Master Writer Research Articles

Study of Mirza Hadi Ruswa's writing style

Mirza Hadi Ruswa (1857_1931) is one of Mirza Hadi Ruswa's writing style is marked by its unique blend of prose and poetry, resulting in a distinctive and eloquent narrative. His most renowned work, "Umrao Jaan Ada," exemplifies this stylistic fusion, making his writing captivating and melodious.Ruswa's prose is characterized by a rich vocabulary, intricate sentence structures, and a sense of refinement. He weaves poetic elements into his narrative, creating a lyrical quality that engages the reader. Through meticulous attention to detail and vivid descriptions, Ruswa breathes life into his characters and settings, allowing readers to immerse themselves fully in the story. Beyond its aesthetic appeal, Ruswa's style serves as a vehicle for social commentary, exploring themes of love, society, and the human condition with subtlety and insight. His literary finesse endures as a timeless treasure in Urdu literature, ensuring his lasting legacy as a masterful writer. the famous and well-known classic writers of Urdu. Mirza Hadi’s reason for fame is his novel Umrao Jaan Ada.He was a versatile genius and one of the pioneer of the Urdu novel. The present study analysis the writing style of Hadi Ruswa especially in the context of his novels.

The Impact of Symbolism in Ernest Hemingway’s Novel the Old Man and the Sea

This research study and examine the masterful writer. The author exhibits their expertise of writing in a distinctive way by utilizing literary devices and approaches. We have a single example of significant authors and novels. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway is a notable symbolic work of American literature that demonstrates the author's skill in using symbols to enhance the literary value of the text. In order to decipher the symbols and determine the many meanings they stand for, the goal of this study is to investigate their application in the novel. This project is divided into: First, we'll discuss aestheticism in general and discuss typical literary style elements like simile, metaphor, irony, and so on. Secondly the study would be about the concept of symbol and the meaning of symbolism. Thirdly gives the general idea of American literature and the major works of Ernest Hemingway focusing on his novel The old man and the sea and its literary analysis . The last thing going to mention with the study all the symbols used in the novel and their meanings. The goal of this work that showing how was Hemingway interesting with his work and writing for symbols and his intention to represent themes behind the use of symbols in The old man and the sea.

Friedrich Nietzsche y Stefan George: duelo por el dios plástico

20th century German literature can only be understood after Nietzsche, whose texts were widely spread from 1890 onwards. However, the reasons and consequences of his reception deserve a deeper analysis, as they are not absolutely constrained to his philosophical views. This is particularly shown in the «minstrel contest» that Stefan George challenged him with. The fact is that George, poet and master writer as well as the epicentre of various intellectual circles and a decisive figure for the German Intelligentsia during the first half of the 20th century, berated his rival as someone lacking in «plastic god», among other deficiencies.

Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia

Hamka's Great Story: A Master Writer's Vision of Islam for Modern Indonesia

The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel by Steven Fine

Reviewed by: The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel by Steven Fine David B. Levy The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel By Steven Fine. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016. 304 pp. Steven Fine, an art and cultural historian, Jewish studies professor, archeologist, and rabbinics scholar, has written an outstanding new book, The Menorah: From the Bible to Modern Israel, that is a well-researched, vitally important contribution. It employs Fine's method of marshalling diverse sources with a broad chronological visionary scope toward a diachronic, object- and text-centered comparativist and international approach to interpreting the Jewish past with implications for the future. Fine, a master writer and storyteller, reveals the story of a living and transforming object of memory from antiquity through the medieval world to the present politics in Israel, "in the belief that all of these contexts are necessary for understanding each context individually as well as the whole picture." This book is a welcome, refreshing, and erudite piece of work that coherently and creatively integrates many diverse genres of primary and [End Page 138] secondary texts from piyyutim, midrash, and the whole corpus of the rabbinic treasury of wisdom to modern Israeli newspapers, classic literary works such as those by Agnon and Coynan Doyle, to pulp fiction and postmodern social media tweets, emails, interviews, and youtube videos. It is carefully illustrated with many important archeological finds and artistic and archival factoids that speak a million words in the concise representation that art can give. The book is written in a collegiate and inviting manner, avoiding technical academic jargon. Fine reveals his inner thoughts when standing in the presence of the Arch of Titus depicting the menorah, for instance, when personably noting, "It was as if the Romans marching forward, carrying the menorah and the other Temple vessels were actually moving as the field of the relief moved deeper and deeper in the white marble—and the vessels of the Jerusalem Temple disappeared forever into the stone. How much more vivid—and ghastly—would this scene have been in full color, I thought." Fine in his conclusion confesses, "This has been a personal history—the history of my own search to understand the menorah, and my attempt at using the tools of my discipline to make sense of my beloved lampstand for our own complicated times. It began as early in my life as I can remember, and reached its heights—quite literally—standing on scaffolding within the Arch of Titus, within centimeters of its grey stone. It has been a place of discovery—not just of the polychromy of the arch menorah, but also of the many paths and palimpsest that are the menorah. Having brought to bear primary sources from across the human experience, from biblical Israel to ancient Rome, medieval Europe to North Africa, America, and even Indonesia and Brazil, I conclude this exploration with an explicit primary source, of my own making, drawn from my own Facebook posts of a research trip I took with my then thirteen year old son, Koby, to Rome and Israel in May 2014." In this post Fine asserts, "You see, the Menorah IS at the Vatican—just not the one brought to Rome by Vespasian!" with the post climaxing in the tag, "we write this from the plane to Israel! Maybe the menorah is there after all! Shalom, the Menorah men." While Fine is a cultural historian, specializing in Jewish history in the Greco-Roman period, there is nothing truncated, narrow, or myopic about this book. Its scope is broad, multifaceted, diverse, and weaves a fascinating story that needs to be told, exploring the journey of how a Temple religious almost theurgic object, lit by the high priest, became over the course of 3000 years of Jewish history a unique symbol and indeed an icon signifying and speaking of Jews, Judaism, God of Israel, Torah, Jewish locals, and the modern Jewish state. [End Page 139] There are many scholars that know a lot about a little. Fine knows a lot about a lot. His work focuses mainly upon the literature of ancient Judaism, art, and archaeology and the ways that modern scholars have interpreted...

The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson

Reviewed by: The Man Who Loved Birds by Fenton Johnson Jayne Moore Waldrop (bio) Fenton Johnson. The Man Who Loved Birds. Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. 318 pages. Hardcover. $24.95. In The Man Who Loved Birds, Fenton Johnson returns to his native landscape in the Kentucky Knobs to revisit themes he has explored in past works—love, the law and the lawless, spirituality, solitude, nature. The novel is like a homecoming on many levels. The book is a new release by the University Press of Kentucky, part of its Kentucky Voices series that began a decade ago as a collection showcasing the best of the commonwealth’s literary traditions, including the works of Robert Penn Warren, George Ella Lyon, Frank X Walker and a handful of [End Page 113] other acclaimed writers. Johnson’s earlier novels, Crossing the River and Scissors, Paper, Rock have been reissued simultaneously as part of the series. The Man Who Loved Birds is set in the 1980s, a period when the region around Nelson, Marion and Washington counties became the hub of the largest domestic marijuana-growing organization in the United States. The area received national attention when federal and state drug enforcement officers seized 182 tons of marijuana in an extensive sting operation in multiple states. In headlines and in legend, the homegrown marijuana cartel became known as the Cornbread Mafia. The bust sent many Kentuckians to prison to serve long, mandatory sentences under laws enacted during the Reagan administration’s war on drugs. The novel includes a verbatim reproduction of a 1989 press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Louisville when sixty-eight people faced federal and state drug charges. Johnson’s research into the facts of the case began more than two decades ago when he wrote a feature-length article titled “High in the Hollows” for the New York Times Magazine, but inspiration for The Man Who Loved Birds began even earlier in Johnson’s life. In 1971, he was a teenager in Nelson County, ready to head to California to attend Stanford University. A Marion County man known for growing pot and eluding conviction was killed in a suspicious shootout with Kentucky State Police. About the same time, a new doctor from Pakistan moved to Johnson’s hometown. She was a Muslim woman who became the first doctor in years to practice medicine in the predominantly Roman Catholic community. The two events loomed large in Johnson’s memory for forty years before he started writing the novel. Three main characters form the heart of the story as they configure themselves into an unlikely triangle. Brother [End Page 114] Flavian is a Trappist monk who has begun to doubt his vows and ventures into the world beyond his central Kentucky monastery whenever he can. His character hooks the reader from the opening sentence: Brother Flavian was not entirely certain what brought him, a Trappist monk soon to celebrate his seventeenth year in the monastery, to be standing in the Miracle Inn with a draft beer in one hand and a pool cue in the other. Dr. Meena Chatterjee is a Bengali-born physician who has been recruited to the area to set up a rural medical practice in a repurposed gas station. She is a skilled doctor but hesitates to take action that might jeopardize her immigration status. Johnny Faye is a pot-growing Vietnam vet who uses outlying monastery land to cultivate his crop. He can’t read and lives outside the law; he’s also a storyteller, a bird lover, and the person that teaches lessons in transformational love to both Flavian and Meena. The three share another bond through their connection to war: Flavian entered the monastery as a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War; Johnny’s military service shifted his world view and introduced him to marijuana; Meena fled India after the war for Bangladesh liberation. Each leads a solitary existence, outsiders in their communities. Johnson is a masterful writer about the natural world. His descriptions of the central Kentucky landscape are lush and recognizable. The woods, creeks, rocky soil, birds and snakes—particularly the snakes—come alive for the reader...

