Familiar World Research Articles

Bluebeard's Egg and Other Stories

In this acclaimed collection of twelve stories, Margaret Atwood probes the territory of childhood memories and the casual cruelty men and women inflict upon each other and themselves. She looks behind the familiar world of family summers at remote lakes, ordinary lives, and unexpected loves, and she unearths profound truths. A melancholy, teenage love is swept away by a Canadian hurricane, while a tired, middle-aged affection is rekindled by the spectacle of rare Jamaican birds; a potter tries to come to terms with the group of poets who so smother her that she is driven into the arms of her accountant; and, in the title story, the Bluebeard legend is retold as an ironic tale of marital deception. Stark and scathing at times, humorous and compassionate at others, Bluebeard's Egg confirms once again Atwood's reputation as the pre-eminent chronicler of our times.

Strangers and Strangeness

Strangers and Strangeness

"There Was an Old Man . . .": The Sense of Nonsense Verse

"There Was an Old Man . . .":The Sense of Nonsense Verse Joyce Thomas Quite literally, nonsense verse does not make sense; and in that way, it is different from any verse that does retain a heavy dose of recognizable sense. Even Edward Lear, that master of nonsense, was not writing true nonsense when he penned, There was an Old Man with a beard, Who said, "It is just as I feared!—Two Owls and a Hen, four Larks and a Wren, Have all built their nests in my beard!" Granted, the Old Man's predicament is absurd, but, like the word "nonsense" itself, its base is squarely situated in sense: we recognize that full, bushy growth of beard; we recognize those eight, named, real birds. Logic, which is the diametric pole of true nonsense, works to extend that base by means of exaggeration. The busy beard become an actual bush that houses nesting fowl. It is absurd, it is incredible, it is hirsute hyperbole; but it still makes sense. Had Lear placed the birds on the Old Man's tonsils or had he substituted for them nesting tangerines and chamber pots, his limerick might more aptly be tagged nonsense. Pure nonsense rejects sense. As much as is possible in this ultimately impossible enterprise, it nullifies sense. As the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics suggests, the raison d'etre of pure nonsense is to create a completely different world, rather than merely distort or invert the familiar world. Inversion, distortion, exaggeration more properly belong to the sphere of the fantastic; in themselves they constitute logical processes, one dependent upon a recognition of what is "normal." In part, we appreciate and take pleasure in any nonsense construct (whether "pure" or quasi-nonsense) because we apprehend the normal and also apprehend the logical processes used to alter it to something momentarily abnormal, The moment of experienced nonsense is most often precisely that—a moment, a flickering, fluttering instant of disorientation during which the unfamiliar, the confusing, the chaotic reign. But almost as soon as that moment is sparked, it vanishes, for our rational minds immediately set about recasting nonsense back into sense. It is as if reason exerted a gravitational pull on nonsense's light verse, always seeking to draw it down and back to sense's solid earth, Thus, by virtue ofthat rational process it elicits in us, virtually all nonsense verse "makes" sense if we can succeed in returning to our known, apparently sensible world. Here, the sense in nonsense is already multiplied, for it exists not only in that return to the sensible, but also in our sensing (perceiving) the sense (logic) involved in the departure from the sensible; and, of course, we sense (appreciate) those creative machinations that have effected that departure. In contrast, the Princeton Encyclopedia suggests that the world of pure nonsense operates "according to its own laws and into which sane people can never really penetrate." It is nonsense when viewed from our "sane" world, and operates within its crazy-quilt boundaries on the basis of altogether different logic. If, as Robert Frost avowed, poetry is "a momentar stay against confusion," then pure nonsense dissolves that stay, and dives into confusion for its own sweet, swirling sake. It may even create its own language to help us break free of the sense inherent in our known language and grammar. Which brings us to the crux of the problem posed by allegedly pure nonsense: our minds and tongues are so grounded in our own language that it would seem impossible to ever free ourselves of it, impossible to ever create pure nonsense. Even "Jabberwocky," the most famous nonsense poem in the English language, is deeply rooted in sense. As John Ciardi notes, the entire poem satirizes common motifs of the folk ballad: motifs like the first stanza's "opening contest of dark forces" and overall depiction of a tested, triumphant hero (705). Lewis Carroll's actual nonsense lies in the nonsense words he creates, words like "brillig" and "toves." Yet even here that gravitational pull toward sense exerts itself. Any ten-year-old child with a background in our language, its grammar and punctuation, can decipher the...

