Book categories

The Magic of Yggdrasill

The Poetry of Old Norse Unconscious

by Yves Kodratoff

2020

This book took its start with the author’s realization that what Old Norse calls 'magic' can be understood as 'unconscious', as stated by C. G. Jung: (we find) "magical means everything where unconscious influences are at work." This book reveals the existence of several Norse words specifically dedicated to magic, as are 'sköp', for instance, and it details the magic they carry with them. In our modern civilization these "skop" still exist but their magical nature is no longer obvious, though this point can be disputed.Once this magic is discovered and acknowledged, it becomes possible to infer from Norse poetry the existence and handling of unconscious archetypes within its associated myths. A few of them have been analyzed in detail and this enabled us to better understand some surpris...

Guide to Enjoying Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters

by John P. Anderson

2017

This non-academic author presents a study of Salinger’s major writings, a study designed to enhance the reader’s enjoyment even in a reread. The study is an analysis of their artistic structure, especially Salinger’s sophisticated use of the narrator’s voice or voices. Catcher comes off as the Hindu Connection, Franny and Zooey as Take Out Zen and Raise High as Kabbalah Reception. The Hindu connection structures what happens to Holden in Catcher, and fast as take out Zen structures what happens to Franny in Franny and Zooey. Principal tenants of Kabbalah influence and structure important aspects of the story Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, particularly the lack of civil reception of “others” at the wedding reception. These choices were no doubt influenced by Salinger’s experiments wi...

Book 7 of Caesar's Bellum Gallicum

With Introduction, Text, Vocabulary and Notes

by Drew Arlen Mannetter, PhD.

2004

This comprehensive reader utilizes a step-by-step approach to help students of Latin read and understand the longest and most dramatic book of Caesar's Gallic War. Book 7 is the culmination of the conflict between Gaul, led by the young Arvernian Vercingetorix and fighting for its freedom and political survival, and the Romans, led by Julius Caesar and fighting for hegemony and political mastery. The final battle at Alesia, pitting the united might of Gaul at 339,000 men against a Roman army of 40,000, changed the course of Western history. This reader is ideal for Latin students of all levels who have a basic knowledge of grammar and morphology. The Latin text of all 90 chapters of Book 7 is broken down into manageable segments, normally about a sentence in length. Immediately following,...

Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre (1904-1938)

A New Perspective on the Study of Irish Drama

by Fabio Luppi

2018

Fathers and Sons at the Abbey Theatre demonstrates how the literary archetype of the clash between fathers and sons and the subsequent depiction of anti-oedipal figures become a major concern for the playwrights writing in a specific and crucial moment of Irish history (1904-1938). The father can be conceived both as a historical / political metaphor as well as a real father in a specific historical and social context. The classical models employed as theoretical tools to nuance the argument--Laius and Oedipus, Ulysses and Telemachus, Aeneas and Anchises, Priam and Hector, Hector and Astyanax--are challenged by the Christian example of Abraham and Isaac, subversively adjusted by Yeats to provide a tragic reading of post-colonial Ireland. All of these pairings provide archetypes for the und...

The Fall of Literary Theory

A 21st Century Return to Deconstruction and Poststructuralism, with Applications

by Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen

2017

The book revives literary theory, which was popular at the end of the 20th century, with the purpose of showing how useful it is in the current century in opening the minds of students to the dangers of claiming to have a fixed identity. The book shows that in Western cultures identity is a construct that always sees individuals as lacking something (being fallen) that can be retrieved or gained at the expense of an Other, an adversary seen as standing in the way of identity fulfillment. The book shows the history of "fallenness" through an analysis of Melville's Billy Budd, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. It also shows ways to heal identity through an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved and Rudolfo Anaya's Tortuga. REVIEWS and WORDS OF PRAISE Effects of ...