Reflections on Brazil and Life as a Historian: An Interview with Richard Graham

Richard Graham is one of a handful of historians who shaped the field of Latin American studies in the United States. Graham taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History Emeritus. At Texas he directed more than 20 doctoral dissertations and served as associate editor and then editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1971 to 1975. Graham is the author of five books, among them Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil (1968), Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), and Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (2010). He has edited five books, including Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (1999), Independence in Latin America (1972 and 1994), and The Idea of Race in Latin America (1990); he has published more than 40 articles. He was awarded the Conference on Latin American History's Distinguished Service Award in January 2011 (see his CLAH Luncheon Address in this issue), one of many scholarly honors.

Reflections on Brazil and Life as a Historian: An Interview with Richard Graham

Richard Graham is one of a handful of historians who shaped the field of Latin American studies in the United States. Graham taught for many years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is Frances Higginbotham Nalle Centennial Professor of History Emeritus. At Texas he directed more than 20 doctoral dissertations and served as associate editor and then editor of the Hispanic American Historical Review from 1971 to 1975. Graham is the author of five books, among them Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil (1968), Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (1990), and Feeding the City: From Street Market to Liberal Reform in Salvador, Brazil, 1780-1860 (2010). He has edited five books, including Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (1999), Independence in Latin America (1972 and 1994), and The Idea of Race in Latin America (1990); he has published more than 40 articles. He was awarded the Conference on Latin American History's Distinguished Service Award in January 2011 (see his CLAH Luncheon Address in this issue), one of many scholarly honors.

