Literary Genealogy Research Articles

‘The pure and perfect book’: Marilynne Robinson, Maureen Duffy, and the Heirs of Piers Plowman

This essay brings readers’ attention to the role of Piers Plowman in the writings of two major modern authors, Marilynne Robinson and Maureen Duffy. At first glance these authors differ dramatically - Robinson is an Iowa-based Christian passionate about Calvinistic theology who came to Langland only recently, while Duffy is a longtime Londoner and patron of Humanists UK, for whom Piers Plowman has been a lodestar for over sixty years. Yet both place the poem in an ethical, utopian, and prophetic literary genealogy, one in which anti-racism is central, culminating in William Blake, which they see their own works as continuing.

Cold War Remittance Economy: US Creative Writing and the Importation of New Criticism into the Philippines

This essay uses archival sources to reconstruct a literary genealogy of the impact of US creative writing on Philippine literature in English during the early Cold War period. It addresses the ways in which Filipino writers translated the New Criticism they learned in the United States into socially useful literature by engaging a concept of translation as economic exchange. The essay argues that this economic notion of translation not only names a rhetorical conceit of Anglophone writing; it also historically refers to a "Cold War remittance economy," that is, the large-scale foreign direct investments in Philippine literary culture by American creative writing programs and private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Focusing on three Rockefeller Foundation fellows—Edilberto K. Tiempo, N. V. M. Gonzalez, and Nick Joaquin—the essay narrates the story of the importation of New Criticism into the Philippines as a confrontation between competing yet analogous values of form: autonomy and organic unity in the literary realm, and sovereignty and fiscal balance in the economic realm. In so doing, the essay models a historicist and formalist reading practice that grasps the relationship between literature and political economy not as homology but as a mediated relationship of mutual determination.

Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher Ouma

Reviewed by: Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher Ouma Sakiru Adebayo Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past BY CHRISTOPHER OUMA Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. ix+ 202 pp. ISBN 9783030362560 paper. Contemporary African literary works are largely informed by the experience of childhood. They use images, figures, and memories of childhood to engage with questions of identity, migration, and all sorts of displacement. This is the main argument in Christopher Ouma’s outstanding book Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past. After the end of colonial rule, many African countries experienced different kinds of military and civilian dictatorships, especially in the 70s and 80s—an era that also coincided with the Cold War. The period after colonial rule in Africa was equally marked by many civil wars, which began with Biafra (1967–70); these wars were, no doubt, a manifestation of a terrible colonial hangover. Hence, during this period (of the 70s and 80s), many African countries could be said to be experiencing a crisis of nationhood that culminated in a great exodus from Africa to the West. This, according to Ouma, caused the “project of identity to shift from nations to individuals, who invariably felt their identity overdetermined by their experience of the crisis of nationhood” (2). Therefore, while earlier African writings construed the nation-state as a teleological and geopolitical entity, contemporary African writers capture the zeitgeist [End Page 227] of the 80s by challenging—through the trope of childhood—the temporal linearity, cultural homogeneity, and logical coherence that characterized these earlier conceptions of the nation-state. In other words, according to Ouma, childhood becomes a significant marker of postcoloniality. The category of the “child/ren” becomes symbolic and even pivotal in constructing and understanding postcolonial African literature precisely because it is inaugurated by and shot through with experiences and memories of childhood. It is therefore not surprising that in the attempts to mark one generation from the other and delineate literary genealogies, contemporary African writers have come up with monikers such as “children of the postcolony,” “children of the cold war,” “children of oil boom,” “children of the revolution,” and so on. This book investigates the childhood experiences of these eras, as chronicled by contemporary (diasporic) African writers who have now come of age in a new millennium. Ouma begins the book by providing a very detailed historiography of childhood in African literature. He traces the portrayal of an Afrocentric childhood in Camara Laye’s The African Child (1959), to the intricacies of colonial childhood in Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy (1966), down to how childhood in Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God (1964) created a space for experimentation, “which is the very essence of childhood” (14). Ouma argues that childhood in early modern African literature was “symbolic of transience, mobility and becoming even though within the binary frameworks of traditional and modern values” (14). He also sketches out feminist representations of childhood in the works of Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Zaynab Alkali, and Ama Ata Aidoo, among others. He shows how gendered childhoods in African literature have been read in relation to the critiques of motherhood. He, however, notes that the rise of African feminist literary criticism brought attention to the idea of “girlhood” in literary childhood studies. Ouma proceeds to highlight the representation of childhood in African life writings and memoirs, especially in notable works such as Wole Soyinka’s Ake: The Years of Childhood (1981), Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile (2000), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Dreams in a Time of War (2010) and its sequel, In the House of the Interpreter (2012). Ouma makes an important observation that, while these memoirs by the older generation of African writers follow the classic bildungsroman style, contemporary African memoirs, especially child soldier narratives, tend to be “anti-bildungsroman” and nonlinear. While the period of the 70s, 80s, and 90s could arguably be said to have seen the rise of children as a substantial part of the population in Africa, Ouma is certain that “it was this period that consolidated global media images of broken and malnourished children’s bodies augmented by the reality...