Work and Labor in World Languages, Literatures, and Film

Selected Proceedings of the 24th Southeast Conference on Languages, Literatures, and Film

by Will Lehman, Margit Grieb, and Yves-Antoine Clemmen (editors)

2021

The essays in this anthology represent a cross-section of current scholarship examining the complex interplay between work, in its broadest theoretical conceptualization, and the world cultures in and through which this labor is performed. Although aimed primarily at an academic audience, the included essays, written in English, Spanish, and French, are also accessible to the curious layperson interested in looking at literature, theater, cinema, and philosophy through the lens of world languages and cultures. For more than thirty years, the Southeast Conference for Languages, Literatures and Film (SCFLLF) has been a premier platform for the discussion and dissemination of the latest scholarship in the Humanities, with emphasis on non-English area studies. The current volume showcases some...

Villains, Victims, and Violets

Agency and Feminism in the Original Sherlock Holmes Canon

by Resa Haile and Tamara R. Bower

2019

Modern writers have reconsidered every subject under the sun through the lens of Sherlock Holmes. The overlooked subject is agency: the opportunities available to these women for independence and control. What we find all too often are the silences around them. And yet, these clients--villains, victims, and Violets--are pivotal in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps more enigmatic than Holmes' methods is what Watson sees: the woman in the shadows. Whether lady or lady's maid, if she does speak, it's often not recorded in her words. That was life for half the population of Victorian England. A woman's role was written before she was born; it merely required her to don the starched white apron of a maid, or the rough, stained skirts of a "char"--who did the dirtiest of household jobs--o...

Kafka's Last Pipes

The Burrow and Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk

by John P. Anderson

2016

Fresh from the twilight zone of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, this non-academic author treats on a line by line basis two of Kafka's last stories, stories written while he was wheezing with tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, these stories features pipes, just what Kafka was thinking about all the time while he was bed ridden, his sore pipes. Kafka experienced the threat of death at the same time as he experienced the love of his life with Dora Diamant. In these two stories Kafka spot-lights fear and love, the most basic human issues and those that had taken possession of Kafka's life. Fear and love in the lives of a mole-like creature alone in a burrow and mice in a crowded colony. In stories with no humans, Kafka teaches us what is most important in being human. The Burrow examines fear-based...

Disabled Literature

A Critical Examination of the Portrayal of Individuals with Disabilities in Selected Works of Modern and Contemporary American Literature

by Miles Beauchamp, Wendy Chung, Alijandra Mogilner, & Svetlana Zakinova

2015

This book examines how authors have used characters with disabilities to elicit emotional reactions in readers; additionally, how writers use disabilities to present individuals as "the other" rather than simply as people. Finally, the book discusses how literature has changed, or is changing, with regards to its presentation of those with a disability.

FACS - Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies

Catastrophe and Representation - Volume 9, 2006-2007

by Peggy Schaller, et al.

2007

IN THIS ISSUE: Foreword PEGGY SCHALLER Saisir le désordre: Expressions littéraires de la catastrophe; modalités et enjeux de sa verbalisation AMINA TAHRI The Lesson of the Titanic BREE HOSKIN Places That Disaster Leave Behind BRUCE JANZ Nuclear Families and Nuclear Catastrophe in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) PAUL WILLIAMS Personal History, Collective History: Mapping Shock and the Work of Analogy AMANDA IRWIN WILKINS It’s What Isn’t There That Is: Catastrophe, Denial, and Non-Representation in Arshile Gorky’s Art KIM THERIAULT The editors of the Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies literary journal invite submissions on any topic for upcoming issues. FACS is an interdisciplinary journal providing a forum for comparative study in the arts, humanities, langu...

FACS - Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies

Remaking Reality - Eroding the Palimpsest - Volume 10, 2007-2008

by Jill Kriegel and Emmanuel Alvarado, et al.

2009

IN THIS ISSUE: Foreword EMMANUEL ALVARADO Artist’s Commentary CYNTHIA ZAITZ Indelible Ink of the Palimpsest: Language, Myth and Narrative in H.D.’s Trilogy MICHELE BRAUN Mary-ing Isis and Mary Magdalene in “The Flowering of the Rod”: Revisioning and Healing Through Female-Centered Spirituality in H.D.’s Trilogy JULIE GOODSPEED-CHADWICK Rethinking the Maya: Understanding an Ancient Language in Modern Linguistic Terms RHIANNA C. ROGERS Monarch of All I Can Sway: “Crusoeing” Alongside Oscar Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” VAL CZERNY Mina Loy’s Design Flaws COLBEY EMMERSON REID Form and Function in the Social Perception and Appreciation of Web Sites EMMANUEL ALVARADO In Of Cigarettes, High Heels, and Other Interesting Things: An Introduction to Semiotics, Mar...