Writing Wrecks

Page 4 American Book Review Authority, talent, privilege—any of those things one either brings or doesn’t bring to class—take a back seat to the poem on the table. Unlike other workshops I’ve participated in, there’s no drama or emotional fireworks. We let our guards down; we move forward. After four years of poetry workshops at USM, one thing I’ve noticed is that those students who do the work, who show up every week and find something to contribute, who keep an open mind and listen to the rest of the class, improve without exception. In my own experience, workshop has given me both the guidance and freedom to develop my own taste and modes of expression. My instructors and peers have offered invaluable advice over the years, but they’ve also given me the space to do my own thing. The result is I have a much better sense of what I like and why in my own poetry and when reading others. The point here is not to present our program as a paragon (though we’re mightily proud of our students and what they continue to accomplish) but to present some of the strengths of the workshop method, which has had its share of detractors but which continues to help writers hone both their editing skills and their capacity for generosity. Angela Ball’s latest book of poems is Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds (2007), which received the Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is an associate editor of Mississippi Review. Steal This Book Leslee Becker Maybe we teach creative writing for the bread. “We all hunger for the love of our fellow creatures, and when one is hungry, even a half-baked loaf tastes sweet” (Anton Chekhov). Raymond Carver would add gravy. He ran a workshop once for us Iowa inmates. I liked his modesty and uncertainty. He mostly apologized, insisting he didn’t know beans about teaching. “Don’t get me wrong now. Maybe it’s just me and my taste, but I wonder what might happen in this story if the writer made the main character a bartender, not a lawyer. Why not give it a try?” He called us students writers. I confess that I long to be a student always, learning from my own work and the work of master writers, but also knowing that the process moves along more expediently in writing programs, when we get the attention we crave. I went to Hollins, Iowa, and Stanford, teaching at the latter two places, and stealing from Richard Dillard, John L’Heureux, Nancy Packer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Hilma Wolitzer. Now, as the Director of Colorado State University’s Creative Writing Program, I’m being asked to discuss pedagogy , and expecting to be hauled off to the Home for the Easily Bewildered, or to the penitentiary for committing fraud and theft. My colleagues and I are unashamedly various in our approaches, probably satisfying current students, and frustrating prospective ones, who beg for statements of our teaching philosophy. We’re the products of writing programs, and we likely try to emulate our best mentors. I steal flagrantly, even that old canard about how creative writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned. At CSU, the learning is done intimately and extensively, the students’ three-year stretch culminating in a thesis and portfolio of their writing, self-assessments about courses, workshops, internships, and a hefty list of annotated works, all the requirements showing that we honor studio work and close reading. I never asked my teachers for their philosophy; I saw in it action, when Richard Dillard remarked that it’s exciting and titillating to watch a field of grass being mowed down, but isn’t there something eminently satisfying by waiting to watch it grow? When I started writing and considering where I’d serve time, I read Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, seeing him tackle the question—can creative writing be taught?—in 1979. “Yes it...

The Crab Grass Question

Page 4 American Book Review Authority, talent, privilege—any of those things one either brings or doesn’t bring to class—take a back seat to the poem on the table. Unlike other workshops I’ve participated in, there’s no drama or emotional fireworks. We let our guards down; we move forward. After four years of poetry workshops at USM, one thing I’ve noticed is that those students who do the work, who show up every week and find something to contribute, who keep an open mind and listen to the rest of the class, improve without exception. In my own experience, workshop has given me both the guidance and freedom to develop my own taste and modes of expression. My instructors and peers have offered invaluable advice over the years, but they’ve also given me the space to do my own thing. The result is I have a much better sense of what I like and why in my own poetry and when reading others. The point here is not to present our program as a paragon (though we’re mightily proud of our students and what they continue to accomplish) but to present some of the strengths of the workshop method, which has had its share of detractors but which continues to help writers hone both their editing skills and their capacity for generosity. Angela Ball’s latest book of poems is Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds (2007), which received the Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. She lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where she teaches in the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi and is an associate editor of Mississippi Review. Steal This Book Leslee Becker Maybe we teach creative writing for the bread. “We all hunger for the love of our fellow creatures, and when one is hungry, even a half-baked loaf tastes sweet” (Anton Chekhov). Raymond Carver would add gravy. He ran a workshop once for us Iowa inmates. I liked his modesty and uncertainty. He mostly apologized, insisting he didn’t know beans about teaching. “Don’t get me wrong now. Maybe it’s just me and my taste, but I wonder what might happen in this story if the writer made the main character a bartender, not a lawyer. Why not give it a try?” He called us students writers. I confess that I long to be a student always, learning from my own work and the work of master writers, but also knowing that the process moves along more expediently in writing programs, when we get the attention we crave. I went to Hollins, Iowa, and Stanford, teaching at the latter two places, and stealing from Richard Dillard, John L’Heureux, Nancy Packer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Hilma Wolitzer. Now, as the Director of Colorado State University’s Creative Writing Program, I’m being asked to discuss pedagogy , and expecting to be hauled off to the Home for the Easily Bewildered, or to the penitentiary for committing fraud and theft. My colleagues and I are unashamedly various in our approaches, probably satisfying current students, and frustrating prospective ones, who beg for statements of our teaching philosophy. We’re the products of writing programs, and we likely try to emulate our best mentors. I steal flagrantly, even that old canard about how creative writing can’t be taught, but it can be learned. At CSU, the learning is done intimately and extensively, the students’ three-year stretch culminating in a thesis and portfolio of their writing, self-assessments about courses, workshops, internships, and a hefty list of annotated works, all the requirements showing that we honor studio work and close reading. I never asked my teachers for their philosophy; I saw in it action, when Richard Dillard remarked that it’s exciting and titillating to watch a field of grass being mowed down, but isn’t there something eminently satisfying by waiting to watch it grow? When I started writing and considering where I’d serve time, I read Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, seeing him tackle the question—can creative writing be taught?—in 1979. “Yes it...

