Kinds Of Writers Research Articles

Razing Cain with Chandler and Wilder: The Prometheus-Pandora Myth inDouble Indemnity

During the eight lucrative but unhappy years Raymond Chandler worked as a Hollywood writer, he wrote or cowrote six screenplays which were made into movies. Surprisingly, he was approached to adapt only one of the Philip Marlowe novels which had made him famous. Chandler’s finest screenplay—coauthored with Billy Wilder—was an adaptation of James M. Cain’s 1936 “roman noir,” Double Indemnity (1944), for Paramount Pictur es. Chandler’s hiring was ironic; it was his first attempt at screenwriting, and he detested Cain’s fiction. In a letter to Alfred Knopf, Chandler—furious over being compared to Cain—launched into a vitriolic attack: But James Cain—faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billy goat. He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. Such people are the offal of literature, not because they write about dirty things, but because they do it in a dirty way. Nothing hard and clean and cold and ventilated. A brothel with a smell of cheap scent in the front parlor and a bucket of slops at the back door. Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that? (quoted in MacShane 101) Chandler’s violent distaste for Cain’s novels must have sparked something, however, for his work on Double Indemnity far surpassed anything he was to do thereafter as a scenarist. According to biographer Frank MacShane, Paramount next recruited Chandler to polish the dialogue on two plodding scripts for movies now virtually forgotten: a melodrama, And Now Tomorrow (1944), and an obscure mystery, The Unseen (1945). Both projects exasperated Chandler because their directors, Irving Pichel and Lewis Allen, respectively, omitted so much of the dialogue he had carefully crafted. Chandler based a third, more promising, film, The Blue

An Autoethnographic Writer's Request to Readers

Speaking from the position of an autoethnographic writer, I ask those who might attend to my work to adopt a number of interactional stances that I hope they will bring to our encounter. Likewise, I make several promises concerning the kind of writer I want to be. If we both agree to move forward as outlined, I argue, we will have a more productive and satisfying experience.

Poetic Signs of Third Place: A Case Study of Studentdriven Imitation in a Shelter for Young Homeless People in Copenhagen

During a series of writing-workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that student-driven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced, that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space.

T.S. Eliot and the textualities of the discarded

This article attends to the propositional presence of redundant or exhausted things within literary writing; it seeks the immanent pulp in fictions considered canonical. If one assumes that writing is shaped by the material capacities of the things participating in the process of writing, then the idea of waste in literature resides in the relationship between its content and the textual medium. In this respect, one of the more compelling effects of waste as it is transcribed into textual forms is the opportunity it affords to reflect upon the activity of writing, making moments that seem ‘simultaneously to create a fiction and to make a statement about the creation of that fiction'. In this metafictional capacity, a potential exists for the contemplation of various methods of drafting things, whether decaying, dissolving or going to waste, and the innumerable things that appear before us, either on the page or screen. Clearly, this is a perspective on content, form and process that can be applied to many different kinds of writers and many different kinds of writing. Here, I concentrate on the published and unpublished work of T. S. Eliot to illuminate works in which waste has often been noted for its presence but rarely understood beyond its surface effect.

Poetic Signs of Third Place: A Case Study of Student-driven Imitation in a Shelter for Young Homeless People in Copenhagen

During a series of writing workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that student-driven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space.

Uneasy riders: some literary modernists and the aristocracy

A significant strain of thought in European modernist literature identified the formal achievement and classic timelessness to which its high art aspired with the historical aristocracy and its traditions. At the same time, modernist authors portrayed the twentieth-century deadend of this aristocracy through the demise of one of its potent symbols: the horseman-soldier. Novelists (Proust, Ford, Roth) explored the class-inflected idea of the artwork within depictions of a changing society. Lyric poets (Rilke, Yeats) located an aristocratic realm of aesthetic play apparently outside of history. Both kinds of writers assimilated this artistic/noble realm with childhood immaturity on the one hand, with death on the other. In this attraction to an expiring aristocracy, such modernism was uncertain how grown-up and modern it wanted to be.

