Love Of Literature Research Articles

Awards, Announcements, and News

Awards, Announcements, and News

Prague: The Czech Republic's “Dear Little Mother”

photos: logan webb notebook Prague City Profile Cities are like oceans: their ebbs and flows offer glimpses of their depths, providing contrasts between what we know and what they’ve yet to reveal. Similarly, Prague’s staccato bursts of modernism are juxtaposed against its wonderfully intact feudal atmosphere, creating a delicious sense of fluidity between medieval and modern. Often referred to as the city of a thousand spires, Prague’s simultaneously idyllic and austere landscape hosts the Prague Writers’ Festival (www.pwf.cz) each spring. Since its inception in 1991, the festival has sought to bring together the minds of great authors—often Nobel, Pulitzer , and Booker Prize recipients—and readers to encourage cross-cultural discussion. Proposed in the late 1970s, the festival began as a rather small poetry reading in London before relocating to Prague’s Valdštejnský Palác (Wallenstein Palace ), the home of the Czech Senate. How could the Czech Republic’s Golden City not be the perfect location for thousands of literature lovers to convene? From housing numerous royals, to hosting the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to what would have been Adolf Hitler’s home had his efforts been successful, Prague’s rich history is ubiquitous. Prague’s connection to the literary world doesn’t end with the writers’ festival. The city is peppered with literary cafés and antikvariats (used bookstores) stacked high with decades-old volumes. These locales are sure to satisfy even the most insatiable hunger for Czech literature, including, of course, the works of Prague’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, whose influence haunts every obscure alleyway, from cobbled street below to ascetic spire above. One of the most popular you-gotta-be-lost-to-find-it literary haunts is the Tynska Literary Café just beyond Old Town. Concealed in a meandering alley, Tynska’s walled courtyard sits just beneath the twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, providing a hidden nook for reading, writing, and drinking. A city of contradiction, Prague is simultaneously warm and stern, soft and severe, no doubt leading Kafka to write, “Prague never lets you go . . . this dear little mother has sharp claws.” Logan Webb is an art student at the University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma. The Czech Republic’s “Dear Little Mother” What to Read at Tynska Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors Myla Goldberg, Time’s Magpie Franz Kafka, The Trial, tr. Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (HarperCollins, 2004) Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, tr. Mike Mitchell (Dedalus, 2011) Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver, tr. Alex Zucker (Catbird Press, 2000) Logan Webb November–December 2014 • 5 ...

Prague: The Czech Republic's “Dear Little Mother”

photos: logan webb notebook Prague City Profile Cities are like oceans: their ebbs and flows offer glimpses of their depths, providing contrasts between what we know and what they’ve yet to reveal. Similarly, Prague’s staccato bursts of modernism are juxtaposed against its wonderfully intact feudal atmosphere, creating a delicious sense of fluidity between medieval and modern. Often referred to as the city of a thousand spires, Prague’s simultaneously idyllic and austere landscape hosts the Prague Writers’ Festival (www.pwf.cz) each spring. Since its inception in 1991, the festival has sought to bring together the minds of great authors—often Nobel, Pulitzer , and Booker Prize recipients—and readers to encourage cross-cultural discussion. Proposed in the late 1970s, the festival began as a rather small poetry reading in London before relocating to Prague’s Valdštejnský Palác (Wallenstein Palace ), the home of the Czech Senate. How could the Czech Republic’s Golden City not be the perfect location for thousands of literature lovers to convene? From housing numerous royals, to hosting the world premiere of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, to what would have been Adolf Hitler’s home had his efforts been successful, Prague’s rich history is ubiquitous. Prague’s connection to the literary world doesn’t end with the writers’ festival. The city is peppered with literary cafés and antikvariats (used bookstores) stacked high with decades-old volumes. These locales are sure to satisfy even the most insatiable hunger for Czech literature, including, of course, the works of Prague’s most famous son, Franz Kafka, whose influence haunts every obscure alleyway, from cobbled street below to ascetic spire above. One of the most popular you-gotta-be-lost-to-find-it literary haunts is the Tynska Literary Café just beyond Old Town. Concealed in a meandering alley, Tynska’s walled courtyard sits just beneath the twin spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Týn, providing a hidden nook for reading, writing, and drinking. A city of contradiction, Prague is simultaneously warm and stern, soft and severe, no doubt leading Kafka to write, “Prague never lets you go . . . this dear little mother has sharp claws.” Logan Webb is an art student at the University of Science & Arts of Oklahoma. The Czech Republic’s “Dear Little Mother” What to Read at Tynska Caleb Crain, Necessary Errors Myla Goldberg, Time’s Magpie Franz Kafka, The Trial, tr. Breon Mitchell (Schocken Books, 1998) Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, tr. Michael Henry Heim (HarperCollins, 2004) Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, tr. Mike Mitchell (Dedalus, 2011) Jáchym Topol, City Sister Silver, tr. Alex Zucker (Catbird Press, 2000) Logan Webb November–December 2014 • 5 ...