Smoke (review)

Reviewed by: Smoke Deborah Stevenson Jukes, Mavis . Smoke. Foster/Farrar, 2009 [176p]. ISBN 978-0-374-37085-5 $16.00 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9 Idaho has always been Colton Hudson's home, but now he and his mother are moving to California, where she's hoping to start life anew in a small rural town there. Twelve-year-old Colton actually likes his new school and begins to find some good friends there as he sorts out his identity in his new place. Nonetheless, he still misses his rodeo champion father and his rancher grandfather in Idaho, and his loyalties are torn further when his mother begins dating a neighbor; worst of all, his beloved Maine Coon cat, Smoke, disappears one night, and Colton fears that his pet became the prey of a roaming mountain lion. Jukes is a masterful writer who makes it look easy with her accessible and unassuming style. Without breaching the tradition of stoicism that Colton reveres ("The Hudson boys didn't complain"), she manages to convey his distress at what seems to him like his father's erasure from his life, and his adjustment to his new home credibly involves not just rebalancing in the face of change but finding a way to keep his connection with his Hudson heritage even from California. Smoke's disappearance will strike at the hearts of animal-loving readers (they'll be relieved that the book provides a plausible happy outcome), and it effectively underscores Colton's general sense of loss. Rich characterization, especially in Colton's schoolmates and his father's family, adds depth, [End Page 326] and there's humor in his relationships at school and home, making this ultimately a quietly triumphant story of a kid who's got some setbacks and concerns, but who's ultimately doing okay. Copyright © 2009 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution (review)

