Aesthetic Stance Research Articles

EFL students’ responses towards Rosen’s ‘Sad Book’: An attitudinal occurrence and aesthetic stance

The vocabulary choice and language used in expressing sadness vary in different cultures, even in the smallest scale of cultural group, i.e., family. There have not been many studies done to explore Indonesian EFL students’ word choices and expressions related to expressing sadness and empathy. The purpose of this study was to explore how the 11 EFL second-year university students in Basic Reading and Writing class expressed sadness as written in their personal reflective writings. The data was analyzed using mixed methods to obtain valid and reliable results. These second-year university students were assigned to read a picture book, ‘Sad Book’, or to watch and listen to the video version as a part of an activity in class. Their reflective writings were analyzed using content analysis to identify the corpus used by the students and using the appraisal framework to capture the variety of their attitudinal linguistic occurrence in expressing sadness and empathy. The findings illustrate that the highest attitudinal marker in expressing sadness is ‘affect’, followed by ‘judgment’ and ‘appreciation’. The use of the picture book, ‘Sad Book’, assists the EFL students to be more engaged in their reflective writing and thus the highest marker of ‘affect’ exists due to their ability to project their aesthetic stance. Implications for English language learning for adult learners are addressed at the end of this article.

Проблема художника в «итальянской прозе» А. Н. Майкова («Пикник во Флоренции») и в романе И. А. Гончарова «Обрыв»

The Maykov literary and artistic salon played a significant role in shaping the aesthetics of Ivan Goncharov, with some members sharing the writer’s creative attitudes towards the contemporary historical and literary process. One of the influential figures was Apollon Maykov. During the 1840s, a time when Russian literature was at an “aesthetic crossroads,” the poet travelled to Italy. His stay in this country resulted in the essay “Picnic in Florence” (1848) where the poet, art critic, and former artist, addresses important problems of verbal and visual art. At the same time, Ivan Goncharov, Maykov’s teacher and a close friend of his family, begins to write a novel “The Artist” (“The Precipice” 1869). In their critical works on painting, both Goncharov and Maykov discussed the two fundamental schools of Italian and Flemish art, which together create a comprehensive depiction of life and embody a holistic approach to art. The main characters in Goncharov’s and Maykov’s texts are remarkably alike, characterized by their innate talent for transforming reality into poetic visual representations. The proximity of Goncharov’s Raisky to Maykov’s Gorunin and Tarneev images highlights their shared commitment to the fundamental principles of modern art: a meticulous portrayal of everyday existence and a celebration of the beauty inherent in the ordinary. These postulates allowed Goncharov and Maykov to achieve a creative synthesis of the “high” and the “every-day,” a central aspect of their aesthetic stance.

Motion&Emotion: Moving Bodies, Touring Subjects

The paper explores the concept of ‘radical mobility’ as the historical result of accumulated diasporas in modern and post-modern culture, and as the distinctive lifestyle pattern of today’s transversal communities, both real and imagina-tive, that dwell along the paths designed by old and new glo-balisation. In this view, places and subjects imply a rethinking of the tropes of travel and tourism, whereby places resist the simplistic ‘non’ imagined by Marc Augé, though suffering the grip of consumption detected by Urry. The paper analyses the concept of ‘touring subjects’, i.e., regular movers that revive “nomadic” attitudes (Braidotti) and are attached to “tempo-rary identities” (Augé), entangled in constant but unpredicta-ble desires of consumption (Appadurai). Not yet totally nulli-fied in their ability to make sense, react, produce emotion and agency, ‘touring’ figures and voices are widely represented in literature and in the media, and can be found at the cross-roads of many crucial cultural and aesthetic stances, as well as in topical situations not devoid of moments of serious cri-sis, dramatic choices and even tragic events. Associated to authorial narrative figures caught up and lost in the puzzle of their multiperspective narrations, these subjects face para-doxical, unprecedented conditions in their being strongly ex-posed to multicultural, hyperreal complexities that go far be-yond the common post-modern rethorics, whose social and political potentiality is still to be imagined and acknowledged.