Literary Genealogies and the Kinship of Black Modernity

Abstract This brief essay is a reflection on the genealogical as a metaphor for modernity’s teleologies. Considering genealogy not as a biological lineage but as a network of kinship relations, we can better understand the collective—and often teleologically recursive—means by which modernity is imagined and reimagined. Understood via this metaphor of relation, we can see how modernity is not simply a progressive line of descendancy, but a complex web of influence. Our methodologies for tracing modernity’s genealogies must therefore think beyond what is inevitable and toward the deliberate and multiplicitous practices contributing to its reproduction. These methodologies must often follow circuitous routes that defy normative disciplinary taxonomies and frameworks. Moreover, the process of tracing modernity’s genealogies is ongoing, perpetuated always to the present moment as its study is also a mechanism for its perpetual reproduction. Black genealogical reproduction is an involved process in modernity, encompassing mechanisms from the bodily to the aesthetic to the technological, resisting normalized teleologies of descent, and extending its branches into complex webs that emerge within Black futures and help to produce them.

Проблема генеалогии музыкальной образности в стихотворениях В. Кривулина 1970-х гг.

The article analyses musical figurativeness in V. Krivulin’s poems of the 1970s. The research objective includes identifying specificity of musical figurativeness in his poetical collections “Sunday Clouds” and “Musical Instruments in Sand and Snow”. Scientific originality of the study lies in the fact that the researcher traces literary genealogy of musical images in V. Krivulin’s poetical collections of the 1970s. The research findings are as follows: the author shows that the musical theme in V. Krivulin’s poems is associated with intellectual contexts of the Silver Age literature, in particular, with the mythologeme of Dionysian and Apollonian elements in art. Krivulin’s interpretation of A. Blok’s conception of music is analysed. The amateur poet reconsidered this conception in his literary manifesto.

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

What God Hath Put Together: Hurston, Black Queer Love, and the Act of Creation

ABSTRACT This discussion considers a literary genealogy that examines Zora Neale Hurston as a predecessor to Joseph Beam and Essex Hemphill, prefiguring their need for a process through which multiply-marginalized communities might create images that more accurately reflect their existence, and considers contemporary poets Danez Smith and Timothy DuWhite as inhabitants of the legacy that they left behind. Focusing primarily on how these artists invoke—and often revise and subvert—the biblical creation narrative within their own narratives of self-creation and image- making, this discussion is also concerned with these writers' articulation of love that is deemed unnatural due to its defiance of heteropatriarchal and cultural norms. These works, when read alongside and in dialogue with one another, collectively assert that love, defined as natural and divinely approved, functions as a challenge to restrictive ideologies and a tool of affirmation for themselves and their communities.