Teaching the Shakespeare of Mathematics

During my year as President of The Mathematical Association the government began a review of the curriculum across all subjects taught in school. Given the constant tinkering with the education system by every government, this is probably a sentence that any MA president could write during their tenure. But 2013 saw government really trying to layout their vision for what education should deliver in the coming decade.In English, an aim of the curriculum review is to develop a student's love of literature through widespread reading for enjoyment. Students will get to read Shakespeare, romantic poetry, the great novels of the nineteenth century together with seminal works of world literature. It is hoped that this will expose students to the great works of literature and allow them to acquire an appreciation of ‘our rich and varied literary heritage’ [1, p. 13].In science, by building on fundamental ideas and concepts, the curriculum review aims to foster in students ‘a sense of excitement and curiosity about natural phenomena’ [1, p. 99]. Students will study the fundamental mechanics of the cell, learn about stem cells, photosynthesis and genomics; they will be exposed to radiation (in a theoretical sense) and the evidence for the Big Bang. Such fundamental ideas will give students the scientific knowledge to be able to understand the uses and implications for the impact of science on society.

Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde ed. by Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Katheryn Starkey (review)

Reviewed by: Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde ed. by Jutta Eming, Ann Marie Rasmussen, and Katheryn Starkey Joan Tasker Grimbert jutta eming, ann marie rasmussen, and katheryn starkey, eds., Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. 355. isbn: 978–0–268–04139–7. $45. This fine and gorgeously illustrated collection of twelve essays grew out of a conference held at Duke University and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2007. Noting that the Tristan legend is the most widely depicted secular story of the Middle Ages and that it is both pan-European and cross-medial, the editors invited medievalists from different fields to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue on the twin themes of visuality and materiality. Although these themes overlap, ‘visuality’ refers to depictions conveying specific meanings and to images, objects, performance, and processes of visually perceiving, while ‘materiality’ refers to objects, manuscripts, and places on and in which the story appears, as well as the construction of space, objects, bodies, and material signs. Although the title and the editors’ goals strongly imply that the essays will range over several ‘national’ literatures, the volume is resolutely and unapologetically German-centric and focused squarely on Gottfried von Strassburg: eleven of the thirteen contributors are from departments of German, and six of the essays are on Gottfried, with one other on Hans Sachs. The volume begins with an excellent introduction in which the editors provide a rationale for their project, define their two key terms, offer a brief survey of critical trends used to interpret the legend, and describe the various essays, underscoring links among many of them. The essays in part I, ‘Courtly Bodies, Seeing, and Emotions,’ reframe the classical debates on Gottfried by underscoring the importance of seeing and visualization in the representation of love in his poem. Asserting that visuality is the core of courtly life, Jan-Dirk Müller (‘The Light of Courtly Society: Blanscheflur and Riwalin’) claims that the love of Tristan’s parents, unlike that of Tristan and Isolde, is called leal because it confirms what everyone can see. In ‘How to Find Love in Literature: Reading Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and His Cave of Lovers,’ Haiko Wandhoff seeks to show that the re-creation of the love grotto is a mise-en-abyme of a work in which Gottfried and Tristan find love through artistic endeavors, and the reader does so by refined interpretation. James A. Schultz (‘Why Do Tristan and Isolde Make Love? The Love Potion as a Milestone in the History of Sexuality’) argues that neither Eilhart nor Gottfried cares why their protagonists fall in love and seek consummation; refusing to treat these questions, the authors use the love potion to [End Page 129] mark their distance from medieval doctors and theologians, who invoke, respectively, ‘appetites’ and ‘concupiscence’: for them, the cause of love is simply love. Ludger Lieb (‘Seeing Love in the World of Lovers: Late Medieval Love Literature as a Fulfillment of Gottfried’s Tristan’) examines Minnereden (discourses on love) to show how, by making love visible through personification, allegory, and symptoms, they extend and elaborate core concepts of Tristan’s love, as set forth explicitly in Gottfried’s prologue. Part II, ‘Media, Representation, and Performance,’ explores the reshaping of the legend for different media. Michael Curschmann (‘From Myth to Emblem to Panorama’) traces the legend from the earliest French verse poems through its crystallization in a single image (the orchard scene) to its change of medium and focus in Malory’s ‘Arthuriad’—and already, I would argue, in the French Prose Tristan—and finally to Swinburne’s 18th-century epic renewal of the legend, which infuses it with some of the original energy. Elke Koch (‘Framing Tristan—Taming Tristan? The Materiality of Text and Body in Hans Sachs’s Tragedia’) describes the strategies that Sachs uses in dramatizing the prose Tristrant and Isalde to represent love as a dangerous drive that he ‘contains’ by limiting all commentary to the prologue and epilogue, where the herald provides an explicitly moral and repressive view. Amanda Luyster’s title, ‘Time, Space, and...