The Romantic Style of P. B. Shelley s Poetry

Shelley s poetry is rich and varied, harmonious in tone, delicate in feeling and expansive in artistic conception, which pushed the British romantic poetry to the peak. Shelley had a very high talent, received a good education since childhood, coupled with diligent thinking, and has twists and turns of life experience, so his works all reflect the pursuit of the truth of the strong philosophical mood. This article mainly focuses on two of Shelley s poems to analyze the romantic style of his poems from the image and theme. Shelley, as a political poet and lyric poet, expressed his poetic aesthetics very clearly. He endowed poets with a lofty mission, believing that they shoulder the dual mission of social revolution and artistic innovation. Of course, Shelley believes that this dual mission is realized in the poet s creative artistic imagination. Therefore, in Shelley s view, the real imaginary expression of poetry should have a spiritual inspiration and aesthetic influence. It can be said that Shelley s poetry aesthetics not only clearly reflects the characteristics of his changing era, but also illustrates his romantic aesthetic stance. Shelley s aesthetic thoughts of poetry are enlightening for people to better appreciate and understand his poems.

Reader Response Journals in The Analysis of Literary Works among Undergraduate Students

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of reader response journals in the analysis of literary works among Malaysian TESL undergraduate students. The study employs mixed method approach and addresses a research question, ‘What are Malaysian TESL undergraduate students’ perceptions on the use of reader response journals in the analysis of literary works?’ Six students of moderate competency in the English language were selected for an interview session to investigate participants’ perceptions of the reader response journals in poem analysis. Interview data were analysed by using thematic analysis in identifying the emerging themes. The findings revealed an increase in aesthetic stance in students’ literary analysis. Besides, students shared that their analyses were more critical with the help of reader response journals. This study proposes an alternative method and strategy to learn literature aesthetically.

Reflection of Aesthetic in the Idea of Saint Aurelius Augustinus

In this study, Saint Aurelius Augustinus’ philosophical point of view and his understanding of art and his thinking are discussed. The aesthetic stance, aesthetic ideas and views in his mind were revealed. St. Augustinus, synthesizing Ancient Greece and Christianity in a Neoplatonic understanding, argues that the source of all knowledge is “God”. According to him, philosophy is an opportunity to find oneself as an activity of self-knowledge. Because, man approaches “God” and tries to discover “God’s source of knowledge with philosophy. For this reason, art is together with thought, and thoughts are together with art.In St. Augustinus’ philosophical understanding, as man imitates “God”, he acquires the knowledge of beautiful, good, pleasant, happiness, love, etc., concepts. In this context, it uses aesthetic elements to acquire spiritual satisfaction. St. Augustinus’ aim is to reach perfection based on the movement from the part to the whole in order to achieve the ideal form. In addition, according to him, if unity and integrity are provided, beauty manifests itself. Beauty is not a temporary thing. According to him, harmony, order, measure, unity, equality and integrity are the basic principles of beauty, and absolute beauty is what manifests itself in these principles.

The Aesthetic and Ethical Consideration of Dance Education

This article examines the aesthetic stance choreographic educators should take when teaching students how to choreograph and engage in dance work. In the field of philosophical aesthetics, there has always been a heated debate about the importance of aesthetic and moral values in evaluating art. Four camps are involved in this debate. This article investigates the negative and positive implications of the philosophical and choreographic educational implications of three camps: aestheticism, moderate autonomy, and ethicism. However, since educators must consider the compatibility of aesthetics and ethics, the interplay of aesthetic and ethical values held by moderate moralism is an appropriate position for dance educators to take when coaching students.