The File of Robert Siodmak in Hollywood

1941 - 1951

by Joseph Greco

1999

Robert Siodmak, who is considered the master of film noir thrillers and crime melodramas, has long been seen as a mere "assignment director," never an artist in complete control of his work. J. Greco's study of Siodmak's Hollywood career dispels this view and presents a unique perspective on the studio system and the director who used cunning to get his own way within it. He incorporates both archival evidence and stylistic analysis to show a distinct correlation between the production histories of Siodmak's studio films and the director's central artistic purpose. Shedding new light on the career of this important film maker, this book is worthwhile reading for the film scholar, the lover of film noir, and the fan of Siodmak's work.

Working on Texts

Reading Literature Critically

by Enrico Terrinoni

2012

If reading is inevitably always an experiment, reading literary masterpieces gains one access to a linguistic and semiotic universe that baffles hermeneutic authority, as well as any attempt to propose definitive interpretations. What is good about reading is that it is simultaneously a statement of subjectivity and recognition of the other as a different interpreter of the same signs. Every reading is therefore always provisional. Working on Texts provides some old and new readings of famous literary masterpieces by authors such as John Donne, S.T. Coleridge, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney.

Learning Self-Therapy Through Writing

An experience in Creative Journaling

by Nathaniel Gadsden

2001

This book designed for self-discovery and self-empowerment. The journal explores three basic questions, who am I, what can I do, and what do I want to do? Then the book challenges you to get started today. The journal is unique because it guides you through very creative but simple excercises that help you visualize your inner most thoughts and fears, while empowering you to move forward.

The journal can be used for group interaction and individual counseling sessions. The journal also contains a section devoted to those persons that are affected by drug/alcohol abuse. The weekly self-contract section and the monthly flushing sessions are great tools that can be used by teens and adults alike.

Marginal Voice, Marginal Body

The Treatment Of The Human Body in yhe Works of Nakagami Kenji, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Salman Rushdie

by Noriko Miura

2000

In examining the work of three "ethnic" writers (Nakagami Kenji is Japanese burakumin, Leslie Marmon Silko Native American, Salman Rushdie an Indian living in England), this project studies the literary depictions of the ways in which the body is portrayed and used as a space for cultural and ideological inscription. The major issues addressed involve gender, race, and ethnicity as forces which become visible through the socially constructed body. In the works of Nakagami Kenji, Salman Rushdie, and Leslie Marmon Silko, bodies cry out the silence to overwhelm the torturer. They all share a concern with the loss of land which induces migration, a weakened sense of identity, and hybridity. Each author uses the body of his/her protagonist as the site to inscribe the consequences of such l...

The Sound and the Fury in the Garden of Eden

William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and the Garden of Eden Myth

by John P. Anderson

2002

This non-academic author brings the Garden of Eden myth alive as sophisticated poetry and a polemic for women and the consciousness of freedom. The myth is explored line by line using the tools of literary analysis and modern ideas, including Freudian concepts. The analysis shows how its "J" author, thought to be a woman in the royal court of Judah around 1000 BCE, uses the techniques of sound association, puns and other sophisticated means to get her messages across. The analysis probes how after thousands of years this myth still speaks to us about the critical human experiences of sex and death and their bigger brothers freedom and limitation. Then this author shows how Faulkner used concepts from the Garden of Eden in structuring his most stunning and difficult stream of consciou...

The Poltergeist in William Faulkner's Light in August

by John P. Anderson

2002

An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama.

Finding Joy in Joyce

A Readers Guide to Ulysses

by John P. Anderson

2000

This is a detailed reader's guide to James Joyce's masterwork Ulysses, voted the most important novel of the 20th century. The guide provides episode by episode an in depth explanation of the action and symbolism, including a description of the related books of Homer's Odyssey and the correspondences. This guide is designed to give the user the keys to the kingdom of one of the wonders of Western civilization. The non-academic author, a retired lawyer and life long Joyce reader, brings new approaches to find the deep meaning of each of Joyce's episodes and the novel as a whole. The scope of this effort, the complete Joyce, is unique in an area monopolized by more narrowly focused academics. The analysis elucidates Joyce's technique to mimic patterns in history and nature in his arch...