Allegories of Influence: Spenser, Chaucer and Italian Romance

This essay reflects upon Renaissance writers' self-reflexive meditations on literary genealogy, by examining Edmund Spenser's allusive interrogation of his relationship to Chaucer on the one hand, and to Boiardo and Ariosto, on the other in Book IV of The Faerie Queene. Focusing on the emblematic tale of Cambell and Triamond, and its striking resolution by the introduction of Cambina, a romance enchantress in bono, it argues that Spenser strategically moves away from metaphors of patrilineal descent and erotic triangulation to re-imagine literary imitation and influence in terms of friendship, symbolized by the tetrad. In the process, it reconsiders models for describing literary originality, inheritance, canon formation, and cross-linguistic influence.

Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director's Guide by Skinner Amy (review)

REVIEWS 167 dominate with its single, monologic voice and those dissenters who pursue alternative forms of thought and discourse. There is an intriguing logic to this book, and how Reich juggles close readings, literary genealogies, medical reports and theory, among other things, speaks to her abilities as a skilled analyst of these varied materials. What makes Snezhnevskii, leader of the so-called Moscow School of psychiatry, especially powerful as a villain for Reich’s account is not so much what he himself accomplished during his reign as Soviet Russia’s premier psychologist. Rather, it is what he represents: the corruption of psychiatric science that pushed authors to experience a need to prove their sanity before a state that seemed itself to have lost sense. At times zooming in to the level of parts of speech in a poem, at others expanding outward to the broad historical factors at work in the post-Stalin era, Reich offers a thorough and engrossing story of this battle of wills fought in examination rooms and in samizdat publications. Department of Modern Languages and Literatures José Vergara Swarthmore College Skinner, Amy (ed.). Russian Theatre in Practice: The Director’s Guide. Methuen Drama, London, New York, Oxford, New Delhi and Sydney, 2019. xv + 278 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £24.00 (paperback). Twelve brief essays covering a period from the turn of the twentieth century to the present day, written by six male and six female contributors advocating the theoretical and practical importance of eight male and four female theatre directors, form the content of this ambitious student handbook. The names of the subjects are both well-known and less familiar, as are their formal means and methods, including puppetry and children’s theatre. The book’s format is very attractive, consisting of bite-sized sections prefaced by bold, indicative headings interspersed with areas of highlighted text containing advice on ways to match acting theory with directorial practice. As far as the choice of practitioners is concerned, the pre-1945 group are virtually self-selecting — Stanislavskii, Vakhtangov, Meierkhol´d, Tairov and Mikhail Chekhov. Less well-known are Aleksandra Remizova (pedagogue and director), Natalia Sats (children’s theatre specialist) and Nina SimionovichEfimova (puppeteer). The post-war selection, once again, includes the more and the less familiar: Oleg Efremov and Anatolii Efros among the former, with Mar Sulimov (pedagogue and director) and Genrietta Ianovskaia (Theatre for Youth) among the latter. The editor is alert to criticism of what might be SEER, 98, 1, JANUARY 2020 168 considered controversial choices for inclusion, plus the absence of other key figures, descriptions of whose work the reader is advised to consult elsewhere. It is extremely difficult to do justice to the lifetime’s work and theories of an important director in the space of a few pages but, in the case of major luminaries such as Stanislavskii and Meierkhol´d, the contributors can point to a mass of external reportage, including detailed accounts of productions and elucidations of theory. The problem with the lesser-known figures is that their champions need to justify their inclusion by explaining the precise nature of the subject’s importance which, in the absence of easily accessible external referencing, poses problems that not every essayist manages to solve effectively. Indeed, in some cases, descriptive and exegetical powers are less than adequate. There are exceptions, such as the contribution on Mikhail (Michael) Chekhov, which ought to be of genuine assistance to any aspiring student director. The remainder read either like synopses of more substantial published work and therefore suffer from the effects of compression or, where English may not be the writer’s first language, exhibit a degree of expressive deficiency and/ or stylistic bathos requiring radical, even ruthless editorial intervention, quite apart from improved proof reading. Other drawbacks include a lack of intellectual clarity when it comes to substantive analysis of ways in which the selected directors put theory into practice, and the frequent resort to mere biography. In the case of the post-war grouping, the citation of critical responses to their work would have enhanced a reader’s appreciation of its value, especially where productions have been seen both at home and abroad. It...