L. S. Vygotsky on theater: from theatrical critique to the Psychology of the actor

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the various appearances of theater in the writings of L. S. Vygotsky. Starting with an overview of his early and still little explored production of theatrical criticism, we observe how theater gradually entered the field of psychology and came to be analyzed as a psychological problem. The analysis of this topic reveals an important shift in Vygotskian thought, i.e., a turn from objective to concrete psychology. With respect to Vygotsky’s aesthetic stance, the paper provides a commentary about the relations between art and society, an underlying topic for the cultural-historical perspective.

ПРЕДБИОГРАФИЧЕСКОЕ ЛИЦО РОК-ПОЭТА В ФОКУСЕ ИНТЕРНЕТ-ДИСКУРСА(статья вторая)

On the example of the Internet-discourse dealing with understanding the life and creativity of Konstantin Stupin, the problems associated with formation and approval of the prebiographical image of the Russian rock-poet in the reader’s environment are revealed. Media decoding of different aspects of private life is studied from the standpoint of the confrontation of cultures, moral and aesthetic stances of different recipient groups. The points of contact between the biographed and the biographer as the central subjects of biography are considered. A range of issues is determined, the solution of which is necessary for further theoretical and methodological study of the structure and content of the prebiography and biography of the rock-poet in the context of creative memory of culture.

Place, rôle et représentation de l’animal dans le roman Sans l’orang-outan (2007) d’Éric Chevillard

Animals occupy a central place in Chevillard’s oeuvre Sans l’orang-outan deals with animals’ place, roles, representations and relationships with humans. The novel depicts a chaotic and apocalyptic world, foreground as it does the disappearance of the last orangutans caused by the arrogant and insolent actions of people. Two aspects characterize Chevillard’s writing: the seriousness of the theme and the irony in its representation. The paper analyzes the numerous dimensions of the novel’s involvement in environmental problems through the reflection on the circumstance of animals. It also discusses the eschatological aspects of the environmental crisis. It is demonstrated that for Chevillard the question of biodiversity is also a question of aesthetics and imagination. The article also looks to show that the aim of adopting ethical and aesthetic stances is to encourage the reader to opt for responsible and life-preserving attitudes towards Earth’s ecosystem; and the raising ecological awareness as such.

Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination, by W. Anthony Sheppard

<i>Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination</i>, by W. Anthony Sheppard

Meaning-Making in Literature: Unlocking Stances and Perspectives of ESL Readers

Meaning-making in reading literary texts is a process that is widely theorised, applied in instructions, and observed through research. While recognitions have been given to the value of literature for different purposes, trends in educational policies for literature in different curricula do not secure a clear and systematic way of how meaning-making should be explored. Research into meaning-making demonstrates the need to examine the process as this remains to be understudied. This study observed the meaning-making process through the stances and perspectives adopted among a group of ESL readers when meaning was made in reading a literary text. This case study employed Concurrent Verbal protocol for data collection. 31 participants, majoring in Teaching English as a Second language (TESL) were selected for the study. Qualitative data from the verbal protocol sessions were quantified using a pre-established set of 24 themes derived from the theoretical framework of the study. The themes were based on the Efferent, Aesthetic, and Critical stances and also the public and private perspectives of the Text, Reader, Universal Values, and Writer. The findings indicate that the Critical is favoured over the Efferent and Aesthetic stances. Public Textual Perspectives were also preferred over the Private Textual, Reader, Universal, and Writer’s perspectives. The implication of examining the meaning-making process from multiple perspectives would nurture learning aptitudes and encourage personal connection and engagement to literature. Future research should consider expanding the investigation into the meaning-making process on other categories of readers as well as literary genres.