Nichiren's Nationalism

A Buddhist Rhetoric of a Shinto Teaching

by Achilles S C Gacis

2000

Chapter One, "Religion and Nationalism in Early Kamakura Society" introduces the issues that affected the nation in the early Kamakura period. The first section points out the historical background of the time that was considered to be a spiritually significant age according to Buddhist chronology. The next section on the "Religious Answers to National Problems" provides a prelude to how the indigenous religious tradition of Shinto attempted to define its leaders and their right to rule as well as the divine protection that was to be given them by the native deities. The imported Buddhist teachings provided a new perspective to the national problems through an examination of existing conditions as possibly being consequences of immoral acts. The various characteristics of the teaching...

Diary as Fiction

Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Turgenev’s Diary of a Superfluous Man

by Jessica M. Natale

2000

There is a genre of literature in which the work is purposely written within the diary format; this type of writings known as diary fiction. Diary novels traditionally reflect what the authors think real diaries are or are written as a parody of the diary as a negative model. The authors of diary novels choose the diary form because its artistic quality expresses a greater sense of immediacy to the reader than other forms of literature. The diary novel emphasizes the time of writing rather than the time that it is written about, so the diarist usually writes about events of the immediate past - events that occur between one entry and the next - or records his momentary ideas, reflections, or emotions. Turgenev's "Diary of a Superfluous Man" represents the marriage of a memoir and a di...

Dostoevsky's Conception Of Man

Its Impact on Philosophical Anthropology

by Peter M. Wolf

1997

Dostoevsky's novels have contributed to a conception of man that reverberates in the conclusions of prominent twentieth-century philosophical anthropologists. Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus, among others, have admitted that the works of Dostoevsky had an influence on the manner in which they learned to conceive of human nature and the world in which humans live. Our aim in this dissertation is to ask: what is there in the novels of Dostoevsky concerning the nature of man, of which certain philosophers could claim that in their philosophical conceptions of man they were positively influenced by him? The main thesis is substantiated with a careful analysis of four novels: Notes From the House of the Dead (Zapiski iz mertvo...

The Moral of the Story

Content, Process, and Reflection in Moral Education through Narratives

by John H. Lockwood

1999

The problem this project attempts to solve is to develop a workable moral education in light of the clash between religious forms of moral education and U.S. Supreme Court decisions concerning them. The concept of story and storytelling has been suggested as a unifying focus for disparate prescriptions for moral education. Several recent approaches to moral storytelling have been proposed. The approaches of William Bennett, Nel Noddings, and Herbert Kohl are among those which have attempted to combine moral education and storytelling within the last decade. Bennett is identified with other theorists whose primary concern is the moral content of a story. Noddings is identified as a process theorist, whose primary concern is the process of moral storytelling, not the content. Kohl is i...

The Spectacle of the Growth of Knowledge and Swift's Satires on Science

by Beat Affentranger

2000

This is a revisionist study of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century satires on science with an emphasis on the writings of Jonathan Swift and, to a lesser degree, Samuel Butler and other satirists. To say, as some literary commentators do, that the satirists attacked only pseudo-scientists who failed to employ the empirical method properly is to beg a crucial question: how could the satirists possibly have distinguished the genuine scientist from the crank? By a failsafe set of Baconian principles perhaps? No, the matter is more complicated. I read the satiric literature on early modern science against a totally different understanding of what science is, how it came into being, and how it developed. Satire has a decided advantage over scientific discourse. It can rely on common sense; sci...