Against Écriture Féminine : Flaubert's Narrative Aggression in Madame Bovary

Against Écriture Féminine:Flaubert's Narrative Aggression in Madame Bovary Ashley Hope Pérez "Avec rage": Flaubert's Revenge "J'ai rempoigné la Bovary avec rage," Flaubert wrote to Louis Bouilhet two months after the end of his relationship with Louise Colet, the woman who had been lover, correspondent, and—perhaps most importantly—rival writer in Flaubert's eyes until the couple separated definitively in 1854.1 The letters to Colet, written over nearly a decade, attune us to the height of Flaubert's artistic aspirations and the extent of his insecurities. They also reveal the degree to which questions of aesthetic power and artistic identity become embroiled in Flaubert's problematic construction of the feminine, a construction that culminates in his writing of Madame Bovary as a portrait of female artistic failure. Throughout the letters, Flaubert expresses his desire to remake Colet in his image. "Je ne veux de toi, comme femme, que la chair. Que tout le reste donc soit à moi, ou mieux, soit moi, de même pâte et la même pâte," he writes, adding some months later, "Oh si je pouvais faire de toi ce que j'en rêve, quelle femme, quelle être tu serais!"2 Flaubert did not, however, get his wish. Although Colet's letters to Flaubert have been lost, the stylistic elements of her published works demonstrate her refusal to conform to the edicts and declarations he directed at her.3 Principal among these pronouncements was Flaubert's railing against the excessive effusiveness and fluidity that he associated with her womanhood. "Tu t'abîmes avec l'élément femelle," he warns, and he counsels elsewhere, "tu arriveras à la plénitude de ton talent en dépouillant ton sexe."4 Even more scathingly, he criticizes what he saw as her stylistic faults by accusing her of excessive femininity: "Il ne faut pas, quand on est arrivé à ton degré, que le linge sente le lait . . . comprime les seins de ton coeur, qu'on y voie des muscles et non une glande."5 Later, we [End Page 31] will see how Flaubert's focus on excess in Colet's writing—and her linen—points to his anxiety that there might be a whiff of milk from his pages as well. For now, though, Flaubert's basic message is plain: if Colet was to be any kind of writer, she ought to write like a man, preferably like Flaubert himself. Yet Colet continued, vexingly, to be a writer and not to be Flaubert. Failing to rewrite Colet or shape her aesthetic convictions after his own, Flaubert wrote Emma Bovary with a vengeance. Indeed, Janet Beizer argues persuasively that Madame Bovary is Flaubert's "most bitter note of revenge" to Colet, "his longest letter in a correspondence already officially ended."6 Written from the start as what Jacques Rancière calls the "embodiment of the wrong way," Emma the failed writer functions as a critical element in Flaubert's elaborate attempts at self-definition against "feminine" writing.7 If Flaubert permits a reading of Madame Bovary as "the portrait of an artist . . . as a young woman," as Naomi Schor suggests, this is nevertheless a degraded portrait strategically conceived so that more credit and acclaim can accrue to the male author.8 Put another way, Flaubert presents Emma as an incompetent writer so as to highlight the unique accomplishments of his narrative technique. Madame Bovary as a showpiece of originality, then, depends for its success on the denigration of a degraded representation of écriture féminine as literary practice and performance. "Les océans laiteux": Emma's Models The novel's thematic treatment of sentimental narratives—specifically as a force that destroys originality and artistic potential—is one of Flaubert's strategies for ridiculing the inferior literary company pursued by women, as exemplified by Emma. Flaubert first figures her bad taste and laughable fantasies in his depiction of her growing disillusionment with her marriage: "Emma cherchait à savoir ce que l'on entendait au juste dans la vie par les mots de félicité, de passion et d'ivresse, qui lui avaient paru si beaux dans les livres".9 This passage introduces the thread...