Beyond Narcissism: What Science Fiction Can Offer Literature

1. Never did it occur to me that I would ever be this closely associated with the world of literature, especially as I to this day feel no particular fondness for it. Many roads lead into the courtyard of science fiction: some spring from the love of literature, others from the passion for science. I took the latter path. Nowadays, humans can circle the globe in less than an hour, yet the light of the farthest visible galaxies has traveled for fifteen billion years before reaching us. If one were to see all of time—from the birth of the universe to now—as a single year, humanity would emerge in the very last second. But in all my limited experience with literature, I constantly hear a whisper in my ear, telling me that only this speck of a world and that tiny flash of a moment since humanity’s appearance is worth experiencing and representing. The entire vastness of all other space and time is not even worth a glance. After all, it is devoid of humans and of humanity, and literature is the epicenter of the humanities. In the world of literature, humanity exceeds all other attractions and the Sun and all other stars revolve around us. If the universe is the Sahara, then all that makes the Earth a grain of gold within it is that particular bacteria called humanity that clings to its surface. It means nothing to the whole of the desert. In literature, however, the Sun exists for no other reason than to illuminate the pure, unadulterated countryside, the Moon has no other reason to shine than to cast the shadows of seaside lovers—and the Milky Way need hardly exist at all. Because of this, literature has always given me the impression of indulging an intense anthropocentric narcissism. Of course, within a four-light-year radius we are the only intelligent life form (we are sure of that, at least at the moment), which grants humanity some cause for narcissism. Even so, some people want to experience more than this. They do not want their minds to be limited solely to this cosmic speck of dust and so are doing all they can to transcend this narcissism. In the field of literature, the most conscious effort in this regard is being made in the field of science fiction.

Rękopiśmienny zbiór pieśni maryjnych Józefa Urody z Buczkowic / The Manuscript Collection of Marian Songs by Józef Uroda of Buczkowice

Józef Uroda (1901-1956), today entirely forgotten, was an organist at the Transfiguration church in Buczkowice near Szczyrk from 1925 to 1942. At that time he was a significant figure in the cultural and artistic life of his village. He was engaged in many kinds of activities: he conducted the parish choir, collected and noted down religious songs, composed musical pieces, wrote poetry, theatrical plays, and translated from foreign languages. An ardent lover of literature and theater, he set up a theater group, which embraced young and older people, with whom he staged some plays (Mazepa by Juliusz Słowacki, Zemsta [The Revenge] by Aleksander Fredro, Chata za wsią [The Cottage behind the Village] by Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, or Zemsta Cygana [Gypsy’s Revenge] by Seweryn Goszczyński). He was also active in his community, taking part in the local cultural and educational undertakings. He cooperated with OMTUR [Youth Organization of the Workers’ University Association]), sat on the Board of the Buczkowice section of the People’s School Society, and he was a member of the Polish Gymnastics Association “Sokół” [Falcon]. During the German Nazi occupation he was imprisoned in the concentration camp Polenlager 92 in Kietrz for two years. He died in Buczkowice in 1956. In the musical collections left by J. Uroda, there is his manuscript collection of Marian songs of 1936, titled Ave Maria! Największy zbiór pieśni religijnych do N. Maryi Panny [Ave Maria. The Largest collection of religious songs to Virgin Mary]. This is a large song collection containing as many as 343 Marian songs. It should be added that the collection was not completed, it had been planned to contain 420 songs. The Marian repertory collected by Uroda is impressive because of its vastness and diversity. The songs are intended for the Feasts of Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Loreto, Espousal of Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Lourdes, Purification of Virgin Mary, the Annunciation, Virgin Mary of Perpetual Help, Virgin Mary Assisting the Faithful, Virgin Mary the Gracious, Visitation by Virgin Mary, Virgin Mary Refuge of the Sinners, Our Lady of the Scapular, Our Lady of the Angels, Our Lady of Snows, the Assumption, Our Lady of Częstochowa, Our Lady of Consolation, Our Lady of Sorrows, Our Lady of La Salette, Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady the Merciful, and the Feast of Oblation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many songs are written for Marian months – May and October. A large set of songs consists of pilgrim songs, sometimes associated with a specific sanctuary or place (“To Our Lady of Gidle near Częstochowa”, “On Virgin Mary in the Floriańska Gate in Krakow”, ”To Our Lady at Piasek in Krakow”, “To Our Lady of Piekary”). Uroda chose this repertory mainly from published songbooks and collections containing organ accompaniments to songs – mostly from the collections of Ryszard Gillar and Tomasz Flasza, moreover, from those of Rev. Michał Marcin Mioduszewski, Rev. Franciszek Walczyński, Rev. Jan Siedlecki, Rev. Józef Surzyński, Teofil l Klonowski, and Rev. Emilian Schindler. From the cognitive point of view it is most important that Józef Uroda’s Marian collection contains over twenty previously unknown songs, which enrich the Polish Marian repertory and shed additional light on it, especially with regard to Poland’s southern regions. These are both previously unknown melodies and song texts and Polish contrafacta of German songs. Among these unidentified and previously unknown items there are six songs authored by Józef Uroda: his three compositions – Do Marii pospieszajmy [Let us hurry to Virgin Mary] Dzwoneczku nasz miły [Our lovely bell] and Tam, gdzie cudowny [Where the miraculous… ]); and his three contrafacta of German songs – Jak wiosny kwiat [Like a spring flower] (for an unidentifi ed German tune), Mario! maja Królowo [Mary, the Queen of May] (for the song melody of Maria, Maienkönigin) and źródło łaski, witaj nam [Be greeted, the Source of Grace] (for the song melody of Gnadenquelle, sei gegrüsst).

