Harold Bloom Creates a Massive List of Works in The "Western Canon": Read Many of the Books Free Online I have little desire to rehash the politics, but the facts are plain: by the time I arrived in college as an undergraduate English major in the mid-90s, the idea of the “Western Canon” as a container of—in the words of a famous hymn—“all that’s good, and great, and true” was seriously on the wane, to put it mildly. And in many quarters of academia, mention of the name of Yale literary critic Harold Bloom provoked, at the very least, a raised eyebrow and pointed silence. Bloom’s reputation perhaps unfairly fell victim to the so-called “Canon Wars,” likely at times because of a misidentification with political philosopher Allan Bloom. That Bloom was himself no ideologue, writes Jim Sleeper; he was a close friend of Saul Bellow and “an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.” Nonetheless, his fiery attack on changing academic values, The Closing of the American Mind, became a textbook of the neoconservative right. A: “The Theocratic Age” Italy
Psychogeography evoL PsychogeogrAphix 2003 evoL PsychogeogrAphix 2004 evoL PsychogeogrAphix 2005 Psychogeography is an approach to geography that emphasizes playfulness and "drifting" around urban environments. Development[edit] Psychogeography was originally developed by the avant-garde movement Lettrist International in the journal Potlach. In "Formulary for a New Urbanism", Chtcheglov had written "Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams".[5] Similarly, the Situationists found contemporary architecture both physically and ideologically restrictive, combining with outside cultural influence, effectively creating an undertow, and forcing oneself into a certain system of interaction with their environment: "[C]ities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones". Quoting Karl Marx, Debord says: Dérive[edit] Noted psychogeographers[edit]
Nude in your hot tub, facing the abyss (A literary manifesto after the end of Literature and Manifestos) Down from the Mountain Once upon a time, writers were like gods, and lived in the mountains. They were either destitute hermits or aristocratic lunatics, and they wrote only to communicate with the already dead or the unborn, or for no one at all. They had never heard of the marketplace, they were arcane and antisocial. Later, there came another wave of writers, who lived in the forests below the mountains, and while they still dreamt of the heights, they needed to live closer to the towns at the edge of the forest, into which they ventured every now and again to do a turn in the public square. Soon, writers began to take flats in the town, and took jobs—indeed, whole cities were settled and occupied by writers. Now you sit at your desk, dreaming of Literature, skimming the Wikipedia page about the ‘Novel’ as you snack on salty treats and watch cat and dog videos on your phone. The Puppet Corpse To say that Literature is dead is both empirically false and intuitively true.
Translating the Untranslatable Aphra Behn Aphra Behn (/ˈæfrə bɛn/;[1] baptised 14 December 1640 – 16 April 1689) was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration, one of the first English professional female literary writers.[2] Along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she is sometimes referred to as part of "The fair triumvirate of wit." Little is known for certain about Behn's life except for her work as an author and as a spy for the British crown. There is almost no documentary evidence of the details of her first 27 years. The bawdy topics of many of her plays led to her oeuvre being ignored or dismissed since her death. Life and work[edit] Versions of her early life[edit] Title page of the first edition of Oroonoko (1668) Information regarding her life is scant, especially regarding her early years. Career[edit] A sketch of Aphra Behn by George Scharf from a portrait believed to be lost (1873) Behn's exploits were not profitable however; the cost of living shocked her, and she was left unprepared. Last years[edit]
10 Untranslatable Words (And When You'll Want to Use Them) English is one of the harder languages to learn, especially if you consider certain key aspects of it. One is pronunciation and spelling, whereas in languages like Spanish, Italian, Latin, Greek, and German the words are pronounced exactly or almost exactly as to what they are spelled, in English this is not as common of an occurrence, or at least spelling/pronunciation continuity is not as intuitive as it could be. Consider the letter sequence "ough," it is pronounced as "off" in cough, as "uf" in rough and tough, as "uu" in through, as "ahh" in thought, and as "oh" in thorough, however some people will pronounce thorough with an "uh" sound for the "ough" in the word.