Microfiction Collage

Microfiction Collage Walton Muyumba (bio) Briefs: Stories From the Palm of the Mind. John Edgar Wideman. Lulu. http://www.lulu.com. 168 pages; paper, $15.99. Among contemporary American writers, few are as significant to our thinking about social justice as John Edgar Wideman is. Wideman’s books argue that in order to achieve democracy and social justice for all, we must learn to see ourselves anew, reimagining ourselves thus freeing ourselves from the economic, racial and gender categories that marginalize many of us from gaining the full benefits of American citizenship. Wideman’s most recent book, Briefs: Stories From the Palm of the Mind, is a collection of 102 microfictions. Though these short shorts repeat many themes and subjects of earlier fictional works and essay collections, Briefs is alive with newness. It’s a Widemanian expression machine, an echoing novel of ideas that’s been exploded and then rearranged as a Romare Bearden-like collage. Though evoked stories like “Installation” and “Glass Eye,” “Now You See It,” a one-sentence, cascade about blank space on the page, best represents the author’s idea about literary visuality and imagination. The blank space houses “everything the writer does not know, cannot know.” As we read, the typographical caesura expands, drawing in the whole world, including the writer’s dream dreamed up to fashion a story, to fashion a space within the story for you, your dreams…nothing survives the space, no words, no page, no safe passage the writer promised through roaring silence that closes like the sea over heads of creatures who cannot swim, the story gone before the writer’s next word. If one tries reading Briefs too quickly, these stories will envelope you in sound and image, but then ebb away, leaving almost no memory. Instead, follow Wideman’s rhythmic structures piece by piece, flowing into his blank spaces, seeing and dreaming differently. This instruction is especially significant for grasping Wideman’s conception social justice embedded deeply into this collection. His artistry flows from James Baldwin’s theory that African American artists must bear witness to American life writ large in order to expose the forces undergirding the color line’s maintenance. Adopting the concept from Christian theology, Baldwin adapted “witnessing” as his aesthetic motivation. Witnessing for truth, Baldwin’s writing reveals the fears and interests supporting claims that racial identity denotes an individual’s character. Relying on these racial markers, Americans assure themselves that democracy is functioning well “by making racial injustice appear inevitable or natural.” Baldwin’s literary “witnessing” gives “public voice to stories—especially stories about the lives of black Americans—that belie the myths of American democracy.” Wideman demonstrates his Baldwinian inheritance in “Witness,” Briefs’s second piece. Though true throughout collection, “Witness” sounds especially like an oral storytelling and demands to be read out loud. Told in the first person voice of a wheelchair-bound observer, the story is about watching a young man’s murder, the policing of the crime scene, and subsequently, the young man’s family mourning his death at the scene. Wideman positions readers as witnesses too, guiding us to imagine the dead boy’s parents and baby sister arriving “at the spot the boy died,” where they “commence to swaying, bowing, hugging, waving their arms about,” and “look like they grief dancing, like the sidewalk too cold or too hot they had to jump around not to burn up.” Flannery O’Connor’s description of the realist literary artist is an apt one for Wideman’s aesthetic: “[For] this kind of writer, the meaning of a story does not begin except at a depth where adequate motivation and adequate psychology and the various determinations have been exhausted…his way will much more obviously be the way to distortion.” Wideman’s distortions begin by launching story in medias res, apropos of nothing: “Sitting here one night six floors up on my little balcony when I heard shots and saw them boys running.” The opening sentence, with its attention-capturing once-upon-a-time oral cadence, might offer a linguistic marker of blackness, but there’s no specific evidence for this. As well, Wideman doesn’t use any racial markers...

Fabricating Defoes: From Anonymous Hack to Master of Fictions

The “Defoe” to be found in the major modern biographies and the criticism of the last four decades is a radically different person and writer from earlier Defoes. Although the notion of a “constructed” author is by now an over-worked cliché, Defoe represents an especially problematic case. Dryden, Pope, and Fielding as we now conceive them are constructions built on the basis of relatively clear (if not uncontested) materials; the evidence we possess about them is open to varying interpretations, but we have a considerable amount to work with. More than any other major eighteenth-century writer, however, our Defoe is a construction—one that is both relatively recent and of dubious validity. Until the 1960s, Defoe was regarded as a sloppy hack writer who happened to write a few interesting novels. In the last fifty years, his reputation has changed drastically: critics have reconceived him as a brilliant fiction-writer, a master craftsman, and the father of the novel. Defoe is treated very much like other canonical eighteenth-century authors, but he represents a different kind of writer and a unique set of problems, and we should therefore rethink the way we regard him and interpret his writings. For a variety of reasons—having to do with the nature of his life and work, the lack of much personal record, the anonymity and attribution problems—we are simply not on solid ground, as we are with Dryden, Pope, Fielding, or Swift.

Prensa y modernización en América Latina y Chile en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX: la crónica y los cronistas.

During the last decades of ninth century there is a change in the way of making journalism. The “information model”, as a universal tendency, leaves behind the “doctrinary press” that was predominant since the independence in Chile and Latin América, associated to the birth of the information market and the modern journalism genres. The rising journalism field was related with the automation of the intellectual field in general, that generate the presence of a new kind of writer that found in the press as well as in the chronicle a space of development, not exent of tensions and complexity. The objective is to describe and discuss this process as foundation moments that determined the evolution of the Chilean and latinamerican press till now.