Allusion in the Composition of Contemporary Opera

Abstract In memoriamContemporary opera exhibits a wide range of motivations for and approaches to making musical allusions to the past, more so than in any other period in the genre's history. I find, contrary to common definitions of musical postmodernism, that allusions are typically meaningful and symbolic in recent postmodern operas. I briefly consider musical collage in operas that represent a proverbial ‘postmodern’ approach to the past, with operas by Cage and Corigliano serving as extreme cases. The core sections of the article are devoted to three of the most prominent contemporary composers whose operas illustrate the range of forms and motives musical allusion has taken over the past few decades: John Adams's Nixon in China (1987), Louis Andriessen's ‘film opera’ La Commedia (2008) and The Exterminating Angel (2016) by Thomas Adès. By detailing musical allusion in these works, I offer evidence in support of a revisionary understanding of these operas and the aesthetic stances of these composers, who each engaged extensively in musical allusion to varying degrees. I conclude with rather unexpected examples of operatic allusion by composers (Glass, Nova, Mazzoli) who typically do not reference the past in their works. For numerous recent composers, opera appears to function as a particularly powerful magnetic attraction to the past, pulling into its orbit the most unlikely figures and warping their proclaimed aesthetic profiles. For opera audiences, allusion is experienced differentially and shapes popular perceptions of the genre as a whole.

Upprepningar och glada utrop – pedagogers och barns agenda under tre bokstunder i språkbad

Denna artikel undersöker pedagogers och barns agenda under tre bokstunder med högläsning av bilderböcker i en språkbads-förskolegrupp. Samtliga barn har en finskspråkig bakgrund och lär sig svenska i förskolan. Analyser av de videofilmade bokstunderna har gjorts med en sociokulturell och diskursanalytisk infallsvinkel. Resultaten visar att pedagogerna fokuserar på barnens språkförståelse och språkutveckling, medan barnen på eget initiativ och genom estetiska förhållningssätt riktar sin uppmärksamhet mot den egna upplevelsen av bokens innehåll. Barnens handlingar visar också att det är centralt för dem att uppfylla vissa förväntningar på hur bokstunder ska gå till. De bidrar därmed till att upprätthålla bokstunden på ett bestämt sätt. Pedagogernas koncentration på språk kan ses som naturlig eftersom språkstödjande handlingar främjar barnens förståelse av boken. Däremot får barnen knapphändigt stöd för sin läslust och få utmaningar när det gäller att utgående från sina egna tankar, föreställningar eller tolkningar förhålla sig till bokens innehåll.

The Translation of Life: Thinking of Painting in Indian Buddhist Literature

What are paintings? Is there a distinctive mode of experience paintings enable? What is the value of such experience? This essay explores such questions, confining attention for the most part to a few distinctive moments in Indian Buddhist texts. In particular, I focus on invocations of painting in figures of speech, particularly when paintings are invoked to make sense of events or experiences of particular importance. The aim is not to be exhaustive, but to suggest a meta-poetic orientation: On the basis of moments where authors think with figurations of painting, I want to suggest that in Buddhist texts one begins to find a growing regard for the possibilities of re-ordering and transvaluing sense experience. After suggesting the possibility of this on the basis of a preliminary consideration of some figures of speech invoking painting, this essay turns to the reconstruction of what I call aesthetic stances to make sense of the idea of new possibilities in sense experience. I derive the concept of “aesthetic stances” on the basis of a close reading of a pivotal moment in one Buddhist narrative, the defeat of Māra in The Legend of Aśoka.

Tarrying with the elephant: Queer villainy and aesthetic pleasure in Steven Klein’s photography

Through a close reference to Steven Klein’s photo spread ‘John Robinson’ for L’Uomo Vogue in 2003, this article tracks the appearance of the fictional character of the queer villain in fashion editorial photography. It discusses specifically how the register of ‘affectlessness’ is embodied and aesthetically performed by the queer villain. Affectlessness is contextualized within the repertoire of neutral affects that were circulated in fashion photography in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an aesthetic stance that counteracted the normative depictions of ‘happy feelings’ in commercial imagery as well as normative styles of masculinity. Affective states of sadness, alienation and neutrality were enacted beginning in the 1990s primarily by androgynous and sexually ambivalent figures: the stylized representation of such states signalled a challenge to binary ways of embodying and performing masculinity and femininity. After a critical reading of ‘John Robinson’, the article concludes by tracing a speculative trajectory for thinking about aesthetic pleasure in relation to queer amoral characters in fashion visual narratives.

