cooper of Mississippi Chemical; 1987 Highway Bill; Eddie Khayat; Jamie Whitten; and Triggs elected to the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board
Exploring the Edward J. Bloustein dictionary collection
No full textEdward J. Bloustein, was a man with a keen and informed interest in lexicography, and now the Rutgers University Libraries are fortunate to be in possession of his extensive personal library of dictionaries. These range from Thomas Cooper’s Latin/English glossary, Thesaurus linguae Romanae et Britannicae (1573) to the Webster’sThird New International Dictionary (1961) edited by Philip Gove, though the main periods of concentration are the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, during which time the dictionary as a genre evolved into its recognizably modern forms
Humbert Rising: The Nature and Function of the Two Parts in Lolita
No full textVladimir Nabokov was never one to miss an opportunity of balance, and Lolita is full of balances, repetitions, and oppositions. This is as true of the novel’s larger structure as it is of minutiae. The balance in a name like Humbert Humbert is reflected in the balance of the two parts of the book. In fact, the two parts of the book are vigorous opposites in structure and in tone, and this opposition sustains much of the plot’s considerable energy. Part one is dominated by Humbert’s solipsistic view of those around him, while part two suggests his gradual release from this condition. Thus, in the first part of the novel, Humbert has virtually complete control of the narrative perspective and the reader is expected on the whole to accept his version of the events being related, while in the second part the reader is invited to make a counter-reading, to see Humbert’s perspective as limited and provisional, and to view the other characters as having distinct motivations apart from the enchantment of his imagination. Paradoxically, this allows us to see Humbert himself in a truer relation to the other characters and to take some measure of him in his tragic freedom
A Controlling Sympathy: The Style of Irony in Joyce’s “The Dead”
No full textA number of critics have maintained that Joyce was depicting symbolically a society of the “living dead.” All the characters, according to such a view, are left exposed to the merciless blasts of their author’s irony. Against such a view, I would argue that Joyce had a more generous conception of his characters. This is not to say that he does not “detect” them in the limitations of their humanity, that there is not irony at play here, but simply that the irony is gentle and embracing
Doing Other Things with Texts: The Use of Electronic Resources in Revising the OED
No full textThe old ways of lexicographers were good ways, and should not be given up lightly. And yet, if we are to accomplish the enormous task of a full revision of the OED in less than 20 years, new ways of integrating computers into the editorial process will have to be investigated and put into practice.This essay was given as a peer reviewed paper at the Conference on Early English Databases, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, October 9, 1993.Peer reviewe
R.S. Thomas and the Problem of Welsh Identity
No full textOne aspect of R.S. Thomas’s work which is perhaps most difficult for Americans to fathom is his relation to Welsh nationalism. This rather arcane issue is complicated even further by the fact that Thomas is an Anglo-Welsh poet, indeed the guiding spirit of what is known as the Anglo-Welsh movement. Tony Bianchi has called Thomas “the dominant voice in the attempt by Anglo-Welsh writers to define an audience.” Throughout his career, Thomas has been faced with the difficult choice of writing poetry in what he considers a foreign language, or committing creative suicide. Having been born in “the capital of a fake nation” (The Echoes Return Slow 4), that is, Cardiff in English speaking southern Wales, Thomas did not learn Welsh until he was thirty, too late for it to be of use for poetry (Selected Prose 182). The resultant tensions in his work are sometimes overlooked by English critics, who would rather welcome Thomas as a distinguished “colonial” contributor to their own literature, and who thus concentrate for the most part on his celebrated movement in later years toward more inward, spiritual, and therefore more international themes. And yet even Thomas’s later religious poetry should be understood in the context of his distinctly national concerns, as indeed many of the pieces in his Selected Prose, as well as passages in his most recent work, The Echoes Return Slow, make clear.A shorter version of this essay was given as a peer reviewed paper at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association (MLA), 1989 (Session on Exile and Language)
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