Rare 1959 Audio: Flannery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ Flannery O'Connor was a Southern writer who, as Joyce Carol Oates once said, had less in common with Faulkner than with Kafka and Kierkegaard. Isolated by poor health and consumed by her fervent Catholic faith, O'Connor created works of moral fiction that, according to Oates, “were not refined New Yorker stories of the era in which nothing happens except inside the characters' minds, but stories in which something happens of irreversible magnitude, often death by violent means." In imagining those events of irreversible magnitude, O'Connor could sometimes seem outlandish--even cartoonish--but she strongly rejected the notion that her perceptions of 20th century life were distorted. “Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable," O'Connor said. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures." Related Content:
20 more awesomely untranslatable words from around the world If only you could use these words in Scrabble. Photo: Jeremy Mates When linguists refer to “untranslatable” words, the idea is not that a word cannot somehow be explained in another language, but that part of the essence of the word is lost as it crosses from one language to another. This often is due to different social and cultural contexts that have shaped how the word is used. In the novel Shame, Salman Rushdie’s narrator suggests: “To unlock a society, look at its untranslatable words.” Here are 20 words that don’t translate directly into English; what may these words tell us about the societies in which they come from? 1. Arabic – [in-shal-la] While it can be translated literally as “if Allah wills,” the meaning of this phrase differs depending on the speaker’s tone of voice. It can be a genuine sentiment, such as when talking to an old friend and parting with “We’ll meet again, inshallah,” or it can be used as a way to tacitly imply you actually aren’t planning to do something. 2.
Mind Matters One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern LifeBy Mitch HorowitzCrown Publishing, 2014352 pp.; $24 cloth George Orwell once wrote that you had to be a part of imperialism in order to hate it. A comparable sentiment drives author and editor Mitch Horowitz’s inquiry in One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life. Like imperialism, the positive thinking movement is a juggernaut, a wide-eyed troop of optimists who march in lockstep toward bliss, stamping out negative thoughts with every tread. Unlike Orwell, however, Horowitz is not a mutineer but a wary supporter who mouths affirmations while his cohorts holler them with fervor. It is his halfhearted embrace of positive thinking, Horowitz argues, that makes him best suited to critique it. And so it is that Horowitz, sans rose-colored glasses, attempts to record the lineage of the American positive thinking movement. More useful as part of these works would have been testimonials.
Music from Yemen Arabia • Samar Music from Yemen Arabia • SamarLyrichord - LLST 7284 Side A A1 Leish Teguig 5'20 A2 Al Sabah 6'55 A3 Keef Faish 11'15 Side B B1 A'Zaffer 21'30 Hassan al Zabeede, ud - track A1, A3 Salim Ibrahim, derbooga - track A1, A3 In the evening, Yemeni friends gather to talk, listen to music, smoke tobacco, chew the narcotic leaf quat and drink scented water and ginger spiced coffee. North Yemen lies in the southwest corner of the Arabian peninsula facing the Red Sea. Mohammed al Kawkabani, qanun - track A3, B1 Saad al Kawkabani, ud - track A3, B1 Music ▼ R Omniscient Gentlemen of The Atlantic | | Notebook Maureen Tkacik [from The Baffler No. 19, 2012] Shepherd, show me how to go O’er the hillside steep, How to gather, how to sow,— How to feed Thy sheep. –Mary Baker Eddy Not long before The Atlantic’s parent company announced its swing into a profit-making business model despite operating in the most moribund corner of a publishing industry, I sat in a glass-paneled press room next to a small auditorium on the second floor of the Washington Newseum and took in the incipient profitability. The din of younger colleagues tapping keyboards is never soothing, but sitting in the press room of the Ideas Forum felt like a human rights violation. [New York Times financial correspondent] rankles [Treasury Secretary] with questions such as “What do you think is the most important thing the team has gotten right?” Omniscience is the operating principle by which everyone understands everyone else in Washington, D.C. Quinn wore a light beige pantsuit with a pink blouse that conjured the seventies.