Remembering James M. Cox

Remembering James M. Cox George Core James Cox was born in Independence, Virginia, in August of 1925. His ancestral home, a handsome three-story white frame house, with a stream running through the backyard and into a springhouse with a mill upstream, has stood for well over a century. It and its surrounding four hundred acres were as much a part of Jim as his love of literature, especially such American writers as Hawthorne, Emerson, Henry* Adams, Mark Twain, and Robert Frost. Independence was the perfect place for Jim Cox to have been born and raised and to have spent his youth and his old age, for nobody was more independent than Jim. And during World War ii he fought (as a submariner on the Dragonet) to help preserve this country’s independence. After the war he completed his education at the University of Michigan (ba, ma) and at the Indiana University (Ph.D.). His graduate work was punctuated by two years of teaching at Emory and Henry College. Afterward he spent most of his career teaching, with great distinction, at Dartmouth College, where he earned a Harbison Distinguished Teaching Award from the Danforth Foundation in 1968 and an Avalon Humanities Award the next year. He received fellowships from Indiana University School of Letters, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. I first got to know Jim by writing him about some of his essays in the Virginia Quarterly Review, then edited by Charlotte Kohler. His natural mode was the essay, and he wrote regularly for many years for the Sewanee Review (beginning with “Remarks on the Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn” in 1954 and ending with a tribute to Lewis Simpson in 2003) and the Southern Review, as well as the Virginia Quarterly. He published an anthology of criticism on Frost; his magnum opus, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966, recently reprinted); and a selection of pieces on autobiography, Recovering Literature’s Lost Ground. He had more than enough essays for another book on American literature but chose not to republish them. Jim was a brilliant teacher and lecturer whose greatest interests were humor and autobiography. Humor defined him as a quick-witted and engaging man whose cleverness was always in play. No one knew more about humor than Jim Cox or was more humorous. His departure from our sullen world leaves it a duller and darker place. [End Page 1] Footnotes * See his “Beneath My Father’s Name,” Sewanee Review (summer 1991). Copyright © 2012 University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee

"Too Many Young Men Who Smoke Pipes": Time, Inc. and the Interst itial Intellectual

"Too Many Young Men Who Smoke Pipes":Time, Inc. and the Interst itial Intellectual Jennifer Burns (bio) Robert Vanderlan . Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art, and Ideas Inside Henry Luce's Media Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. 392 pp. Illustrations, archival sources, notes, and index. $49.95. In this insightful revisionist history, Robert Vanderlan uses a biographical and cultural approach to challenge idealized visions of the American intellectual as a detached seeker of truth floating loftily above the fray of commercial life, arguing instead for a vision of the "interstitial" intellectual who works most productively and consequentially while embedded in institutions, in this case Henry Luce's Time, Inc. As case studies, Vanderlan selects a varied cast of both leading lights and lesser-known writers and photographers, from Walker Evans to Daniel Bell. All of them worked for Luce at various points in time, and Vanderlan shows that Luce was both censor and muse. Luce did not give his writers free rein, intending his magazines to portray his views rather than theirs. But this was a productive tension, Vanderlan argues, for as they pushed back against the boss, the interstitial intellectuals developed "perspectives, ideas, arguments, and criticisms unavailable to intellectuals working from outside this corporate environment" (p. 3). Moreover, they found in Luce's magazines a way to resolve the deep ambivalence many felt "about the value of living an intellectual life divorced from practical concerns" (p. 11). Rather than see their work for Luce as mere "selling out," Vanderlan argues that something far more complex was happening when lauded poets, essayists, and photographers signed on to Time, Life, and Fortune. Assessing their cultural and political impact, he suggests in closing that more was lost than gained when their peers in later generations turned from the crass commercialism of mass-market magazines to the quiet groves of academe. Vanderlan uses the biographical approach to tease apart the thicket of motives that drew intellectuals to Time, Inc. In the first place, he notes pragmatically that even those who live on ideas need bread, too. But, more significantly, his careful attention to context and archive helps establish that writers such as Archibald MacLeish and Dwight MacDonald joined Luce's empire for reasons other than pecuniary ones. Examining the history of MacLeish's [End Page 101] work for Fortune magazine, for example, he establishes that MacLeish had begun working for Luce prior to the stock-market crash that later biographers used to explain his decision. What, then, drew him and the others to Time, Inc.? While Vanderlan's subjects might need their daily bread like everyone else, almost more urgent was their need for influence and status. In deft biographical sketches, Vanderlan traces the path of MacLeish, MacDonald, and Time editor T. S. Matthews through comfortable childhoods, prep school high-jinks, and Ivy League literary pretensions. This was an elite group of men, raised in comfort and trained for power. Nor were they immune to the broader cultural celebration of business in the 1920s. Their love for literature could mitigate, but never overcome, this class background. Many struggled with the feeling that intellectual life was somehow "inconsequential" (p. 59). These were suppositions Luce shared, and he used them to skillfully draw writers into his empire, offering them "a double identity as both creative writers and well paid professionals" (p. 31). Working for Luce allowed writers to at once embrace their intellectual aspirations, achieve the success expected by their families, and exercise the cultural and political leadership they had been bred to assume. Most were recruited to Fortune, Luce's pet project, which quickly assumed an important and unexpected role as a critic of corporate capitalism amid the Great Depression. When Luce founded Fortune in 1929, he intended it to advance an ideal of enlightened corporate stewardship. Instead, pushed leftward by the tide of events and the intellectuals Luce had brought aboard, Fortune became a magazine that, at least in its early years, helped legitimate "a historic shift in American politics, away from the private and corporate control Luce had advocated and toward the acceptance of a new set of social rights protected by an expanded federal government" (p. 91). Fortune provides Vanderlan's...

