Digger's Blog on Words, Words and More Words
06-06-2015
, 07:06 AM
06-08-2015
, 09:28 AM
06-09-2015
, 09:45 PM
Update:
Doing final edit of Citizen Kane and Summertime - due 5 hours.
Gender and genre: The Penelopiad etc - no change.
Narrative Theory and Method: Now at 2100 words - first draft.
Film and Folktale: no change.
Slightly ahead of schedule.
/end procrastination update
Thanks bob.
Doing final edit of Citizen Kane and Summertime - due 5 hours.
Gender and genre: The Penelopiad etc - no change.
Narrative Theory and Method: Now at 2100 words - first draft.
Film and Folktale: no change.
Slightly ahead of schedule.
/end procrastination update
Thanks bob.
06-10-2015
, 01:46 AM
06-10-2015
, 10:54 AM
06-11-2015
, 08:45 AM
06-11-2015
, 11:28 AM
06-13-2015
, 09:27 PM
06-15-2015
, 07:25 AM
06-16-2015
, 04:56 AM
Semester 2 reading List
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Vintage)
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Penguin)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Penguin)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (Picador)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador)
J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (Penguin)
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Vintage)
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th-century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later claimed was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːlknər/, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.[1]
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Vintage)
Samuel Beckett, Molloy (Penguin)
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Penguin)
Don DeLillo, White Noise (Picador)
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador)
J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (Penguin)
W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (Vintage)
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th-century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner's fourth novel, and was not immediately successful. In 1931, however, when Faulkner's sixth novel, Sanctuary, was published—a sensationalist story, which Faulkner later claimed was written only for money—The Sound and the Fury also became commercially successful, and Faulkner began to receive critical attention.
William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːlknər/, September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays. He is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he spent most of his life.[1]
Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he became the only Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.[2] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is often included on similar lists.
06-20-2015
, 05:05 AM
The first narrator of The Sound and The Fury is notoriously difficult. Benji, is a developmentally disabled man of 33 years old. His cognitive functions are depicted as that of a child somewhere between 3-6 years of age. Part of the reason for the difficulty in reading the first section of the book is to do with its non-linear narration that slips between indirect narration of Benji's present day thoughts, his past memories and direct narration of both past and present events. Furthermore, the style of his narration that distinguishes him as being disabled (the concentrated detailing of reactions and character acts that would otherwise be consider unnecessary for reader consideration) also contributes to the difficulty of understanding the story being told.
Below are two pictures. The first is a map drawn by Faulkner detailing his fictional setting. The second is the house of his childhood, Rowan Oak.
Below are two pictures. The first is a map drawn by Faulkner detailing his fictional setting. The second is the house of his childhood, Rowan Oak.
06-25-2015
, 05:08 AM
Life & Times of Michael K is a 1983 novel by South African-born writer J. M. Coetzee. The novel won the Booker Prize for 1983. The novel is a story of a man named Michael K, who makes an arduous journey from Cape Town to his mother's rural birthplace, during an imaginary civil war during the apartheid era, in the 1970-80s.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...ee-823326.html
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/...e-michael.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-en...ee-823326.html
https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/11/...e-michael.html
06-25-2015
, 05:13 AM
06-25-2015
, 05:22 AM
Molloy is a novel by Samuel Beckett written in French and first published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles.
On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name only as their experiences and thoughts are similar. The novel is set in an indeterminate place, most often identified with the Ireland of Beckett's birth. It was written in Paris, along with the other two books (Malone Dies and The Unnamable) of 'The Trilogy', between 1946 and 1950. 'The Trilogy' is generally considered to be one of the most important literary works of the 20th century, and the most important non-dramatic work in Beckett's oeuvre.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[3] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[4] He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
On first appearance the book concerns two different characters, both of whom have interior monologues in the book. As the story moves along the two characters are distinguished by name only as their experiences and thoughts are similar. The novel is set in an indeterminate place, most often identified with the Ireland of Beckett's birth. It was written in Paris, along with the other two books (Malone Dies and The Unnamable) of 'The Trilogy', between 1946 and 1950. 'The Trilogy' is generally considered to be one of the most important literary works of the 20th century, and the most important non-dramatic work in Beckett's oeuvre.
Samuel Barclay Beckett (/ˈbɛkɪt/; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[3] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation".[4] He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
06-25-2015
, 06:02 AM
Stephen Jay Greenblatt (born November 7, 1943) is an American literary critic, theorist, scholar, and Pulitzer Prize winning author. He is John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University.