From the Familiar to The Unfamiliar: Arumanian Contribution to European Fantasy

THEREappears to be no generally-agreed definition of fantasy, but one of the essential criteria to which a would-be fantastic tale must conform is surely that of having its starting-point in the familiar world, so that the reader is led gently into an unfamiliar world, without ceasing to believe in the plausibility of the tale. The best description of the process remains Hoffmann's, in Die Serapionsbriider:

Roving Across Fields: A Conversation and Uncollected Poems, 1942–1982 by William Stafford, and: Smoke’s Way: Poems from Limited Editions 1968–1981 by William Stafford

Reviews 319 The nineteen essays by prominent authors, scholars, and critics are divided into six categories: The Old Guard, an assessment of the Dobie/ Webb/Bedichek triumvirate;The Old Order, an investigation of the Southern heritage; The Vanishing Frontier; The Texas-Mexican Perspective; The Texas Mystique; and The Sixties and Beyond. Although Larry McMurtry’s name is a leitmotif throughout the volume, a transcript of the panel in which he participated is not included. The book does not suffer from the omission. A related publication is William II. Goetzmann, Texas Images and Visions (Austin: Archer M. Huntington Art Gallery of the University of Texas, 1983), the catalog of “a notable exhibit of paintings and sketches, by the famous and the obscure, that attempt to portray Texas in the visual arts” (p. 7). This exhibit was on display during the conference. SYLVIA ANN GRIDER Texas A&M University Roving Across Fields: A Conversation and Uncollected Poems, 1942-1982. By William Stafford. (Daleville, Indiana: The Barnwood Press, 1983. 51 pages, $6.95 paperback.) Smoke’s Way: Poems from Limited Editions 1968-1981. By William Stafford. (Port Townsend, Washington: Graywolf, 1983. 112 pages, $6.00 paperback.) Anyone who has a shelf of little magazines could probably find enough uncollected poems by William Stafford to fill a chapbook. The books from Harper & Row, his major publisher, represent him without really collecting him : there are poems in the magazines and in pamphlets and chapbooks that we wouldn’t want to do without. Keats suggested that poetry should come as easily as leaves to a tree, and this is the case with Stafford. Two recent books have gathered some of the leaves. Roving Across Fields is a beautifully produced book. Thom Tammaro has assembled nineteen fugitive poems from the last forty years and prefaced them with an interview with Stafford that he recorded in 1976. The interview is not one of Stafford’s best, though it has some good observations. The poems are not among the best either, but as Tammaro points out, it is interesting to see that Stafford’s vision and tone have remained consistent over forty years. The first poem, dated 1942, is a fable about “The Country of Thin Moun­ tains.” The people in that country have only false mountains painted on cardboard, and they don’t care, being caught up in profit and self-importance. But one of their mountains is real, a joke on them that the poet shares with us. This little story could come right out of Someday, Maybe. It makes its point in a way typical of Stafford’s voice: not insistent, but persistent. A more substantial collection is gathered in another beautiful book, Smoke’s Way. There are more poems, and some preliminary sorting has been 320 Western American Literature done by the poet, since the contents first appeared in fourteen limited editions — and not everything in those has been reprinted. Stafford has provided helpful section titles and the poems are in chronological order. Hence this is a book rather than a miscellany. I am glad to have so many elusive booklets brought together. I remember copying out In the Clock of Reason for myself in a Rare Book Room, and ordering a copy of Braided Apart (an interesting book in collaboration with his son, Kim) from a small press distributor in New Mexico. There are no surprises in the collection — we are in Stafford’s familiar world of rain, wind, cold and sunlight — but there are plenty of happy dis­ coveries. It is a world the poet is definitely not alienated from; it sustains him, breath by breath. The chief sacrament in Stafford’s religion is the simple act of breathing: count the poems in which that act is crucial. Dark things happen, but they can be accepted with a certain grace. Stafford learns patience not from Bruce’s spider but from something equally common. Here is the conclusion of “Smoke” : I saw Smoke, slow traveler, reluctant but sure. Hesitant sometimes, yes, because that’s the way things are. Smoke never doubts, though: some move will appear. Wherever you are, there is another door. Smoke may join wind, rain and light as one of Stafford’s key symbols...