Polonya siirinde askın serüveni – ı Orta Çağ’dan Realizm’e

The motive of love in literature has been reflected variously according to the different cultures for the ages. This variation is caused not only by the geographical and cultural differences but by the historical events and literary movements also. In Polish poetry the motive of love changes from time to time. In this study the motive of love which is seen in Polish literature from middle ages to realism is analyzed.

Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins (review)

Reviewed by: Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins Kathleen Rooney Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture. By Jim Collins. Durham: Duke University Press. 2010. An alternate subtitle for Jim Collins’ Bring on the Books for Everybody—less concise, but perhaps more accurate—might be “How Literary Culture Has Been Affected by the Same Market Forces that Every Other Aspect of Consumer Culture Has Been Affected by.” [End Page 179] In this engaging study of how literary reading has been incorporated into visual and electronic media, Collins considers how, through pervasive consumerism, an impulse toward self-improvement, and a widespread desire to use literature (like virtually all other purchases) as a lifestyle signifier, the formerly solitary activity has been reborn as a social expression of value and taste. Collins examines how books are consumed, concluding that “the love of literature can now be fully experienced only outside the academy and the New York literary scene” (3), and observing that “The most profound change in literary America after the rise of postmodern fiction [. . .] was the complete redefinition of what literary reading means within the heart of electronic culture.” He analyzes online book retailers, chain superstores, literary adaptation films and Oprah’s Book Club, delivering rich case studies of how such relatively new institutions—which affect how books are distributed and valued—have profoundly altered when and where “literary” experience takes place. Readers seeking arguments about these developments may be disappointed. Collins’ stated aim is to remain in the realm of the descriptive, and he adheres to this objective almost without fail. In his introduction, he explains: “My goal in this book is to trace the contours of a particular ‘media ecology’ shaped by the increasing convergence of literary, visual and material cultures” (8); although he expresses hope that it will not, the account sometimes comes across as detachedly observational. Mostly, though, Collins’ writing is personable and accessible, and he draws on his expertise as a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame to maintain appropriate ambivalence and to avoid speciously pitting various media against one another in a zero-sum game. For instance, he does good service to his subject by permitting himself to argue that notions like those espoused in the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk—which asserted “that reading books and viewing electronic media are mutually antagonistic experiences”—are “troubling” conclusions based on a “highly debatable interpretation of data” (14). Collins is best when most argumentative, as when, in the final chapter, he critiques “the relationship between the type of beauty offered by reading literary fiction and other sorts of aesthetic beauty, specifically those offered by material culture” (226). Here he notes that “Literary critics have theorized about the pleasure of the text for the past three decades,” and “In much the same way, the pleasures furnished by material objects have also been theorized [. . .] by sociologists eager to identify the underlying desires that animate consumer culture,” and concludes that “I know of no attempt to situate the two in reference to each other” (226). Though critical at times of “the academy,” Collins comes across as a passionate teacher, often invoking student reactions in his analyses, and the book seems to reflect his commitment to fostering discussion; because it refuses—sometimes frustratingly, other times wisely—to offer a unified argument, Collins’ project stands as an invitation for readers to draw their own conclusions based on a wealth of curated evidence. [End Page 180] Kathleen Rooney DePaul University Copyright © 2012 Mid-America American Studies Association

Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor by Rob Nixon

78 World Literature Today reviews daydreams about the literature he left behind, his beloved library, and how texts changed and adopted new meanings in his memories. He recounts his fury that a Chilean guilty of horrific war crimes relished a classical symphony that Dorfman loves. The same song both connects him and distances him from his enemy. Later in life it helps Dorfman recognize the enemy’s humanity. Language itself is as fluid and interconnected as the author’s elusive sense of identity throughout the memoir . It is written in English but includes phrases in Dorfman’s native Chilean Spanish and various European languages as he vagabonds through Paris and Amsterdam. Dorfman called this book “my therapy, mi última palabra [my last word] . . . to look back so I can stop looking back.” Working through the collision of multiple identities and syntaxes, he ultimately resolves to identify as both American and Chilean. Dorfman’s “confessions of an unrepentant exile” fluctuate between locations, tenses, and years. Although a timeline is included in the back, he discourages relying on it. He inhabits multiple, at times overlapping, identities : a Latin American communist revolutionary, an American intellectual , the star of an award-winning film, a writer, and a refugee. Throughout it all the only constant is his love of literature. This memoir is testament to Arial Dorfman’s unique talent for exceeding the boundaries of genre and his ability to turn an array of confusing events into meaningful prose. Leigh Cuen Qiryat Bialik , Israel Rob Nixon. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press. 2011. isbn 9780674049307 Rob Nixon is a prolific writer who contributes frequently to the New York Times and has penned work for the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, the Guardian, and more. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor is Nixon’s fourth book exploring relationships to the natural world in the postcolonial era. The work investigates the notion of what he calls “slow violence,” the often invisible, ephemeral, slow-leak effects of environmental crises such as nuclear fallout, oil spills, deforestation , and war. It is primarily concerned with the effects of such violence on peoples of the global South, and the ways in which such effects are largely ignored by mainstream environmentalist rhetoric. The book begins with a clear and thorough introduction in which Nixon lays out his primary concerns. He aims to rethink the slow violence of environmental destruction, confront the representational challenges posed by doing so, and consider an environmentalism of the poor, the primary victims of slow violence. At the same time, he celebrates those environmental writers and activists who use their own work to decry the environmental degradation wrought upon underrepresented groups. In eight dense chapters, Nixon investigates the literary tradition of the picaresque as a tool for reading time; neoliberalism and the urban poor; oil despots and the tricky notion of “resource curse”; minority water rights and the plight of the Ogoni; the particularities of gender oppression and environmental violence; modernity, imagined communities and the megadam; race and tourism; precision warfare; and the complicated relationships between environmentalism , postcolonialism, and the narrow field of American studies. Throughout, Nixon gracefully incorporates a literary framework provided by the texts of authors such as Indra Sinha, Rachel Carson, Ken Saro-Wiwa, June Jordan, Njabulo Ndbele, Arundhati Roy, and others. While Nixon has long been an important voice in the meeting of environmentalism, the humanities, and postcolonial studies, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor raises the volume. The work is groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice , as well as its investigation of both the power and challenges inherent in creative representation. Furthermore, it is unique in its push beyond the local and national confines so often applied to environmental writing and literary criticism. Adamantly transnational in his approach, Nixon is able to pay due respect to the local in terms of individual social structures and geographical particularities while also crossing geopolitical boundaries . In its attention to “unforeseeable imaginative connection,” Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor challenges readers to new...

John Taylor Coleridge, Forgotten Editor of The Quarterly Review

In late 1824, aged 34, John Taylor Coleridge (1790–1876) inherited the editorship of The Quarterly Review from its founding editor William Gifford. A London lawyer with literary ambitions, a famous surname, and impeccable Oxford credentials, young Coleridge must have seemed destine for prominence in London’s literary circles. Instead, he prepared a mere four issues, March, June, October, and December 1825, before falling from favor with publisher John Murray and relinquishing his post to novice editor John Lockhart. Coleridge’s rapid rise and fall have been either forgotten or misunderstood. His biographer, Timothy Toohey, frames Coleridge’s life story around the legal profession, dismissing his periodical work as “prompted less by his love of literature than his need to earn additional income.” 1 Joanne Shattock’s excellent history of the Quarterly during the early nineteenth century notes that Coleridge’s commitment to the editorial profession is “unclear” and concludes, “in retrospect, it was generally assumed that [Coleridge] had taken the editorship temporarily.” 2 Regardless of his motivation or depth of commitment, Coleridge eagerly sought his fortune as editor in the turbulent world of the London periodical press. 3 Editors and the periodicals they served came and went, and only a few editors, notably Gifford and Lockhart at the Quarterly and Francis Jeffrey at the Edinburgh Review, achieved longevity. Coleridge’s place in the topsy-turvey profession might have remained a footnote in studies of the Quarterly but for the British Library’s 2006 acquisition from the Coleridge estate of thirty-five volumes of John’s private journals. Documenting Coleridge’s life from 1811 when he entered Oxford to his death in 1876, the journals shed new light on his remarkable life, including his interaction with the London periodical press. The purpose of this essay, then, is to use the newly available material to establish Coleridge’s brief but spectacular trajectory in the periodical profession: his tortured relationship

The original of Laura (Dying is fun)

This legendary novel has been the source of much anxiety and contention for Nabokov's fans - and family. late Vladimir Nabokov requested that this unfinished work be destroyed, but his son, Dmitri, did not oblige, although neither did he allow the work to be published - until now. The Original of Laura is about a wonderfully large man called Philip Wild, married to a very promiscuous woman, and whose meditations concern the nature of death. novel was complete in Nabokov's mind, though he died before he could translate his vision on to paper. It is hard, however, to imagine any scholars, Nabokov enthusiasts or literature lovers being disappointed by even these fragments.