THE HIGHEST TERRESTRIAL OFFICIALS OF CHERNIHIV VOIVODESHIP (1696-1733s)

The article is based on academic biographical and genealogical literature with involvement of published legislative sources of the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth Diet (Sejm). The researching instruments are represented by the method of the prosopography and ruled by principles of objectivity, chronology and historicism. This paper reveals the history of a nobleman group which occupied highest posts (voivode and castellan) in Chernihiv Voivodeship terrestrial office hierarchy during the reign of the king August II (1696-1733). It has been studied out that highest terrestrial officials were represented by people that came from rich magnate nobleman families from the different parts of the country. This group of noblemen were related to the different centers of political power and their careers were built on dependence not only on the land possession of their families but also on the great role of their political relationships with the king and various opposing political forces. Chernihiv Voivodeship can be named as “titular”or “exulant” due to absence of lands in its possession in contradistinction to real voivodeships of the Polish-Lithuania Commonwealth. This circumstance reduces the role of a highest terrestrial official of an “exulant” voivodeship only to the senator’s mission in a republican Diet. It has been found that terrestrial official’s titles can be characterized as “sinecurial” and they also were the instruments for a power increasing of large political fractions in the Diet. The narrower relationships between Chernihiv’s highest officials (senators) and Chernihiv Voivodeship exulants nobleman community grouped over Volodymyr dietine (sejmik) can be found on a wider material of different historical archival sources hiding a various data of political and parliamentarian processes.

Introduction: Autotheory Theory

Introduction:Autotheory Theory Robyn Wiegman (bio) since its publication in 2015, much attention has been given to the genre-bending conventions of Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, a book that experiments with the protocols of traditional autobiography by conjoining descriptions of daily life with philosophical reflection and debates in both art criticism and critical theory. Celebrated on its back cover as writing of a new kind, called "autotheory," The Argonauts introduces readers to its hybridity at the outset, juxtaposing love and anal sex with Wittgenstein and a meditation on the limits of language on its very first page. The book's title is drawn from Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, that well-known anti-autobiography crafted by the author whose manifesto, "The Death of the Author," is required reading for students tracing the history of the humanities as it was reshaped by the trans-Atlantic influence of critical theory last century. Whether figured as the "linguistic turn," the "cultural turn," or simply "poststructuralism," the ongoing implications of the broad critique of humanism's epistemological and aesthetic legacies are clearly written into The Argonauts's citational universe, while its personal narrative combines elements of the traditional marriage plot (sex, love, and baby, but not divorce) with the familiar confessional voice of the autobiographer. When read as paradigmatic for the new genre it is said to found, The Argonauts stages autotheory as an encounter between first person narration and theory as an established body of contemporary academic thought. Other experiments in self-narration that now travel under the moniker of autotheory have significantly different aesthetic approaches and theoretical dimensions, making it important to resist the lure to position The Argonauts as the genre's north star. Even Nelson points out that autotheory as the name for a contemporary mode of textual performance was not her invention. "I flat out stole this term from Paul [End Page 1] Preciado's amazing Testo Junkie," she says in an interview with Micha McCrary. "I'm always looking for terms that are not 'memoir' to describe autobiographical writing that exceeds the boundaries of the 'personal.'" But while Preciado opens his book with the declaration, "This is not a memoir" before defining its practice as "a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory," Testo Junkie's scope includes an extensive and intensively academic foray into the intertwined histories of sexuality, pharmaceuticals, and pornography—an emphasis underscored by the academic enunciation of the subtitle, Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era (11). Reading self-theory in the context of its academic commitments positions Preciado's use of the first person less as a rendering of critical theory as part of the worlding of everyday life, a la Nelson, than as a virtuoso intrusion of autobiographical confession into the conventions of academic writing itself. To be sure, there is a deep kinship between these works, especially their interest in gender's queer compositions, but the differences they evoke in critical intervention and aesthetic form demonstrate the need not for a standardizing taxonomy of a new genre (an impossible task anyway) but for collective curiosity about the many ways that an autotheoretical impulse can be found not only in contemporary literature and academic criticism but in the traditions of writing and thinking that pollinate each. This special issue of Arizona Quarterly seeks to orient the conversation about autotheory around this pollination, which entails both disentangling and engaging the concept's combination of two highly embattled terms: autobiography and theory. Thought to be a distinct genre of writing since the eighteenth century, autobiography conventionally refers to practices of self-narration that nurture and celebrate the individual life story through the confessional modality of first person address. Linda Anderson traces its literary genealogy to Augustine's Confessions in which the mastery of the self has a religious import whereas its later flourishing is indebted to the secular humanist priority given to the individual in modernity. In its modern self-centered posture, autobiography has a decidedly contentious reputation. On the one hand, its claims to truthfulness and facticity have been sullied by the imprecision that accompanies human memory and by the psychoanalytically inflected suspicion that its devotees are...