Dog and Wolf

Dog and Wolf Catherine Filloux (bio) Entre chien et loup [between dog and wolf] is a multi-layered expression. It is used to describe a specific time of day, just before night, when the light is so dim you can’t distinguish a dog from a wolf. However, it’s not all about levels of light. It also expresses that limit between the familiar, the comfortable versus the unknown and the dangerous (or between the domestic and the wild). It is an uncertain threshold between hope and fear. Céline Graciet Production Notes Play is performed in one act, without an intermission. We move fluidly between locales with lights and sounds. Lana, her killer, and dream characters are heard as voice-overs. Cast of Characters Jasmina (pronounced Yas-MEE-nah), forties, a human rights worker and refugee from Bosnia; rebellious, traumatized, has a sense of style, with an Eastern European accent. (Her other name, Fatima, is pronounced Fah-TEE-mah.) Joseph , fifties, a U.S. immigration attorney; in control, tough, good sense of humor, transformative, wheelchair-bound. Judge / Mother / Waitress , a U.S. circuit court judge; a mother and a waitress who are both Eastern European. Lana , Jasmina’s deceased sister. Man , Lana’s killer. Scene One Joseph, seated in his wheelchair, is going through an application form in his office. Jasmina begins to light a cigarette. joseph There’s no smoking in here! jasmina I will need the cigarette. joseph Sorry. It says here your name is “Fatima”? [He mispronounces it.] [End Page 57] jasmina No. joseph What is your legal name? jasmina [Correcting his pronunciation.] Fatima. [She appeals to his vulnerability.] This question would require for me to have a cigarette . . . joseph Well, didn’t you read the warning from the Surgeon General? It causes cancer. jasmina [Looking at cigarette.] You Americans like to kill people with greenhouse gases, correct? No Kyoto Protocol. joseph We protect our fifth-amendment rights fiercely, our freedom to pollute. So your name is Fatima but you go by a different name? An alias? jasmina I do not know this word . . . joseph Pseudonym. jasmina Do you mean what may be referred to as the “pen name”? I am not that kind of writer. joseph No, it means you use a different name when you’re in hiding. Look, I’m overbooked. I told the PHRD that I’d see you, but if you’re not going to answer my questions . . . jasmina Yes, I am “in hiding.” They shoot through my door trying to get to me. joseph What were you doing at the door? jasmina Bell, it rang. So stupid. joseph What does that mean? jasmina I go to door. This is stupid. I am this kind of person. Door rings. Go to door. Plant garden. Expect flowers. joseph You can’t say that. jasmina What . . . ? joseph Don’t ever say you’re stupid, for our purposes. jasmina We share a purpose? joseph Your name is Fatima. For the sake of this interview. jasmina Ah, interview? joseph When did you get here? jasmina Three month ago. My organization . . . [End Page 58] joseph The PHRD? jasmina Yes, Protect Human Rights Defenders rush me to get this position, “scholar in danger,” while we apply for asylum. [Referring to cigarette.] If we do close the door, could I . . . ? joseph Sorry, it’s against the law. And this is a law firm. jasmina One young student who is working near me at university says, “I thought you’d be different?” Perhaps she think that all Muslims wear the headscarf and do not smoke? [Points to the wheelchair.] In my country it is land mines that put people in wheelchairs. Yeah, that’s what got me on Park Avenue—a land mine. What other names have you used? [Still referring to land mines.] Skull-and-crossbones signs in hills . . . What other names have you used? I do use the “disguises”—is this the term . . . ? Meaning? To hide what is my identity. What kind of disguises? Eyeglasses, different hair, hats, the scarf? The headscarf. Why? Because I am wanted. By whom? Wanted by many. I try to make joke. Is that a Bosnian joke? We’ve got about six...