The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics From Spitzer to Frye (review)

Reviewed by: The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics From Spitzer to Frye Mary Anne O'Neil The Twentieth-Century Humanist Critics From Spitzer to Frye, by William Calin; 267 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007, $27.95. In The Twentieth-Century Humanists from Spitzer to Frye, William Calin examines the contributions of eight scholar-critics who produced their most important work between the mid-1930s and the early 1960s, before the advent of contemporary critical theory. Five are from Continental Europe. Leo Spitzer, Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach were German-language students of Romance literatures, while Albert Béguin and Jean Rousset, both speakers of French, were leading figures of the Geneva school. Calin also includes English-language scholars: the Oxford don C. S. Lewis, the American F. O. Mathiessen, and the Canadian Northrop Frye. Calin's goal is threefold. He wants to draw distinctions between the mid-twentieth century American New Critics, who rejected extra-textual approaches in their readings, and these eight men, all of whom brought a deep knowledge of classical and biblical literature, history and, often, philosophy, to their interpretation of texts. Secondly, he argues that all eight participate in the humanist tradition that extends from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century because they believed in the continuity of a unique Western culture and celebrated the power of great books of the Western world to liberate the individual and improve society. Finally, Calin appeals to contemporary literary theorists of many stripes—post-colonialists, queer theorists, feminists—to recognize these men as their predecessors, since they too fought culture wars of their own times by pitting themselves against dominant academic discourses. Ultimately, they succeeded in expanding the literary canon and opening literary study to a non-academic, generally educated audience. Calin's book is divided into two parts, followed by extensive notes and an almost thirty-page bibliography of works on theory and general criticism as well as on the primary works of his subjects and the critical literature devoted to them. Part I consists of eight short chapters, one on each of the humanist critics. The chapters are brief, with the longest on Northrop Frye only twenty pages, and all follow a similar pattern that begins with an exposition of each scholar's contributions to the study of literature. He credits the philologist [End Page 260] Spitzer with revolutionary readings of Romance literatures from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, Curtius for demonstrating the centrality of the Middle Ages to European culture, and Auerbach for his work on the representation of reality from Homer to Virginia Woolf as well as for his application of biblical exegesis to the study of medieval texts. Beguin was among the first to trace the origins of modernism to post-1850 France and to identify the German Romantics as the predecessors of the French moderns. Rousset radically revised our understanding of the French seventeenth-century. C. S. Lewis introduced allegory, courtly love, and the quest as the underlying structures of medieval literature. Mathiessen invented American Studies while also placing American writers in the context of world literature. Frye's most noteworthy contribution was his demonstration of the centrality of the Bible to Western literature, a belief which led him to formulate a cyclical view of literary history. Calin examines each critic's works for evidence of a methodology. He concludes that only Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) is a theoretical work. What guides all eight humanist critics is a love of literature. Calin's praise of Lewis as " a sensitive, passionate, committed reader of books" (p. 91) applies equally to the other seven men he studies. In the course of each chapter, Calin points out the affinities between his subjects and most schools of literary theory that have arisen since the 1970s, including reader response, narratology, intertextuality, structuralism, archetypal and Marxist criticism, and postcolonial studies. Finally, Calin resumes the critical literature on each of these writers and evaluates it objectively. Whatever their shortcomings, all eight were solid scholars who produced innovative interpretations and treated the texts they studied with generosity and respect. All performed "critiques des beautés and not a reading for evil" (p. 147), that is...

The Cold Dish , and: Death without Company , and: Kindness Goes Unpunished , and: Another Man’s Moccasins , and: The Dark Horse (review)

Reviewed by: The Cold Dish, and: Death without Company, and: Kindness Goes Unpunished, and: Another Man’s Moccasins, and: The Dark Horse Ann Ronald The Cold Dish. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2005. 354 pages, $14.00. Death without Company. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2006. 271 pages, $14.00. Kindness Goes Unpunished. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2007. 288 pages, $14.00. Another Man’s Moccasins. By Craig Johnson. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. 290 pages, $14.00. The Dark Horse. By Craig Johnson. New York: Viking Penguin, 2009. 318 pages, $24.05. Usually a book-a-year output from either a writer of Westerns or a writer of detective stories would invite an unfortunate condemnation: formulaic genre writer. In the case of Craig Johnson, author of five recent Walt Longmire mysteries, that label would be wrong. Each of his novels is vigorously plotted, psychologically complex, and inherently thoughtful. While Johnson acknowledges a debt to James Crumley, he actually extends the range of the noir Western mystery far beyond his predecessor’s accomplishments. The settings, stories, and situations are shrewd, sophisticated, and smart. They tease the formula; they turn it upside down. The West itself is fully realized, a full-fledged rural Wyoming with its blizzards, its isolation, its tight-knit communities, its gossip, its distinctive inhabitants. Scenic descriptions resonate: “The clouds were dappled like the hindquarters of an Appaloosa colt, and the beauty kicked just as hard. The head wind rattled the bare limbs of the cottonwoods as the longer branches swayed, and the remnants of grass and sage shuddered close to the ground” (Cold Dish 334). The people resonate, too, their personalities distinct and their quirks quite charming. Each novel stars Sheriff Longmire, an aging Vietnam vet who, despite his easygoing manner and love of literature, always gets his man—usually in violent fashion. The posse ensemble includes Vic (his Philadelphia-trained deputy who finds herself in unfamiliar territory), Ruby (the shrewd dispatch voice of organizational competence), and Santiago “Sancho” Saizarbitoria (a Basque lawman who arrives on the scene in the second book and stays). Even more compelling is the sheriff’s best friend, Henry Standing Bear, a Cheyenne sidekick whose inherent wisdom and physical prowess rescue Longmire from some very tough spots. He may be a Tonto look-alike, but it’s often Standing Bear’s competence that steers the plots toward successful completion. [End Page 400] So Johnson gives his readers a heroic sheriff, an Indian sidekick, a faithful posse, and larger-than-life solutions to mystery and mayhem. Sounds like genre fiction. Right? Wrong. The isolated terrain and the distinctive characters and the random murders totally transcend easy labels. Several things carry the novels beyond the stereotypes. First is the sense of community. Each novel centers on a subset of communal interactions. In The Cold Dish, it’s the Cheyennes; in Death without Company, it’s the Basques; in Kindness Goes Unpunished, where Longmire and Standing Bear travel east, it’s Philadelphia’s Italian neighborhoods; in Another Man’s Moccasins, it’s the heritage of Vietnam; in The Dark Horse, it’s the cowboy and his horse. In each case, the micro-world is tightly wrought and convincingly portrayed. Only in Philadelphia does the sheriff seem out of his element. He belongs in the West, I think, because he’s the laconic western hero, although he’s a lawman with many more dimensions than a Gunsmoke or Hopalong Cassidy fan might imagine. Given his western-ness, then, the four novels set in Wyoming are more believable than the one set totally elsewhere. Ironically, though, to me the most compelling of Johnson’s Wyoming books is Another Man’s Moccasins, where intercut Vietnam scenes from the past drum a rhythmic counterpoint to the present-day plot. In any event, community is crucial. Another highlight of the novels, alongside those unique communal focal points, is a strong Native American component. Henry Standing Bear is nothing like a foil. Rather, he guides the narrative lines and instructs Longmire along the way. The sheriff reacts intuitively, often assimilating what appear to be Native reactions and Native responses to narrative surprises. It might...