The Antithesist Vision of William Rhodes

To conclude this presentation, I would like to say that children are much more resilient than I used to think they were; otherwise, how has the human race survived? I do not think that the trend of the times are in children's favor. But I do have greater confidence in the individual's ability to remake himself, with God's help, than I ever have had. Most children will make it when they grow up, in spite of us and our ministrations or lack of ministrations to them. In spite of their faults and flaws, human beings are divine, creative creatures. The amazing way in which we create our own reality out of the of sparsely spaced, disorderly electrons and protons, which physicists believe are the only stuff of the uni verse, is wondrous and miraculous. It seems now from the findings of natural science that our whole familiar world emerges from consciousness in its natural and supernatural power. Truly, we are wondrous creatures.

Six Who Knew Edward Hopper

In a career of sixty years, marked by complete artistic integrity and steady growth, Edward Hopper created a series of unforgettable images of twentieth-century America. His art was based on the ordinary aspects of the contemporary United States, in city, town, and country. No artist has painted a more truthful and revealing portrait of our land. But Hopper, of course, was much more than an objective realist. His work was charged with strong personal emotion, with a deep attachment to our familiar world, in all its ugliness, banality, and beauty.

Fatalism and Symbolism in Hardy. an Analysis of “The Grave by the Handpost”1

There is a marked tendency in critical comments on Hardy's prose work to subscribe to the view that his many fatal coincidences are contrived and therefore artistically unsatisfactory. In the opinion of the present writer such a view pays too much attention to the outline of the story as planned by Hardy and as paraphrased by the critic, and too little attention to the story itself. “The Grave by the Handpost” with its succession of incidents to thwart the course and aspirations of Luke Holway is here used to illustrate the point. the article demonstrates how, through a fusion of time‐levels, the reader is taken into a framework of symbolic meaning to participate in the universal conflict between harmony and disharmony, faith and despair, the Gospel story and its perversion, the familiar world of the Christmas singer and the alienation of the outcast. A story of life and death in which the incidents cease to exist as so many cases of the author's wilful planning to become resonant parts of a meaningfully integrated whole. the story, again, is intimately connected with Hardy's work as a whole. It provides a moving late Victorian expression of loss, made bitterly acute against an insistent evocation of harmony and hope.