The Plays of Christopher Marlowe and George Peele

Rhetoric and Renaissance Sensibility

by Brian B. Ritchie

1999

This work is concerned with the evaluation of rhetoric as an essential aspect of Renaissance sensibility. It is an analysis of the Renaissance world viewed in terms of literary style and aesthetic. Eight plays are analysed in some detail: four by George Peele: The Battle of Alcazar, Edward I, David and Bethsabe, and The Arraignment of Paris; and four by Christopher Marlowe: Dido Queen of Carthage, Tamburlaine Part One, Dr Faustus and Edward II. The work is thus partly a comparative study of two important Renaissance playwrights; it seeks to establish Peele in particular as an important figure in the history and evolution of the theatre. Verbal rhetoric is consistently linked to an analysis of the visual, so that the reader/viewer is encouraged to assess the plays holistically, as unif...

J. Henry Shorthouse, "The Author of John Inglesant"

(with reference to T. S. Eliot and C. G. Jung)

by Charles W. Spurgeon

2003

When J. Henry Shorthouse (1834-1903) published John Inglesant in 1881, he contributed a unique synthesis of Anglo-Catholic sensibilities to the enduring legacy of the Oxford Movement. Although his "philosophical romance" has been acclaimed "the greatest Anglo-Catholic novel in English literature" and "the one English novel that speaks immediately to human intuition without regard to the reader's own faith or philosophy", his most enduring contributions are the "religion of John Inglesant", an Anglo-Catholic synthesis of obedience and freedom, faith and reason, and the sacramental vision of "the myth of Little Gidding". The popular success of John Inglesant transformed the quiet, middle-class, Birmingham manufacturer into "the author of John Inglesant", apologi...

Fictionality and Reality in Narrative Discourse

A Reading of Four Contemporary Taiwanese Writers

by Li-fen Chen

1999

This dissertation is an attempt to define a Chinese "modernism," exemplified by the narrative practices of four major writers in Taiwan today, from the perspective of comparative literature and recent development of literary theory. I propose that modernity of Taiwanese fiction is not so much a result of Western influences as an evolution of Chinese narrative tradition itself. To argue my point I delineate a poetics of Chinese narrative, from which I devise a method of reading and a criterion of evaluation for contemporary Taiwanese fiction in defining its achievement and historical significance. This study of Taiwanese fiction also aims at providing a better understanding of fundamental aesthetic assumptions of Western "modernism" in the context of its own literary tradition. Chapter One...

Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Uncertainty in Dixie

by John P. Anderson

2003

A reader's guide to William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Master Players in a Fixed Game

An Extra-Literary History of Twentieth Century African-American Authors

by Ralph D. Story

2001

The literary expression of Afro-Americans has been scrutinized and criticized in exhaustive detail, yet historically perceived by many American and English literary scholars as qualitatively and quantitatively underdeveloped. This was the view held by many literary scholars until the late 1960s when Afro-American literary scholars and black students argued forcefully and convincingly in favor of the plays, short stories, poetry and novels written by Afro-Americans. Despite such noteworthy efforts, however, few scholars have investigated the uneven and sporadic appearance of publications, or the absence of publications, by black writers in any comprehensive fashion. Thus, the dissertation examines the various extra-literary problems faced by Afro-American writers which have contributed to e...

Cinematic Techniques in the Prose Fiction of Beatriz Guido

by Christine M. Gibson

2000

Has 20th century literary technique been influenced by the cinema? The obvious answer is yes. But with that answer few specific examples are ever provided, frustrating the reader and filmgoer alike. This study does give specifics drawn from the novels, short stories and screenplays of Argentine writer Beatriz Guido (1925-1988), wife of noted film director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson. Cinematic narrative techniques and literary narrative techniques share features in common, a mutual influence, but also important differences. Here these are examined in detail. Students and fans of film and Latin American literature will be intrigued.

Flaubert's Madame Bovary

The Zen Novel

by John P. Anderson

2004

This non-academic author has previously brought you reader’s guides to the depths and subtle pleasures of works by Joyce and Faulkner. With this book he brings you to the ultimate pleasures of Gustave Flaubert’s masterpiece. This author treats Madame Bovary as the Zen novel, working on the reader in the same way Zen works on a disciple. He shows how Flaubert uses a radically new style in order to create a literary breakthrough of a similar order as Zen and has composed the ultimate music of this novel in the counterpoint of style and plot. The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion and determinism. In the plot the inevitable demise of Madame Bovary is driven by her passionate nature and corresponding v...