A Man in Full

A Man in Full Tom Williams (bio) Ralph Ellison: A Biography. Arnold Rampersad. Knopf. http://www.randomhouse.com. 672 pages; cloth, $35.00; paper, $17.95. One of the more astute cultural critics of the twentieth century, Holden Caulfield, once asserted that the mark of a good book was "when you're done reading it, you wish the author...was a terrific friend...and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it." Unquestionably, though, had Caulfield succeeded in calling one of his favorite authors, he might not have been too enthused afterward. Who among us has not had that unsettling feeling of discovering that the author, in the flesh, is not the same as the person whom we conjure in our head as we read? The same experience, I find, occurs when one reads a biography of a writer, opening the text with predispositions toward who that writer is, and exiting the same text with the feeling that one would have been better off having not learned so much about the person whose book, as Caulfield would say, "knocks me out." Ralph Ellison has always struck me as the kind of writer that the Holden Caulfields of the world would love to call up. The indomitable power of his single novel, Invisible Man (1952), still inspires readers of all ages and ethnicities, over fifty years after its publication. But Ellison the man has always seemed lesser known. As his much anticipated second novel never appeared in his lifetime, he assumed the status of a "one book writer," and the mythology attending such a categorization overwhelmed Ellison's persona. But it's scarcely hyperbole to state that any remaining mystery about the man has been revealed by Arnold Rampersad in the superb Ralph Ellison: A Biography, as complete a portrait of such a complex character as Ellison I have ever seen. Rampersad rises to the occasion, page after page. Ellison deserves a good biographer, and though this is the first of what will undoubtedly be others, I find it difficult to imagine any subsequent match to this stunningly good book. Such praise should not surprise anyone who has read Rampersad's work before. His books on Jackie Robinson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Langston Hughes demonstrate what is on display in Ralph Ellison: Rampersad's meticulous research, graceful style, and his willingness to approach such prominent African American figures objectively. He neither seems bent on lionizing or taking them down a few pegs. Furthermore, he knows how to stay out of the way: only in the acknowledgments—and then briefly—does Rampersad discuss how he came to write the book. As well, Rampersad is as fine a scholar as he is a biographer, yet at no time does Ralph Ellison seem too academic; it is accessible to far more readers than those conversant with the mumbo jumbo of contemporary critical theory. Yet what a task before him! To write the first biography on Ralph Ellison, perhaps the most significant and/or influential African American writer of the twentieth century. Fortunately, Ellison seemed to know from an early age in Oklahoma that he might be the subject of a biography: The man wrote in his notebook nearly every day and kept everything, judging by his papers housed at the Library of Congress (and of which Rampersad makes exceptional use). Moreover, Ellison lived during so many inherently interesting periods, in such significant places, had he not written Invisible Man, he still would have been an interesting subject, merely for the circles where and among whom he did travel (legendary Tuskegee Institute, the Communist Party, among the black and white literati of Richard Wright, Gordon Parks, Chester Himes, William Styron, and Saul Bellow, to name a few). Indeed, what Rampersad is able to write is something of a cultural history—particularly the development of African American literature and art in the twentieth century; he also fashions a compelling portrait of Ellison's second wife, Fanny, a character almost as fascinating as her husband. But Ellison did write a book, an incredible novel, and Rampersad shows in great detail the artistic development Ellison underwent, from a budding classical musician with...

The African Womanist Vision in Vera's Works

Summary This article analyses the brand/s of feminism depicted in Vera's selected works as articulated in Nehanda (1993), Without a Name (1994) and The Stone Virgins (2002), in an attempt to determine her feministic vision. Vera's writings foreground female discourse in that the subject of her fiction is gender specific. In Sign and Taboo (Muponde & Taruvinga 2003), the editor suggests that Vera works outside any identifiable literary tradition, and seems to challenge reading models of any attempt to classify her as a specific kind of writer. This article, however, will attempt to place Vera's selected works within the conceptual framework of African womanism, an Afrocentric feminist ideology within the feminist paradigm. Vera seems to adopt the main tenets of African womanism as her selected works show women not only as victims of the patriarchal and colonial order, but also as an essential complementary part within an African family or communal unit. Her works centre not only on gender, but also reflect on nationalism, identity and are steeped in historicity. Much of the criticism of Vera's works by female critics has come mainly from Western literary critics whose perspectives are somewhat different from those of an African womanist. Taking the latter stance in this paper is done with the hope that the reader, as well as the writer of this article, will have a clearer understanding and conception of African womanism as a particular brand of black feminism.

Shakespeare and Elizabeth I: Icons and their Afterlives1

AbstractShakespeare and Queen Elizabeth I are each potent cultural icons in their own right, but from the 18th century to the present day their afterlives have been intertwined and mutually dependent. Despite the absence of evidence of any encounter between them, and the scant and ambivalent references to Elizabeth in Shakespeare’s works, many different kinds of writers and artists have imagined a meeting, or patronage relationship, or even intimacy between them. This article surveys this joint iconography as it has appeared not only in historical fictions, historical paintings, and costume‐dramas on film, but also in Shakespeare biography, Shakespeare criticism and the Shakespeare authorship controversy. It considers the role of this mythology in the formation of national identity in both Britain and America. It also briefly surveys recent critical work on the individual afterlives of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.