On the Appeal of M. C. Escher's Pictures

The Dutch artist Maurits Cornelius Escher (1898-1972) used one of the chief characteristics of pictorial artillusion-to demonstrate the possible enigmatic aspects of what is seen and what is known. His 1935 self-portrait (Fig. 1) can be interpreted as a presentation of the coexistence of the outer real world and of the inner subjective world. His pictures, mainly lithographs and woodcuts, have been widely reproduced and discussed. Yet, until about 10 years ago, they were generally ignored by artists and art critics [1, 2]. Escher had different artistic aims from those of his contemporaries, a certain intellectual content of structure, order and logic that does not appeal to artists interested in expressions of emotion [3]. His pictures can be divided into two principal categories: (1) those that deal with figurative symmetric and periodic compositional structures and (2) those that deal with possible ambiguities of pictorial depictions of objects in space. Furthermore, the pictures generally contain representational depictions of familiar real world objects. What then is the appeal of Escher's works? During the late 1960s and early 1970s he became a kind of folk hero to the psychedelic subculture in the U.S.A., just after being noticed by enthusiasts of science fiction. The Rolling Stone magazine of this sub-culture had a review of his work that suggested Escher's understanding of reality corresponded with the aims of psychedelic art because of 'the fact that nothing is really as it seems and that everything is governed by higher laws of logic and mathematical laws that draw the universe and all its opposing elements together in a mysterious, unknowing harmony' [4]. This kind of popularity apparently made Escher uncomfortable, because, while he often depicted aspects of reality as illusory, he respected logic and intellect, and his works show an 'aversion to disorder and to any kind of slovenly, unfinished representation' [5]. He acknowledged scientifically valid laws of nature and said in 1971: 'There is something in such laws that takes the breath away. They are not discoveries or inventions of the human mind, but exist independently of us. In a moment of clarity, one can at most discover that they are there and take them into account' [6]. He also said: 'My affinity with the exact approach to natural phenomena is probably related to the millieu in which I grew up as a boy: My father and three of my brothers were all trained in the exact sciences or engineering, and I have always had an enormous respect for these things. And now again my three sons try to think scientifically, in other words honestly, rather than unverifiably, hazily, sentiently, in the manner of the artist' [4, p. 30]. It is Escher's treatment of some of the varieties of

Magnetism in one dimension

Not just biological phenomena but most physical phenomena as well become drastically altered or impossible in spaces of fewer than three dimensions. As is well known, the cooperative behavior of many-body systems depends very strongly on the coordination of the closely interacting particles and therefore on the number of spatial dimensions. As we shall see, not only does an examination of physics in fewer than three dimensions illuminate the familiar world of three dimensions, there are also real systems whose structure effectively reduces their dimensionality and for which, therefore, low-dimensional physics is a prerequisite. As a consequence, a considerable effort has been expended in explaining the properties of lower-dimensional and, especially, linear systems. During the last decade there has been a veritable explosion in the “one-dimensional” literature. In this article we would like to discuss in the context of magnetism some of the motivating factors for this explosion and the progress that has been achieved so far.

Perception and Primary Qualities

Early modern science, according to a misleading and now widely accepted thesis, introduced a split or schism between a world of colorless, imperceptible particles, on the one hand, and the familiar world of perception, on the other. One of the most important dilemmas of modern philosophy, of course, seems to follow directly from this alleged rupture: For how are the two seemingly incongruous worlds to be “reconciled”? This way of formulating the problem, however, seems to be based on a misunderstanding of early modern science, on an interpretation that underestimates the very real difficulties that scientists faced in putting forward hypotheses about unseen minute bodies. If we start to pay attention to the way in which knowledge claims about the properties of atoms or corpuscles were advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in fact, it becomes increasingly obvious that such fundamental properties were first attributed to minute bodies on grounds of strict analogy, that is, on the grounds that allperceptiblebodies exhibited precisely the properties of size, shape, motion, and so forth.

The Silence of Hermippos: Greece in the Poetry of Cavafy

Hellene: a. An ancient Greek, of genuine Grecian race.b. A subject of the modern kingdom of Greece or Hellas. OED.1. On 29 April 1933 Cavafy died in Alexandria, the city in which he was born. There is some reason for satisfaction in this. Visitors to his apartment on the second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius knew how self-contained Cavafy’s small and familiar world in Alexandria was. Rue Lepsius was home for the last twenty-six years of Cavafy’s life: ‘Below, the brothel caters for the flesh. And there is the church [St. Savvas’s] which forgives sin. And there is the hospital where we die.’ The first floor of 10 Rue Lepsius never catered to Cavafy’s flesh, but the church forgave his sins, and he died in the hospital. He could have died in an hospital in Athens where he had gone the year before for treatment of cancer of the throat. He stayed there for a time at the Hôtel Cosmopolite, and from Kifissiá he found the sight of Hymettos and the mountains to the north ‘boring’. He returned home to die, ‘an Alexandrian of the Alexandrians’, an epitaph he very nearly composed for himself.