Reviewed by: Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution Ronald J. Zboray Printer's Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution. By Bruce Michelson. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2007. In early printing houses, devils were lowest-rung apprentices who did odd-jobs, like pulling sheets from the press and redistributing set type, both of which gave these lads an inky patina. If the devils worked hard, and were receptive to the education senior workers gave them, and were lucky, they might rise to become masters. [End Page 123] Bruce Michelson's Printer's Devil boldly casts Samuel Clemens in this role, while playing upon its meaning. Yes, young Sam was a devil, typographically speaking, as a fetching occupational daguerreotype testifies (6). In it, Clemens looks devilish, too, with a proud glimmer in his eye, and a tromp l'oiel in his hand: his name rendered on a composing stick in defiance of the medium's characteristic image reversal. Such mechanical devilry continued in later life, as seen in his Faustian obsession with perfecting the hopelessly complex Paige typesetter, which cost him his fortune. Had it succeeded in the market it may have bedeviled the compositors whose jobs it would replace and whose unreliable work habits and unpredictable strikes, according to Michelson, contributed to "money-gobbling expenses in getting [Clemens's] own books through the publishing process." (12) There was deviltry in Clemens's writing, too, in its wicked sarcasm, personae manipulations (the pseudonymous "Mark Twain" may have been his greatest invention), and deft language use, treacherous to the naive and gullible, the too-innocent and overly precious. And there were literal devils in Twain's writing. Perhaps the most telling occurs in his "Mysterious Stranger," set in a fifteenth-century print shop frequented by an all-seeing, if nihilistic stranger, oddly enough named Satan, who edifies the workers with the startling conclusion that nothing is real but the narrator's "Thought, 'Wandering forlorn among the empty eternities'" (218). Michelson reads this "Mark Twain dream of Samuel Clemens," in transit from printer's devil to media mogul to inefficacious "public identity," as "contrived and promulgated with printed language that inevitable alienates and objectifies the dream" (220, 223). Coming to consciousness of these slippery ontological slopes of the printed page, the narrator avers the truth of nothingness beyond the thought and appropriately ends the story. Michelson's dazzling display of such cultural poetics throughout his book is thought provoking. It quickly dispels any suspicion that perhaps printing, whether as initial inspiration, shaping influence, or simple synecdoche, was not as central to Clemens as Michelson claims. Much to the author's credit, the reader wants it to be so, even if he or she should know better. Take the phrase "American publishing revolution," for example. It is key to Michelson's argument, not only concerning the centrality of print, but for his many attempts to link that media revolution with today's. Yet was there such a revolution? No other scholars have used the phrase, and with good reason: there was little revolutionary about such old media probably at any time in American history, but especially during Clemens's adulthood, when the publishing industry struggled mightily to survive. The "American publishing revolution" thus resembles one of those substance-less thoughts albeit, with textually constitutive power, to which the Mysterious Stranger alludes. Jettisoning that thought might diminish the book's contemporary relevance only to highlight the chaotic publishing environment, limned well by Michelson, out of which printer-devil Clemens rose to become Twain, the exceedingly devilish master writer. Ronald J. Zboray University of Pittsburgh Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Hunter And Hunted: Relationships Between Carnivores And People

H. Kruk. 2002. Hunter and Hunted: Relationships between Carnivores and People. Cambridge University Press, New York, 246 pp. ISBN 0-521-89109-4 price (paper), $24.00. Mammalian carnivores, because of their charismatic nature, attract attention in both the conservation and scientific worlds. Carnivores also interest the public as predators, as pets, as providers of fur, or as killers of animals we value or use. Because of this wide range of connections, portraying carnivore-human interactions without bias is a challenging task. Hans Kruuk is a master writer, however, and he hits a literary home run with his latest book. Writing in a very accessible style, Kruuk effectively conveys scientific information to the layperson. When faced with difficult topics, he presents evidence objectively, then unobtrusively points out his personal …

Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer (review)

Part of Texas's Critical Reflections on Latin America series, this volume comprises four essays, each taking a different approach to Machado de Assis's novels, and all concentrating on his most famous work, Dom Casmurro. Graham's stated intention is to "call new attention" to Machado de Assis (vii) while presenting critical essays representative of the current disagreements over interpreting his work. This compendium is primarily of interest to specialists in Machado de Assis and, to a lesser degree, to Brazilianists in general. All of the essays engage in ongoing scholarly debates regarding Machado de Assis's authorial intent. While the general question of authorial intent may be compelling to virtually any student of literature, the debates specific to Machado de Assis have a life and history of their own. The articles in this book are a continuation of those particular debates, and require some understanding of their history.

Defenders of the truth: The battle for science in the sociobiology debate and beyond

Abstract Segerstrale is a masterful writer… the author's sketches of possible plots and counterplots by antagonists reads more like an espionage novel than a standard sociology of science text.