Historical dictionary of journalism

Journalism is the discipline of gathering, writing, and reporting news, and it includes the process of editing and presenting news articles. Journalism applies to various media, including but not limited to newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and the internet. The word 'journalist' started to become common in the early 18th century to designate a new kind of writer, about a century before 'journalism' made its appearance to describe what those writers produced. Though varying in form from one age and society to another, it gradually distinguished itself from other forms of writing through its focus on the present, its eye-witness perspective, and its reliance on everyday language. The Historical Dictionary of Journalism relates how journalism has evolved over the centuries. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the different styles of journalism, the different types of media, and important writers and editors.

Between the Fall of the Gang of Four and the Rise of Bestsellers

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In 1978 less than one per cent of China's urban population possessed a television set; ten years later the figure stood at nearly forth per cent, according to Joshua Aleksandr Harman in ‘Relative Deprivation and Worker Unrest in Mainland China’ (<http://mcel.pacificu.edu/aspac/papers/scholars/harman/ Harman.htm>, accessed 15 Feb. 2007). 2. In 1932 a debate over the concept of ‘Third Kind of Writer’ raged between Lu Xun on the one hand and Du Heng and Dai Wangshu on the other, who maintained that there was a third position between a bourgeois writer and a writer committed to the Party line. For more on this controversy see Gregory Lee, Dai Wangshu: The Life and Poetry of a Chinese Modernist, chapter 2. 3. At the same time it should be recalled that, even within the Communist Party and its pre-Liberation cultural front, the League of Left-Wing Writers, there were divergent politico-literary lines. The prominent metropolitan writers, such as novelist Mao Dun, were attached to a more Soviet-style socialist realism, while the Party theorist Qu Qiubai, whose ideas presaged much of what was preached at Yan'an, was critical of the use of such bourgeois forms as the novel and, in the face of mass illiteracy, favoured a recuperation of popular lyric and visual forms so as to achieve a mass democratisation of literature and culture. As for Lu Xun himself, in the late 1920s and early 1930s he had abandoned his critical realist narratives, for which he is celebrated, for a more polemical revolutionary line which he promoted in numerous essays. Both Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) and Lu Xun (1881–1936) died before their ideas and reputations could be recuperated, normalised and exploited by Communist Party theorists. For more on Shanghai literary politics see Wang-chi Wong Wang-chi Wong . Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–36 . Manchester : Manchester UP , 1991 . [Google Scholar], Politics and Literature in Shanghai: The Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers, 1930–36. 4. First published as an article in Wenyibao, II (1982). 5. Mang Ke, Mang Ke shixuan [Selected poems of Mang Ke], Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chunban gongsi, 1989. Printed and ‘published’ in February 1989 but, because of the events leading up to and following the debacle of Tiananmen and Mang Ke's history as an underground poet, this book was not distributed. When I visited Mang Ke in May 1990 in his flat in Beijing, I found him surrounded by cartons containing several hundred copies of his book that he had rescued just before they were pulped by the publisher. 6. For Bai Hua's own full account of the ‘Bitter Love’ controversy see his interview with Cheng Yingxiang in Dégel de l'intelligence en Chine 1978–1989. 7. Following Party intervention in local elections in November 1986, the dissident Fang Lizhi made controversial speeches that led to students’ demonstrations against the authorities. Hu Yaobang, the relatively liberal party chairman, was held responsible, officially criticised and forced to step down on 16 January 1987. The following week the Anti Bourgeois Liberalism campaign was re-launched. The untimely death in 1989 of Hu Yaobang and the mass mourning that followed was reminiscent of the massive mourning and demonstrations that followed the death of Premier Zhou Enlai, held in high esteem by liberal intellectuals, in 1976. The brutal suppression of the mourners, deemed counter-revolutionary by the authorities, was termed the Tiananmen Incident. Those involved were later ‘rehabilitated’, or found to be innocent and the ‘Incident’ itself labelled progressive. After the massacre at Tiananmen in 1989, the authorities declared the student occupation and demonstrations to be counter-revolutionary, and described the event once again as the ‘Tiananmen Incident’. The 1989 ‘incident’ and those who participated in the democracy movement have yet to be ‘rehabilitated’. 8. The participation in the global capitalist economy of former state-controlled socio-economies has not significantly democratised them, while democracy in those countries that ‘won’ the Cold War has suffered serious reversals.

(Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions (review)

Reviewed by: (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions Wendy Rawlings (bio) (Not That You Asked): Rants, Exploits, and Obsessions. By Steve Almond. Random House, 2007. 304 pages, cloth, $21.95. I can count on one hand the number of writers who possess the smarts, sense of humor, and guts to confront the giant sensationalist clusterfuck that passes for mainstream news these days. Of these, Steve Almond is the only one I can think of who wrote an undergraduate thesis about Kurt Vonnegut and served as the object of a Sean Hannity hissy fit on Fox News. Though Steve Almond isn't quite a household name, he's widely admired and envied in the blogosphere, where his populist appeal (his first collection of essays, [End Page 178] Candyfreak, chronicling his lifelong candy addiction, was an instant hit) and rabble-rousing make him a celebrity of the online literary establishment. Almond's an in-your-face kind of writer, a literary version of the guy at the bar with whom you strike up a conversation, only to find yourself deep in a debate about those three no-no's: politics, religion, and sex. His new collection, (Not That You Asked), capitalizes and reflects on the notoriety he has gained in the three years since Candyfreak put him on the map. Though this new book covers topics as personal as Almond's adolescent sexual humiliation, his misbegotten decision to wax his chest hair, and ten ways he thought he accidentally killed his daughter during the first three days of her life, the great achievement of (Not That You Asked) is its (a) series of fascinating analyses of the American psyche and its attendant psychosis, manifesting variously as warmongering and collective self-delusion and (b) cojones (or, in less gendered terms, chutzpah). In 2005, Almond quite publicly resigned (in an open letter to the Boston Globe) from his position as adjunct faculty at Boston College to protest the university's invitation to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to speak at commencement. The news media went wild for the story, landing Almond a guest spot on the Hannity & Colmes show on Fox News. During his appearance, Almond calmly refused no fewer than four times in about 26 seconds to answer Hannity's question about whether he voted for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. In "Demagogue Days or, How the Right-Wing Hateocracy Chewed Me up and Spat Me Out," Almond gives a play-by-play account of how he and Hannity came to square off on a split screen in front of millions of viewers. I recommend first reading Almond's description of how he tried to prepare himself to respond "when Hannity accused me of being a satanic pornographer" and then googling the Fox News segment to watch Almond keep his cool and actually get to utter the words "I believe that public officials shouldn't lie, and Condoleezza Rice has lied repeatedly," while Hannity throws a giant temper tantrum. There are plenty of vicarious thrills and lots of yuks in Almond's accounts of his brushes with everyone from Sean Hannity to P. Diddy's personal trainer, but there's also plenty of substance beneath the tasty cheese topping of his anecdotes."How Reality TV Ate My Life" hilariously recounts the taping of a segment of "Totally Obsessed" for VH1 after the publication of Candyfreak when the producers wanted him to roll around on his bed in a pile of candy. Almond mines this moment not just for its comic potential, but also as a way to interrogate his own motives and, beyond that, the strange, sad illusion of Reality TV. No matter how much we'd [End Page 179] like to trick ourselves into believing otherwise, this genre is really "about the careful construction of two central narratives: false actualization and authentic shame. The nubile bachelorette on the brink of true love with one of several men she has known for seven hours. The brazen cad who manipulates his beloved on cue." If there's one thing Almond raises to the level of art of in (Not That You Asked), it's bullshit-detecting, and if Almond's...

Turning Inward Versus Turning Outward: A Retrospective Study of the Childhoods of Creative Writers Versus Journalists

Twelve creative writers and 10 journalists were interviewed about their childhoods to explore the kinds of early indicators that may be associated with later involvement in writing as a career. Information was gathered about cognitive, socioemotional, and family factors. Cognitive factors reported by both kinds of writers included an early fascination with language and a positive attitude toward schooling. Cognitive factors also differentiated the 2 groups: the creative writers recalled an early fascination with aesthetic aspects of language and with fiction; the journalists recalled a fascination with multilingualism and the sociopolitical sphere—that is, reality, not fiction. Socioemotional factors reported by both kinds of writers included feeling different from others as children: the creative writers recalled having interests differing from those of other children; some journalists felt different because their parents were outcasts. Both groups reported solitary, introverted childhoods and yet both groups also reported having friends as children. Family factors differentiated these 2 groups: journalists recalled child-centered families; creative writers recalled turbulent, stress-filled families, much like those reported by other kinds of highly creative adults. It is concluded that cognitive and family factors differentiate 2 kinds of children with high verbal ability—those who "turn inward" to write fiction or poetry versus those who "turn outward" to report actual events.