"Life is a dream": Ibn ‘Arabī on the Mysteries of Divine

We are the bees of the invisible. Lovesick, we forage for the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible.Rainer Maria Rilke For Ibn ‘Arabī, as for Plato and Dante (or Calderon), all of earthly life and existence is essentially a divine Dream:” a singular, ongoing, timelessly interpenetrating, profoundly meaningful and ultimately transformative cinematic drama that cosmic “Play” and universal shadow-theater whose personal meanings and mysteries each of us must gradually discover through all our hastily improvised roles as audience, author, reader, performer, and even critic.This essay, centering on key passages translated for the first time from the concluding volume of our Murcian master's immense book of Meccan Illuminations, highlights some of the key elements of the universal process of spiritual realization within which each human being gradually moves from the perception of this unfolding shadow-play in sharply limited worldly terms toward the deepening recognition of its aim and fulfillment as a shared, never-ending adventure of divine-human discovery. In order to provide a basic metaphysical framework for these more focused and practical insights, I have begun here with a few more familiar selections from Ibn ‘Arabī 's earlier foundational chapter (63) devoted to outlining our human relation to this entire Play of our earthly (and posthumous spiritual) existence conceived as a cosmic divine "Imagining” (ḫayāl) within which we and our familiar worlds are both the dreamed and yet also in so many shifting ways active dreamers.Given the larger film festival context of this conference, I had originally hoped to draw out more explicit connections at each stage between Ibn ‘Arabī's teachings and observations and particular cinematic illustrations fitting each of these short passages. However, given both the greater time that would require and the need to clearly explain each of the chosen examples we might take up, I must ask each of you instead, as we proceed, simply to notice the pertinent illustrations that will inevitably come to mind.

The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion

In The Quest Mircea Eliade stresses the cultural function that a study of the history of religions can play in a secularized society. He writes for the intelligent general reader in the hope that what he calls a new humanism be engendered by a confrontation of modern Western man with unknown or less familiar worlds of meaning. Each of these essays contains insights which will be fruitful and challenging for professional students of religion, but at the same time they all retain the kind of cultural relevance and clarity of style which makes them accessible to anyone seriously concerned with man and his religious possibilities. Joseph M. Kitagawa, Religious Education

The Problem of Anglo-American Politics in Bellomont's New York

B Y the end of the seventeenth century, politics in the colony of New York had assumed an essentially three-dimensional appearance. On the one hand there were the familiar worlds of English politics and of local colonial politics. In England, changing parties and governments evolved colonial policy on the grand scale and attempted to implement it through a formally constituted and hopelessly complicated bureaucracy. In New York, a wide range of political activity which was purely local in interest and importance was carried on completely independent of the formal imperial connection. Both these dimensions have been considered in some detail for the period i697 to I70I when Richard Coote, Earl of Bellomont, held the New York governorship, but much less attention has been paid to the third dimension, the totally different and vitally important world of Anglo-American politics. Although politics on this Anglo-American level functioned to a considerable degree outside and independent of the formal institutions of imperial control, their course was still largely determined by the very sensitive relationship that existed between the colony and the mother country. Of special importance was the shifting political balance in England, for it was in the faction and cabal of English politics that colonial policies of more than merely local importance were won or lost. It was here, too, that colonial politicians sought to establish connections powerful enough to keep them in office and to withstand the pressures constantly applied by the patrons of their colonial rivals and enemies. If connections and patrons were of great importance to colonial politicians and their rivals, so too was the need to maintain agents and representatives, official and unofficial, in London. It was only

Hospital Industrial Engineering: A Guide to the Improvement of Hospital Management Systems