El Signo Indiscreto de Finnegans Wake

by Ricardo Navarrete Franco

1997

The difference between "mass" and "mess," for example, says a lot about the distinctive capacity of phonemes and the alphabet, but very little about the many similarities in these two words. It follows that there is something not exactly alphabetical in language that is prompted by similarities like these. Even quotidian reading exhibits non-alphabetic ingredients, for instance when we skip spelling mistakes or typographical errors; i.e.: when we impose analogies over differences, hermeneutics over semiology, semasiography over the alphabet. Joyce, who once commented that "a few letters will do if you can't read a whole word," just incorporates another system of writing to his "cyclical history," very much in keeping with Vico's idea that each cycle has its ow...

Johnson's Quarrel with Swift

Johnson's Part in the Swiftian Tradition

by Jordan P. Richman

2010

Samuel Johnson included in his Lives of the Poets a "Life of Jonathan Swift." His friends, including his biographer, believed he had formed a prejudice against Swift's life and works. They were relieved to find that Johnson's biography of Swift was fair and judicious, indeed. This dissertation shows the parallels, as well as divergences, between the two writers in satire, political thought, and theological philosophy.

Joyce's Finnegans Wake

The Curse of Kabbalah Volume 4

by John P. Anderson

2011

This fourth in a series continues this non-academic author’s ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This volume covers all of chapters 1.7, 1.8 and 2.1 with the intent to explore them as art objects. In chapters 1.7 and 1.8 Aesthetics meets Theosophy meets Metaphysics. Together they share a common subject—how one part or whole treats another part. These two chapters move from shun to share, hurt to help, male to female. In aesthetics, from bad art to good art. In theosophy, from TZTZ god to ES god. In metaphysics a la Arthur Schopenhauer, from male to female aspects of Will. Featuring an all male cast, chapter 1.7 is a stinging criticism of Shem by Shaun—brother against brother. Chapter 1.7 is intentionally bad art. In aesthetic terms, the whole of the cha...

Thucydides and US Foreign Policy Debates after the Cold War

by John A. Bloxham

2011

This thesis examines the reception of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War in US foreign policy debates since the end of the Cold War. It begins with a background survey of Thucydides' use in foreign policy debates up to and during the Cold War, primarily by the realist school of international relations, and the comparisons which were drawn between the Cold War and the Peloponnesian War. After the Cold War, these comparisons became less relevant to current debates, and critics of realism began to use Thucydides to support their own theories. The emphasis is on how the three key movements since the Cold War, realism, liberal internationalism and neoconservatism, have each seen aspects in Thucydides' writing to admire and utilise for their theories, at the same time building competin...

Weeping Widows and Warrior Women

A Feminist Reading of Shakespeare's First Tetralogy

by Corey Lynn Hutchins

2011

Weeping Widows and Warrior Women will consider the plays of Shakespeare's first tetralogy, which includes 1, 2, 3 Henry VI and Richard III, through a feminist critical perspective. It will assess the female characters of these plays through their speech and actions rather than giving credence to external evaluations of them, whether from other characters or a perceived stance of the playwright. The goal throughout is to divorce previously seldom-studied characters from oppressive patriarchal interpretations of their actions in order to bring them in line with a feminist understanding of fully individuated women. This thesis will explore issues of sexuality, witchcraft, war-mongering, widowhood, mourning, and scolding through the characters of Joan la Pucelle, the Countess of Auvergne, E...

Rehabilitating Literary Theory

A Practical Guide for the Critical and Semiotic Analysis of Poetry and Drama

by Khaled Besbes

2011

The present work seeks to bring literary theory in line with the most recent practical turn the humanities are witnessing. When simplified, succinctly presented, and skillfully used in multi-coded interpretation within a semiocritical framework, literary theories become practical exercises in criticism, not only facilitating the interpretation of literature, but also making it more enjoyable and more rewarding. This book is different from its counterparts in the sense that it includes an exceptionally expanded model of the practice of literary theories, and replaces long and theoretical discussions with brief synopses of the examined theories. It relies on less-overused texts for illustration as it compiles and organizes the terms and phrases that are often used by the proponents of th...