Тематическая композиция эмигрантского автобиографического романа: от «Жизни Арсеньева» И. Бунина к «Дару» В. Набокова. Часть 1

Bunin’s novel “The Life of Arsenyev” is a completely new model, different from the classics of the 19 th century. In the novel “The life of Arsenyev” several themes are developed in a new way, in particular, the theme of aristocratic genealogy, it is deliberately deployed in all the richness of its cultural and historical semantics. The compositional rhythm of Bunin’s novel is subject, as often in the stories of this author, to elegiac laws with alternating and contrasting semantics of death, breakage, failure and rebirth, connection, love, life and creativity. Nabokov reproduces in the novel “The gift” many features of the model developed by Bunin: poetic name and literary genealogy of the character. Expansion of literary and cultural subtexts through the development of genealogical and travel motifs; the elegiac alternation of the theme of death, rebirth and its connection with the eventual Nabokov plot.

Leer desde la ruptura. Propuesta teórica para explorar el potencial político de una genealogía literaria interrumpida

Este artículo tiene por objetivo elaborar una propuesta teórica que nos permita conocer, siguiendo a Walter Benjamin, el potencial político de una genealogía literaria interrumpida: la de la novela política y social de los años treinta y cincuenta, uniendo sus puntos aparentemente inconexos en una constelación. Del mismo modo, y siguiendo la teoría althusseriana del conocimiento, este artículo no pretende describir su objeto de estudio sino producir un nuevo lugar, radicalmente otro, desde el que conocerlo y transformarlo en un conocimiento nuevo. En este sentido, propongo leer esta literatura –que he denominado literatura desde abajo– desde la ruptura Se exploran cuatro rupturas desde las que leer y conocer esta genealogía interrumpida: 1) desde la interrupción que obliga al proyecto de la literatura política a empezar siempre desde cero, sin poder disponer de un archivo de experiencias acumuladas para la emancipación; 2) desde las grietas que esta literatura abre en el muro del historicismo, desafiando el relato del poder y reivindicando la agencia y el lugar en la historia de las clases subalternas; 3) desde la ruptura con la ideología de la literatura, al explorar y elaborar un discurso literario otro para producir un discurso para la emancipación más allá de la forma literaria; y 4) desde la ruptura que nos atraviesa hoy, desde la transición hasta nuestros días, en tanto que lectores sin repertorio de voces literarias para pensar la emancipación en el presente. Finalmente se propone la necesidad de construir un archivo –en la acepción foucaultiana– que no sirva únicamente para catalogar y registrar esta literatura olvidada, sino para hacerla legible.

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Material deceptions and the qualities of time

Material deceptions and the qualities of time

German Romantic Tradition in John Ashbery’s "Where Shall I Wander"

In popular critical and readerly reception, the New York School of poetry was shaped mostly by what Marjorie Perloff calls the tradition of indeterminacy. This was started by Arthur Rimbaud and, a few decades later, developed by Dadaists and Surrealists. Therefore, the tradition of French modernism seems to have been vital for John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuler, and Barbara Guest, and the poets themselves appeared to confirm this fact. They often visited France privately and as scholars, and lived there for extended periods of time. In the case of John Ashbery, his year-long Fulbright fellowship was prolonged to a decade. Moreover, the New York School poets contributed to the propagation of French literature, being translators, critics and editors of French authors. However, as John Ashbery’s late works prove, literary genealogies are far more complex. German Romantic tradition always exerted an important influence on John Ashbery, and it inspired the New York experimenter to contribute two major poems to the twenty-first century American literature: “Where Shall I Wander” and “Hölderlin Marginalia”.