Brand Relationships and Switching Behaviour for Highly Used Products in Young Consumers

Consumer-brand relationships is an evolving area of study. The purpose of this study is to: establish that brand relationships postulated in the literature exist along all dimensions for young consumers in the emerging market context investigate the influence of peers, family, and brand relationships on switching intentions amongst young consumers examine the impact of price changes on switching intentions in the context of brand relationships. This is an empirical study focusing on the brand relationships amongst young consumers in the age range of 13 to 25 years in an emerging economy. Data were collected from 214 respondents from the SEC A and B categories in a city in Western India through a questionnaire administered in the presence of the researchers. The results indicate that: young consumers do form relationships with brand(s) on all the six dimensions of consumer brand relationship that have been postulated in the literature love and passion dimension of brand relationship is stronger amongst teenagers as compared to young adults. The second part of the paper looks at the influence of the social groups like family and peers on the switching behaviour in presence of brand relationship dimensions where, we found that family has a relatively stronger influence than peers. Finally, it looks at the effect of price comparison on brand relationship. It is found that consumers do compare price irrespective of how strong the brand relationship is. This may be an artifact of the higher price consciousness in the Indian environment that is found amongst consumers across income groups. The future directions and limitations are discussed at the end.

Teacher to Teacher: Literature in the Mathematics Classroom: Introducing The Inch Boy to Middle School Students

I was sitting in a faculty meeting when my principal suggested that teachers of all disciplines should read to their students. I remember thinking to myself, These are middle school students. They should know how to read already. My principal continued by explaining that reading aloud to a class is an excellent and effective way to in-still the love of literature in students. I was doubtful, and thought, I'm a math teacher. We don't have time to read books in math. As if he were reading my mind, the principal gave examples of how teachers of all disciplines, including mathematics, could incorporate literature into their lessons. I was skeptical but decided to give it a try.

David Goldblatt, MD (1930–2007)

American neurology lost a leading voice in medical humanities, ethics, and professionalism when David Goldblatt, MD, died of metastatic urethral carcinoma on September 1, 2007, at age 77 at his home in Penn Yan, New York. In a career spent almost entirely at the University of Rochester, David distinguished himself as a clinician, teacher, medical editor, and tireless advocate for compassionate patient care. David was born in 1930 in Cleveland. His mother imbued him with a love of literature, particularly poetry, in which he was both an expert and prolific practitioner. His father Harry was a pathologist, known to generations of physiology students from his work showing the renal arterial cause of hypertension. The name Goldblatt will forever be associated with the kidney experiment he conducted. When David underwent a nephrectomy …

Richard Hoggart as literary critic

This article shows how Hoggart uses a literary method to represent the working class and literary critical methodology to engage with popular culture. I examine Hoggart as a literary critic, using examples from his earliest book on Auden to show how the working-class intellectual engages with canonical literature in a ‘high’ art form and then I consider a range of his writings about literature to show the importance of literary criticism for Hoggart and his love of literature. This is important because love of literature and commitment to a rigorous literary critical method inform all Hoggart’s writing on culture. An understanding of his literary criticism is key to appreciating his cultural analysis and can also offer a way forward at a time when the literary may have been abandoned in the quest for the popular.