Joyce's Finnegans Wake

The Curse of Kabbalah Volume 5

by John P. Anderson

2011

This fifth in a series continues this non-academic author's attempts to decode on a word-by-word basis all of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This volume covers chapter 2.2, generally considered the most difficult of chapters, with the intent to explore Joyce's novel as an art object. This difficult chapter takes us through the human psychosexual journey of the first 12 years. This journey, critical to the development of the full human spirit, is a pothole-ridden ride from infant dependency at the breast to breezy adolescent independence in puberty, from the stroller to the "hot rod." This Freud induced chapter flags the pot holes along the way and the flats they can cause. The goal of the journey is independence and new possibilities while the flats cancel the trip and the child stays at home. ...

A Thematic Approach to French Cultural Studies

Love, Sex and Desire in French Literature and Cinema

by Marie-Anne Visoi

2012

A Thematic Approach to French Cultural Studies: Love, Sex and Desire in French Literature and Cinema introduces a selection of major literary texts and film adaptations to students at the intermediate college and university level. The goal of this book is to provide a theme-based approach for teaching French Cultural Studies by enabling undergraduate students to contextualise and to think conceptually about French culture and its place in the Western culture and tradition. One of the most noteworthy aspects of this book is that it includes a collection of effective hands-on activities, multimedia resources and teaching suggestions which will stimulate students to develop their cultural and literary competency. The text-based method is designed to encourage close reading of three representa...

Joyce's Finnegans Wake

The Curse of Kabbalah Volume 6

by John P. Anderson

2012

This sixth in a series continues this non-academic author’s ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. This volume covers all of the long chapter 2.3 with the intent to explore its 80 pages as an art object. Coming off the last chapter about children, the role performed in the case of children by over-bearing parents is taken over by imperialistic forces in the case of adults. The imperialists consume weak adult spirits by telling them what to do. Anal-retentive children become passive/aggressive adults under the direction of imperialists. They are the “head liners” in this chapter. The spirit imperialists in this chapter range from the church allowing you to experience the joy of sexual intercourse only in the harness of the properly married state, to t...

James Hogg

The Founder of the Psychological Novel

by Corinne de Popow

2004

James Hogg, a Scottish writer, was the founder of the psychological novel. He perfectly understood the notions of dream and reality, the danger of the voyage in “Nancy Chilshom”, the world of the illusions, the lure, madness and strangeness towards the reality of the tragedy, the kingdom of the fairies, death, the finality of art, the supernatural, the Devil and sorcery in Scotland, the Scotland-England couple : the female nation and the male devastator, the carnival of the masks and the reality of his Masonic initiation at the end of his life.

Conrad's Lord Jim

Psychology of the Self

by John P. Anderson

2005

This non-academic author explores Conrad’s classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad’s character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named the Patna, he is judged by a court of inquiry and humiliated. Pathologically subject to shame because of the lack of any secure self, the dependent Jim attempts to hide by moving from port to port and...

An Exploration of a New Poetic Expression beyond Dichotomy

An Analytical Approach to the Meta-poetic Features of the Poems of D.H.Lawrence

by Shin'ichiro Ishikawa

2005

This study attempts to re-evaluate Lawrence's poetry, which has often been read as a set of biographical documents or supplementary notes to his novels, as fully independent literary work in the light of post-modern critical theory.

The author carefully examines how Lawrence needed to misread his precursors, the nineteenth-century Romantics, to establish himself as one of the modern poets. What separates his poetry from his precursors' is his self-consciousness as a modern poet. His search for radical freedom in language and his meta-poetic exploration of a new poetic expression make him a true pioneer of the "terra incognita" in English poetry.

Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Rebirth of Tragedy

by John P. Anderson

2005

This is a reader’s guide to Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness as art, not as a page-turner but as art. As he has done with other works of Conrad, Anderson traces Conrad’s art in a line-by-line analysis of most of this short novel.Anderson traces the unifying theme of the novel to Nietzsche’s ideas in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche interpreted ancient Greek tragedy as a reflection of Dionysian and Apollinian life experiencesof the Greek audience. Apollo was a Greek god of the higher orders of civilization and the civilized restraint and control that is necessary for getting along with others. Dionysus, on the other hand, was agod of nature and fertility and is associated with unrestrained, orgiastic worship.This author shows how Conrad used the contrast between the A...