Ganymede's Heavenly Descent

ABSTRACTSchubert's song Ganymed has attracted a great deal of interest from analysts on account of its progressive tonal plan, which is often seen as a challenge to Schenkerian theories of tonal structure, as well as its evocative text. This article draws upon a spatial theory of tonal meaning which helps both to resolve the epistemological impasse faced by reductive theories of tonal structure and to better access Schubert's interpretation of Goethe's text through spatial metaphors that derive from the harmony of the song. It also highlights an allusion to Beethoven's ‘Waldstein’ Sonata in the song, which has previously gone unremarked, and identifies this as part of a network of references to Beethoven's Sonata that act both as homage to and critique of his middle‐period style. These serve as a window both into the song and into Schubert's aesthetic stance vis‐à‐vis his musical forebear. It realises latent directional metaphors in the diatonic sharp‐flat and triadic dominant‐subdominant dimensions, which are of hermeneutic value for tonal music. Such a theory helps us interpret Schubert's tonal plan, explain his choices of keys and better understand his reading of Goethe's text and his aesthetic priorities in setting it to music.

Historisierung des Diskurses und Potenzierung ästhetischer Erfahrungen in der Literatur der (Post-)Moderne

AbstractThe paper is based on the assumption that modern art centralises aesthetic experience in a specific way, why it as well be may regarded – in contrast to the rather forced interpretation of art already opposed by Susan Sontag (Sontag 2001, 10) – as an appropriate mode for encountering art. However, the theoretical discourse on aesthetic experience is characterised by opposite poles, which will be examined in the first part of this paper. On the one hand, there is the utopian conception around 1800, in which the reflection on aesthetic experience originally is rooted, in Friedrich Schiller’sOn the Aesthetic Education of Man(cf. Noetzel 2006, 198) or Friedrich Schlegel’s imaginations of a life in art inLucinde(cf. Dziudzia 2015, 38sqq.). On the other hand, the reflections in the German discourse at the beginning of the 20th century are marked in a conspicuously negative way, which can still be seen until the 1980s.In the theoretical first part of the essay, a few cursory positions on the ›problem of the aesthetic human being‹ will be considered initially, which reject aesthetic views in everyday life and evaluate such tendencies as forms of social decay. Concerned about morality on the surface, these positions indeed aim at criticising individual lifestyles in a modern world, which, in particular, are opposed to conservative and collectivist ideas of society and morality. These discourse positions, which are ultimately ideologically grounded, then lead to the deliberate reflections on aesthetic experience, as they unfold most notably from the 1970s onwards, where they form the implicit background.As will be shown, the explicitly negative evaluation expressed in the earlier positions then shapes the assessments of aesthetic experience of Hans-Robert Jauß (cf. Jauß 2007), Peter Bürger (cf. Bürger 1977) and Rüdiger Bubner (cf. Bubner 1989) as a fundamental, rather implicit scepticism. For the most part, their positions seem to make it impossible to think of the aesthetic experience as enrichment or to evaluate it positively, as is common in the US-American discourse, for instance.The latter stance, which is, in essence, initiated by John Dewey and his consciously non-strict separation between art and everyday life as well as his decidedly anti-elitist understanding of art and aesthetics, is more in keeping with the utopian concepts of around 1800. However, his writings only find late distribution in Germany (cf. Dewey 1980). In contrast to Dewey’s position – and Susan Sontag’s explicit rejection of the interpretation as a violent act and the omittance of the sensual experience of the artwork (Sontag 2001) – the critical condemnation of aesthetic experience, which ultimately remains unfounded in the German discourse (because of its implicit ideological origin), now appears challenged.In fact, attentive observation in an aesthetic stance becomes part of the aesthetic programme in modern art across the board (cf. Dziudzia 2015b). Bürger reflects on this and offers – especially in the examination of Marcel ProustIn Search of Lost Time – a productive proposal to grasp the ›aestheticizing perception‹ (as he calls it) as a literary technique. In his conception, Bürger refers to media as a specific ›projection area‹ of aesthetic experience, especially in literature around 1900. The ›imaginary fadings‹ (cf. Schmitz-Emans 2001) in modern literature are, following Bürger, to be further thought of as ›exponentiated‹ aesthetic experiences, which find their form not only around 1900 but also in more recent literature.Therefore, in the second part of the paper and the exemplary reading of a contemporary German novel, Martin MosebachsDer Mond und das Mädchen(The Moon and the Maiden), published in 2007, it is to be shown how aesthetic experience finds complex forms. In the specific shaping of imaginary fadings in the interplay of figure and narrator level, especially in recourse to the medium film to be observed therein, the ambivalence of the theoretical concept of aesthetic experience insinuates as will be argued.