“A Boy Inside It”

This essay explores Ann Bannon’s lesbian pulp series “The Beebo Brinker Chronicles” through the lens of trans studies, placing her eponymous hero in conversation with the inversion rhetoric of sexological discourse and the transgender pulp novels that circulated alongside Bannon’s texts in the 1950s and 1960s. Despite the prominence of Beebo’s masculine identification, and the fact that Bannon draws heavily from Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness—now widely read as a transgender text—Beebo has yet to be read as a character that resonates within both the trans and the lesbian literary canons. Revisioning Beebo as a transmasculine character transforms our understanding of an unfolding trans-gender literary tradition, offering a bridge between Hall’s Stephen Gordon and later twentieth-century articulations of transmasculine identity and embodiment. Further, the essay suggests that Bannon’s series provides a vital intervention in the “case study” framing that dominated both transgender pulp novels and The Well by offering a vision of trans experience that, presented in the romance genre, exists outside medical authority. If we broaden the context for studying Beebo to include other contemporary trans literary genealogies, Bannon’s work becomes integral to understanding the pulp genre’s treatment of transgender themes and the reach of transgender plots and possibilities at midcentury.

The Americanization of World Literature?

As American publishing conglomerates and institutions have come to play an increasingly dominant role in world literature, dominant critical discourses tend to equate the “Americanization” of world literature with a process of aesthetic diminishment and devernacularization. This essay nuances and complements such accounts by focusing on the role of American independent publishers as curators of world literature. The “world literary vernacular” through which these presses construct world literary value contains five key elements: an insistence on modernist literary genealogies; an emphasis on regional (or at least subnational) attachments; an investment in oeuvres rather than in individual works or personal charisma as salient units of literary value; a decidedly unironic rhetoric that connects literature to a putative world republic of letters; and finally an emphasis on translatedness and the creative values of translation. The essay situates independent publishers as crucial participants in the contemporary world literature ecology.

Feminismo y escritura: los ensayos de Diamela Eltit

En este artículo me propongo indagar en los ensayos de Diamela Eltit haciendo especial hincapié en dos tópicos: el feminismo y la escritura. Para ello, analizo un corpus de textos publicados en los libros los libros Emergencias (2000), Signos vitales (2008) y Réplicas (2016) a partir de tres operaciones ideológico- discursivas: la deconstrucción del cuerpo, la reconstruccion de genealogías literarias femeninas y la reflexión sobre la escritura. Sostengo, a modo de hipótesis, que la práctica ensayística de la autora constituye un ejercicio crítico a través del cual se convoca a una multiplicidad de voces para desnaturalizar y repensar los recorridos del cuerpo, la subjetividad y el lenguaje en el marco de las sociedades contemporáneas. El marco teórico- metodológico propende a articular conocimientos de los estudios culturales y de la crítica feminista. En este sentido, el trabajo pretende no solo explorar una faceta escasamente abordada dentro de los estudios en torno a Eltit sino también caracterizar las variaciones y tensiones referidas al feminismo y a la escritura que gravitan dentro de su producción literaria.

Anna Maria Ortese’s palette: Colors and achromaticity in Neapolitan Chronicles

The article outlines the forms and functions of Anna Maria Ortese’s palette in Neapolitan Chronicles. Moving through short stories, essays, and reportages, we can identify topical colors in Ortese’s work: gray, and the achromatic shades black and white. In addition to differentiating the roles of the color series, the article traces Chronicles’ literary genealogies, linking it to Melville and Poe’s works. Far from being a traditional colorist, Ortese gives life to a pictorial writing, which makes of the deformation of reality a key to a more vivid and acute perception of the world.