Colonial and Postcolonial Rewritings of "Heart of Darkness"

A Century of Dialogue with Joseph Conrad

by Regelind Farn

2005

Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899) is taught and read all over the world. Everywhere, novelists and travel writers respond to it in their own creative work. I discuss 30 responses, or rewritings, from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the US. Their perspectives include those of groups who identify with Conrad's Europeans and groups who feel close to his Africans, and increasingly those of groups who situate themselves between these two extremes in various ways. I identify world-wide developments as well as themes, strategies and paradigm shifts that correlate with different geopolitical situations. Rewriters address the contribution Conrad has made to the identities of his very different readers, and the patterns he has suggested for encounters. ...

Those Uneasy Currents

Elements of Menace and Terror in Selected Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen

by Ann W. Perce

2006

The elements of menace and terror are crucial aspects of Elizabeth Bowen's pervasive theme of betrayal in her investigation of human relationships. Bowen introduces menace into the familiar and predictable environment of her characters and threatens their sense of security and safety.

Mann's Doctor Faustus

Gestapo Music

by John P. Anderson

2007

This is a reader’s guide to Mann’s classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century—how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized “land of music,” the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? The noble purposes of this novel are to understand the nature and sources of Nazi evil and to help ban it from the ring in the future. As you will note, Mann’s explanation is relevant for events in Iraq in 2007. Mann gives a new answer to this question—the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, “serial” music composed without freedom but with strict controls. Founded on repetition, this n...

Synthesizing Systems

The Work of Art and Science in the Fiction of Richard Powers

by Anna Darden Copeland

2007

The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce a general reading audience to the major themes found in the fiction of Richard Powers with an emphasis on his use of science. For Powers, science is something more than the accumulation of technical data and the proliferation of theories developed to explain physical phenomena. It is an evolving body of knowledge which has important insights to contribute into the conditions which ground human experience The close and often detailed discussions of contemporary issues in science which Powers incorporates into his fiction indicate the extent to which he sees science as an inseparable component in any attempt to understand the complexities of human experience. The common ground Powers uses to link the interests of science and those of fiction ...

Hawthorne's The Marble Faun

A Re-appraisal

by Richard Mezo

1999

Since its publication in 1860, critics have questioned the artistic value of Hawthorne's The Marble Faun. A revival of critical interest during the 1950's and 1960's has done little to change a generally unfavorable opinion of the work. With a few notable exceptions, most recent critics believe The Marble Faun to be inferior to Hawthorne's other completed romances. Such opinions, however, usually seem to be based upon the personal taste of the individual critic rather than upon any sort of objective artistic standards. The purpose of this study is to examine and evaluate the various critical approaches to The Marble Faun. These interpretations provide the basis for a re-appraisal of the work. A study of the structure, the main themes, and the characters of The Marble Faun reveals tha...

The Dowdy King

An Alternative Translation of 'Tao Te Ching', Lao Zi's Taoist Classic

by Clifford Borg-Marks

2004

A pleasing translation into rhyming English verse of the primary classic text of Taoist philosophy and religion. It provides a Taoist view of the universe and society that is accessible by non-specialists of all ages.

The Authenticity of the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares and Its Interpretation

by Ramesh Khatry

2000

This thesis seeks to demonstrate the authenticity (as dominical teaching) of the parable of the darnel (Mt 13:24-30) and its interpretation (Mt 13:36-43). The interpretation in particular is almost universally regarded as non-dominical, notably by J Jeremias and his followers. My thesis argues that the whole of Mt 13:36-43 (and Mt 13:24-30) should be seen as dominical. The 'introduction' gives a brief survey of parabolic studies, and outlines the case against the authenticity of Mt 13:24-30,36-43. Chapter AI defends the authenticity of the parable (Mt 13:24-30). The following chapters do the same for the interpretation (Mt 13:36-43), looking at the 'Son of Man' and related teaching (chapter BI), the 'kingdom of God' (BII), 'righteousness' and 'lawlessness' (BIII), and other motifs (BI...