This guide to hospital management systems is a landmark on the road which the American Hospital Association took 15 years ago when it established a committee on methods improvement in hospitals. The authors, members of a pioneer group of industrial engineers who turned their attention from the familiar worlds of business and industry to the complex and often baffling problems of health care institutions, have produced a comprehensive text that can be used equally as a manual for the practicing hospital executive and as a reference book for students in courses in hospital administration. The first portion of the book, which defines the role of industrial engineering in the hospital and discusses the conditions under which it can function effectively, can be read profitably also by staff physicians and trustees who wish to improve the productivity of the systems employed by hospitals to achieve their three major objectives: care of

Science and the rejection of realism in art

A rejection of representational realism characterizes much of Western art after 1850. And various inquirers have sought to found this rejection in the desire of recent artists for a new kind of audience an audience that would admire the artist not because he succeeded in reproducing the familiar world of everyday experience, but because through his genius he created a pure art-world independent of everyday experience. However, many serious students of contemporary arts have been offended by this type of explanation. They have, indeed, gone so far as to condemn all socio-aesthetic analysis which is patterned after that of Ortega Y Gasset. For, in their view, such analysis ends by denying the integrity of the whole body of recent art. No result save this is possible, these students assert, when an analysis begins with the assumption that poet and painter alter their styles solely because they refuse to tolerate a philistine audience which does not appreciate the technical imagination of the artist. Now it can be admitted that this assumption seems unlikely to provide a thoroughly adequate analysis of the motives of artists in the period in question. But precisely what an adequate analysis of motives would consist of is unclear. The defenders of the integrity of the modern artist set forth their own in generalities. They aver that the artist alters his mode of expression in the direction of difficulty or even obscurity because he feels that older modes are inadequate for the presentation of his dis coveries in an unexplored range of experience. And hence we are to conclude for ourselves that the modern artist's flight from simple repre sentational realism (and from the analogues of this style in verse and music) has been in some measure a result of a new conviction that truly realistic interpretation of human experience was impossible in that mode of art. But what was the source of this conviction? If it were possible to find one which, in its finality, excluded all others, the entire dispute might end

Strategic Problems of an International Armed Force

The relation of an international military authority to the industrial (once nuclear) powers in a disarmed world is an intriguing one. We should not expect much success in finding an ideal strategy for it. It is hard enough to find one for the United States, Britain, or the Soviet Union in the familiar world of competitive military force.

The Human Situation

Of recent months we have been living in a world the actuality of which we can believe in only by an effort of the will. Constantly we have awakened to a new day with the feeling that we have been living in a nightmare. Events have been happening which were not only unpredictable, but the very possibility of which we could hardly have entertained except as fantastic imaginings. A succession of calamities has swept over us, and we have supped so full of horrors that we no longer seem to occupy the old familiar world of earlier days. Prophecies of impending new disasters are eagerly listened to and believed. The old familiar landmarks which gave stability both to life and thinking have many of them been swept away. We are no longer so sure that human nature is the same wherever we find it, nor that you cannot bring an indictment against a whole nation. In a word our life has become an adventure, we are living dangerously, and we are by no means sure as to what the morrow may bring forth.

On Space and Time as Attributes of Nature and Forms of Experience

What can we say of space and time when we consider them as attributes of nature and as attributes of nature in the context of experience? The following is an examination of this question in the light of those portions of the writings of Locke and Kant which were concerned with it. Since men have no difficulty in speaking about and utilizing the familiar spatial and temporal relations of things, we begin with these and shall avoid definition and debate except insofar as it is pertinent to the present inquiry. Nor shall we consider it necessary to examine space and time in any other context as, for example, that of modern physics. The familiar world is the necessary condition for the conception of any intellectual development of it, and to begin with the intellectual development is to render it unintelligible. This is evidenced in several ways. When we begin with physics and mathematics, we cannot account for the world within which we live and consequently end in scepticism about it, whereas this is not the case when we begin with the actual world itself. Furthermore, the manifestly perceptible is indispensible to scientific enquiry for we must employ instruments and objects directly accessible to experience. Without these there would be neither experiment, observation nor inference. Communication would be impossible without it as well as discussion about subject matters such as logic and esthetics. It is for these reasons, therefore, that we begin with the familiar spatial and temporal relations of things.