Six Ways to Stand with the Work of Visual Art in the Age of Instagrammatical Reproduction: Tanaka Tatsuya and the Beautiful Plenitude of the Reimagination

Six Ways to Stand with the Work of Visual Art in the Age of Instagrammatical Reproduction:Tanaka Tatsuya and the Beautiful Plenitude of the Reimagination Will Bridges (bio) I. THE FOUNTAIN RIGHT-SIDE UP Eight alpinists make their way up what is, for the time being, a gentle slope. Their boots press tranquil, ovular imprints into the snow, tiny testaments to the tractability of their trek thus far. The expedition has been so biddable for our eight, in fact, that they have managed to synchronize their steps, leaving a single set of footprints as the only bit [End Page 667] of proof of the octet's momentary existence in this landscape. That is, until their transient footprints melt and fade away. I don't mean to say that they haven't seen any hardships along the way. Two of our mountaineers—let's call them "Three" and "Six"—are clearly well on their way to hypoxia. But I do mean to say that they ain't seen nothing yet. Their guide points them toward the summit on the horizon. They do not know what is on the other side of the horizon. But we do. We know that just beyond the snow-sprinkled conifers there waits (best-case scenario) a 90-degree vertical climb up a solid wall of ice or (worst-case scenario) a 270-degree plunge to the depths below. We know this because we know this terrain better than anyone. Of course we do. We go, on good days, at least three to five times a day. So of course we know what waits on the other side of a Toto toilet. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Tanaka Tatsuya, Mt. Toilet (2018). Image courtesy of the artist. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Tanaka Tatsuya, Mt. Toilet (2018). Image courtesy of the artist. There are (at least) six ways to stand with this work of visual art in our age of Instagrammatical reproduction. (I mean "work" here in the sense of the object or phenomenon that captivates our artistic attention, but I mean it more in the sense of the labor of those objects and phenomena, the force they send cascading throughout the world—how they get to work, moving us and things around.) If we are going to continue our travels with our eight alpinists and their creator, Tanaka Tatsuya (1981–), however, then we will first have to disabuse some of [End Page 668] our friends of one of the six ways. For this abusive stance tells us that the way to stand with the work of visual art is to see ourselves and our time as greater than the work, to imagine ourselves as the CFO of a company of one, standing over and looking down on the alpinists. The logical scaffolding of this stance is commonsensical. In an age of Instagrammatical exchange, high-speed supercomputers let flash boys make millions in milliseconds on the stock market. So someone is bound to think that their time and presence is bigger than Tanaka's microcosmic, paracosmic play with figurines, to think that, when you go to the toilet, you just need to take care of business. And so of course these someones take a jaundiced view of the work of art, sending Tanaka's toy mountaineers cascading down in an avalanche of hurry as they rush past and belittle his miniatures—as one president once put it: "I promise you, folks can make a lot more … with … the trades than they might with an art history degree."1 The playscape of Tanaka's Mt. Toilet—the commode—almost seems to make the commonsensical case for looking down on the work of art against itself: who, Tanaka seems to imply alongside Piero Manzoni, wouldn't look down on this child's play given the bigger fish we have to fry? Thierry de Duve proposes that Duchamp's urinal marks a shift in our view of our relation to the work of art from the classical Kantian aesthetic stance—this is beautiful—to the modern aesthetic stance—this is art. A natural byproduct of this modern stance is the assertion that...

