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English
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These three essays-originally written in the 1960s as lectures-show how novels, poems, and plays confront the philosophical complexities of humanity's existence.
Our self-awareness-the very thing that makes us human-also makes us realize our powerlessness and the limitations of our existence. This concept is explored in this thought-provoking guide and provides a jumping off point for this treatise on existentialism and literature.
Davis D. McElroy...
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Language
English
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Description
Writers' relationships with their surroundings are seldom straightforward. While some, like Jane Austen and Thomas Mann, wrote novels set where they were staying (Lyme Regis and Venice respectively), Victor Hugo penned Les Miserables in an attic in Guernsey and Noel Coward wrote that most English of plays, Blithe Spirit, in the Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion.Award-winning BBC drama producer Adrian Mourby follows his literary heroes around the...
Author
Publisher
Doubleday
Pub. Date
[2023]
Language
English
Description
"From the bestselling author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler comes a stirring manifesto on love in the modern age. From one generation to the next, our understanding of love is constantly evolving, be it courtship, sex, or romantic relationships. The science of love is advancing, too, from the study of chemicals responsible for our behavior in love to the mining of data generated using dating apps. Now, more than ever, we find ourselves...
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English
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Description
"What can literature teach us about resilience in the face of climate change and planetary-scale vulnerability? In "Weak Planet," Wai Chee Dimock proposes a way forward by showing how writers have met past hazards with experiments in non-paralysis, and how their works still inspire readers to "find their strength." Dimock looks for hope not in heroic resistance but in the unspectacular and inconclusive. Focusing on tenuous networks among authors and...
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English
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Description
The Nobel Prize—winning poet and man of letters Octavio Paz was also a brilliant reader of other writers, and this book selects his best critical essays from over three decades. In the sixteen pieces collected here, Paz discusses a wide range of poets and writers, both American and international, from Robert Frost and Walt Whitman to William Carlos Williams; from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Luis Buñuel to Alexander Solzhenitsyn; and from Charles Baudelaire...
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English
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Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker.
Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man...
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English
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Description
In the Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century's best-known writers--including Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Michel Houellebecq, and Elena Ferrante. They are employing a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected. From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and...
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English
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Description
In this collection of essays and epigrams, E.M. Cioran gives us portraits and evaluations-which he calls "admirations"-of Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the poet Paul Valery, and Mircea Eliade, among others. In alternating sections of aphorisms-his "anathemas"-he delivers insights on such topics as solitude, flattery, vanity, friendship, insomnia, music, mortality, God, and the lure of disillusion.
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English
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Description
In this brilliantly original book, Camille Paglia identifies some of the major patterns that have endured in western culture from ancient Egypt and Greece to the present. According to Paglia, one source of continuity is paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture. Others, she says, are androgyny, sadism, and the aggressive western eye, which has created our art and cinema....
Author
Series
Charles Eliot Norton lectures volume 2016
Publisher
Harvard University Press
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
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Description
America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...
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English
Description
"A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War. During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to exile, imprisonment or execution if they...
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English
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Twenty-three biographical essays on writers admired by the award-winning author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax.
For Louis Auchincloss, life and letters are not two things but one. It therefore comes as no surprise that when he writes about writers, their lives are considered as closely as their works. He takes what today is a refreshingly unpopular position: that the artist and his art cannot be teased apart, that biography of criticism and criticism...
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English
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Description
This entertaining and learned volume contains book reviews, lectures, and hard to find articles from the late C. S. Lewis, whose constant aim was to show the twentieth–century reader how to read and understand old books and manuscripts. Highlighting works by Spenser, Dante, Malory, Tasso, and Milton, Lewis provides a refreshing update to medieval and Renaissance criticism, and equips modern readers to understand these works in a new way.
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English
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Description
The occult was a crucial influence on the Renaissance, and it obsessed the popular thinkers of the day. But with the Age of Reason, occultism was sidelined; only charlatans found any use for it. Occult ideas did not disappear, however, but rather went underground. It developed into a fruitful source of inspiration for many important artists. Works of brilliance, sometimes even of genius, were produced under its influence. In A Dark Muse, Lachman discusses...
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Language
English
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Description
As editor of the quarterly Salmagundi for the past fifty years, Robert Boyers has been on the cutting edge of developments in politics, culture, and the arts. Reflecting on his collaborations and quarrels with some of the twentieth century's most transformative writers, artists, and thinkers, Boyers writes a wholly original intellectual memoir that rigorously confronts selected aspects of contemporary society. Organizing his chapters around specific...
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English
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""Get the Money!" was Ted Berrigan's mantra for the paid writing gigs he took on in support of his career as a poet. This long-awaited collection of his essential prose-written between 1960 and his early death in 1983-draws upon the many essays, reviews, introductions, and other texts he produced for hire, as well as material from his journals, travelogues, and assorted, unclassifiable creative texts. Get the Money! documents Berrigan's innovative...
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