The Revenant Charles Churchill: A Haunting of Literary History

LITERARY history has flattened out and moralized Charles Churchill into something like satirical prints that caricatured him in his own day. More symbol than substance, Churchill comes to us now in simplistic form, if he comes at all. He is vanity of misspent youth, dying ember of formal verse satire, the comet of a season, or, most often in current discussion, a mere political journalist. This last label is as misleading as it is convenient. To be sure, it accurately reflects part of Churchill's literary career, but it also neglects seriousness of some of his political commentary and blinds us to his ambitions as a poet and to his engagement with a range of contemporary philosophical and aesthetic problems. If we strip away accumulated assumptions from our understanding of Churchill, what do we find? I will address this question in three parts: (0) How did Churchill's contemporaries perceive him? (2) How have critics, anthologists and literary historians understood and represented him since his death? And (3) what kind of writer did Churchill strive to be? The answers to these questions will help us see how this once-popular poet has all but disappeared from story of English literary history. Situated in his own context, I argue, Churchill fits uneasily into categories that characterize confused period of British literature from Pope to Wordsworth: an Age of Johnson, Sensibility, Post-Augustanism, Pre-Romanticism. These categories focus attention on certain kinds of writing, and their focuses cause one

In the Dark

Teachers must deal with lights that turn off on their own, toilet paper rationing and hot water shortages in the bathrooms, and not enough books for their classes. Ms. Horn argues that asking teachers to work in these conditions while holding them accountable for dramatic improvements in student performance threatens to drive current teachers from the profession and discourages others from considering it. I AM SITTING here in the dark. When I get to school early or stay late and then sit still at my desk, the lights turn off automatically. In order to make the lights go on again I have to get up, take three mother-may-I steps from my desk, and flail my arms around. Given that it takes me about 15 minutes to grade a student essay and that I have to jump up an average of three times per paper, I'd have to say that the motion sensors are set to turn off the lights about every five minutes. The sensors are some architect's or engineer's idea of how to make energy use in the classroom more efficient. The assumption -- the beautiful, sad, I wish-it-were-so assumption -- is that when the students leave and the motion stops, so does the life of the classroom. Ha! A big fat ha! So, I'm sitting here in the dark. Sometimes, when I'm having a parent conference after school, the lights turn off, and my unwitting guests think it's a power failure. (This is California, after all.) Some of my regulars now know to flail their arms too. I know one teacher who wads up papers and throws them at the lights. (I'm hoping that it's scratch paper and not her students' work, though who knows what kinds of madness the lights inspire.) The sensors cause a kind of writer's block -- who could create under such circumstances? And then there are the bathrooms. There's no hot water. In a profession where children sneeze into their hands while simultaneously asking to borrow your pen, there is no hot water. And the toilet paper. I could create an entire metaphor for public education based on tales of toilet paper alone. The first round of a school construction project included new toilet paper holders that were rigged to prevent teachers from tearing off more than one square sheet at a time. One square sheet! We're talking about people who do not have time to get to the bathroom before the next bell rings and who are expected to work with one square sheet at a time. So I fill out a work order. I get a response: the device is rigged to prevent the careless waste of paper, but they'll go ahead and dismantle it. The result? The toilet paper won't stop flowing. It rolls and puddles on the floor. Waste galore. I wish I could stop here, but there remains the installation of the hand dryers. You know, the ones that are designed to prevent more paper waste. But the bell she is a-ringin', so we all run around wiping our cold wet hands on our laps and backsides as we head back to class. Where's the dignity? I secretly suspect that teachers, when their colleagues aren't around, have all but given up washing their hands after visiting the rest room. I ask you, What's next? The state of California wants to hold teachers and schools accountable for improving the performance of low-achieving students. And I say, yes, yes, yes! We all need to be held accountable. But, I tell you, they're making it all but impossible for a good-hearted, smart professional to do her job well. You want greater literacy? Did you know that of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, California ranks 50th in class size? An English teacher who teaches five periods a day finds herself accountable for more than 150 students. At 15 minutes per essay? That's a lot of jumping up and down. The options are downright dismal: streamline your efforts, conserve your energy, ration your desperately needed comments -- one little square at a time -- or you can just keep flailing about until you're all out of steam, of innovation, of charm. …