The Unthinkable: Writing about the death of children

reviews 174 or many years—a generation, almost—I refused to read books in which children died. This was less an aesthetic stance than a survival strategy. Or no, not a strategy: that seems far too conscious. I was operating on more instinctive terms. My catalyst was the weightlessness I felt upon becoming a parent, a state for which I was (how could it be otherwise?) entirely unprepared. I had imagined family as the safest of harbors; it was the expected, the conventional choice. From the outside it appeared if not orderly than at least trackable, a series of quantifiable movements, bound by the rigidity of scheduling: feedings, naptime, baths, and bed. idea in review The Unthinkable Writing about the death of children David L. Ulin F The Unthinkable | 175 Then my wife got pregnant with our first child, and the illusion, projective as it was, began to grow increasingly complex. First there was the specter of my own upbringing, the polarities, the brittleness I did not wish to re-­ create. “I fear,” I wrote in a journal entry a few weeks before our son was born, “that I’ll become the fragile, alienated parent I rebelled against.” After the baby arrived, I discovered more encompassing concerns. Such as: How do you protect a small, dependent creature? How do you teach him to protect himself? Have a second child and the stakes grow expo­ nentially. “Please, please, let me keep them,” Marion Winik writes in The Lunch-­ Box Chronicle: Notes from the Parenting Underground, recalling the horror of losing, temporarily, her young sons in a market. I offer a version of this prayer every day. What Winik is addressing is the unspoken subtext at the heart of parenting: What if my children disappear? That she doesn’t quite put that fear into language only illustrates the depth of the conundrum. How do we reckon with a terror we are hesitant even to name? I don’t want to make the argument that discussing the death of a child is taboo, exactly; throughout human history, dead offspring have been an unavoidable currency of life. In Elizabethan England, as an example, 60 percent of children died before they turned sixteen. All the same, we no longer live in the sixteenth cen­ tury, and in any case, such percentages have nothing to do with grief. Much like love, sorrow remains a private matter, a condition we have no choice but to face on its own terms. “It occurs to me,” Marisa Silver writes, “that a child is something that gets stolen bit by bit. A two-­ year-­ old dissolves into a five-­ year-­ old, and no pic­ ture can adequately bring back the feel of him, the sound of his voice, and all the intangible qualities that made him himself at that moment. A ten-­ year-­ old becomes fifteen, then seventeen. Then he slips out of your life altogether.” Even in the best of circumstances, in other words, we raise our children so they can move on. Here we see one reason I avoided works involving dead or dying children: perhaps by refusing to acknowledge such a possibility, I might also deflect the small daily erasures of parenthood, of family—or hold 176 | David L. Ulin them in their place. Please, please, let me keep them: for me, these are the emotional stakes of raising kids. As to why this is, in part it is my weakness. In part it is the certainty that I would be incapacitated by the claustrophobia of grief. “My brain burns,” Naja Marie Aidt mourns in When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back; “it cannot get these extreme opposites to fit together; it cannot get this information to form a sequence, one story, the story we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.” The author is referring to the death of her son Carl Emil, who jumped from a fifth-­ story window while high on psilo­ cybin; he was twenty-­ five. My son—the child I was once so wor­ ried I might alienate—is also twenty-­ five now, and when he was nineteen and twenty and twenty-­ one and twenty-­ two...