Machado de Assis: Reflections on a Brazilian Master Writer

Introduction 1. Dom Casmurro: Realism and Intentionalism Revisited (John Gledson) 2. Dom Casmurro: Simulacrum and Allegory (Joao Adolfo Hansen) 3. Dependents Play Chess: Political Dialogues in Machado de Assis (Sidney Chalhoub) 4. Machado in English (Daphne Patai) References Index

Machado de Assis: reflections on a Brazilian master writer

Machado de Assis: reflections on a Brazilian master writer

The Rievaulx Abbey Chapter House

The chapter house (figs, i, 2) is the most puzzling of the buildings that survive at Rievaulx Abbey, North Yorkshire — the Cistercians's first foundation in the north of England. A reconstruction based on the ruined remains shows a two storey interior supported on cylindrical columns, lower flanking aisles, and an apsed termination with a hemicycle and surrounding ambulatory (figs. 3, 4). No other chapter house in England or France shares these features. As a consequence the building has been ignored in the literature for the most part, or drawn criticism on account of its divergence from Cistercian norms. Gardner (1976, 106 n. 103), for example, in his wide-ranging study of English chapter houses categorized it as ‘bizarre’ and Gilyard-Beer (1978, 34) judged it a ‘remarkable lapse’ from Cistercian austerity. Yet the building merits greater attention. It survives as the oldest example in England of a Cistercian chapter house, a building type which, except for the conventual church, ranked as the most important in the entire monastic complex. Moreover, the visible remains can be dated to the brilliant rule of Rievaulx's third abbot, Ælred (1146–67), the pre-eminent pastoral master and spiritual writer of the High Middle Ages in Britain, under whom the community grew to the largest in the country with 640 men. Ælred's role as patron raises important questions, therefore, about the building's sources and meaning.

Stephen Greenblatt‘s new historicist vision

W henever friends in other academic fields ask me as a professor of literature to explain what is going on in my discipline, I am usually surprised to discover how little they really know about literary studies today. They have just managed to get a feel for deconstruction, now that the theory has filtered down to the level of the popular press. Thus they are dismayed to learn that on our finer college campuses today Jacques Derrida is already considered pass6 and something called the New Historicism (to be sure, inspired by another Frenchman, Michel Foucault) has largely taken the place of deconstruction. When my enquirers had expected me to talk about Paul de Man or Stanley Fish, they are puzzled to hear me dwell upon Stephen Greenblatt instead. Indeed, although figures like de Man and Fish are the ones usually ment ioned when journalists discuss contemporary literary study, if I were asked to name the most influential literary critic of this generation, it would be Greenblatt. 1 Greenblatt is not a theoretician by temperament; his writings tend to involve detailed analyses of specific texts, like the poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Thus to the general public, he does not seem to have contributed to the theoretical controversies that polarize the world of literary critics. Nevertheless, I would argue that Greenblatt has done more than anyone else to shape the way literary criticism is practiced today, and that means how literary criticism is actually written. Indeed, much of Greenblatt 's success and influence is to be traced to the fact that he is a masterful writer. His prose is graceful, fluid, and supple, and above all he knows how to construct an essay with the skill of a professional mystery writer, artfully withholding key facts until just the right moment, timing his revelations perfectly to create an almost hypnotic suspense in the unfolding of his argument. He is also, as I will try to document, extremely savvy in his rhetorical skills, making it difficult for his critics to pin him down and challenge his assertions. It is no wonder then that over the past decade Greenblatt's remarkable essays have become models for literary critics throughout the profession, although unfortunately, as might be expected, what he appears to do effortlessly, his followers tend to do mechanically.

De l'École au Palais de Justice : L'Itinéraire Singulier des Maîtres Écrivains de Paris (XVIe-XVIIIeSiècles)

En 1569, un scandale éclata à la cour : le secrétaire de Charles IX était soupçonné d'avoir imité le seing privé du roi. Pour lever le doute, le chancelier Michel de l'Hospital en appela au jugement de neuf écrivains, réputés dans la capitale pour leur habileté en matière d'écriture. De fait, l'examen et la comparaison qu'ils firent des pièces mises en cause confirmèrent les premiers soupçons.La supercherie commise aux dépens du roi eut pour conséquence directe de porter un éclairage accru sur la menace des écritures contrefaites et, du coup, sur l'impérative nécessité de personnes expertes à les reconnaître. Quelques mois plus tard, les maîtres écrivains jurés de Paris recevaient les lettres patentes confirmant les premiers statuts de leur communauté.