Greenblatt is regarded by many as one of the founders of New Historicism, a set of critical practices that he often refers to as "cultural poetics"; his works have been influential since the early 1980s when he introduced the term. Greenblatt has written and edited numerous books and articles relevant to new historicism, the study of culture, Renaissance studies and Shakespeare studies and is considered to be an expert in these fields. He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal Representations, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on the New York Times Best Seller List for nine weeks.[1] He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.[2][3]
New Historicism[edit]
Greenblatt first used the term “new historicism” in his 1982 introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance wherein he uses Queen Elizabeth's “bitter reaction to the revival of Shakespeare’s Richard II on the eve of the Essex rebellion" to illustrate the “mutual permeability of the literary and the historical”.[7] New historicism is regarded by many to have had an impact on "every traditional period of English literary history”.[8] Some critics have charged that it is “antiethical to literary and aesthetic value, that it reduces the historical to the literary or the literary to the historical, that it denies human agency and creativity, that it is somehow out to subvert the politics of cultural and critical theory [and] that it is anti-theoretical”.[7] Scholars have observed that “new historicism” is, in fact, "neither new nor historical."[9] Others praise new historicism as “a collection of practices” employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as “historically contingent on the present in which [it is] constructed”.[7]
As stated by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, the approach of new historicism has been "the most influential strand of criticism over the last 25 years, with its view that literary creations are cultural formations shaped by 'the circulation of social energy'."[10] When told that several American job advertisements were requesting responses from experts in new historicism, he remembered thinking "'You've got to be kidding. You know it was just something we made up!' I began to see there were institutional consequences to what seemed like a not particularly deeply thought-out term."[10]
He has also said that “My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. I am constantly struck by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long ago".[11]
Greenblatt's works on new historicism and “cultural poetics” include Practicing New Historicism (2000) (with Catherine Gallagher), in which Greenblatt discusses how “the anecdote… appears as the ‘touch of the real’” andTowards a Poetics of Culture (1987), in which Greenblatt asserts that the question of “how art and society are interrelated,” as posed by Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, “cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance”.[8] Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices.
06-25-2015
, 07:41 AM
George Redburn Young (born 6 November 1946) is a Scottish-born Australian musician, songwriter and record producer. He is best known as a member of the 1960s Australian rock band The Easybeats, and as a co-writer of the international hits "Friday on My Mind" and "Love Is in the Air" recorded by John Paul Young (no relation). Young was also the producer of the Australian hard rock band AC/DC, which features his younger brothers Malcolm and Angus Young.
06-26-2015
, 08:36 AM
06-27-2015
, 05:57 AM
I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck.Molloy 50
Arnold Geulincx (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɣøːlɪŋks]; 31 January 1624 – November 1669) was a Flemish philosopher. He was one of the followers of René Descartes who tried to work out more detailed versions of a generally Cartesian philosophy. Samuel Beckett cited Geulincx as a key influence and interlocutor because of Geulincx's emphasis on the powerlessness and ignorance of the human condition.
Geulincx was born in Antwerp. He studied at the University of Leuven and was made professor of philosophy there in 1646. He lost his post in 1658, possibly for religious reasons, or (as has been suggested) a combination of unpopular views and his marriage in that year.[2] Geulincx then moved north to the University of Leiden and converted to Calvinism. Initially he gave private lessons.[3] He was appointed reader in logic there in 1662 and extraordinary professor in 1665. He died in Leiden in 1669, leaving most of his works, all written in Latin, to be published after his death.[4] They were edited by Cornelis Bontekoe.
Geulincx summarized his philosophy in the phrase, "ita est, ergo ita sit" ("it exists, therefore it is so"). He believed in a "pre-established harmony" as a solution to the mind-body problem, dying 25 years before Leibniz's better–remembered formulation of the idea. In Leibniz's philosophy, the doctrine of pre-established harmony was linked with optimism, the notion of this world as the "best of all possible worlds". But Geulincx made no such linkage.
The occasionalism of Geulincx is ethical rather than cosmological in its inception. The first tract of his Ethics[10] is a study of what in his terms are the cardinal virtues. Virtue according to Geulincx is the love of God and of Reason (III, 16-17; 29). The cardinal virtues are the properties of virtue which immediately flow from its very essence and have nothing to do with externals: diligence, obedience, justice, humility (III, 17). Humility divides his view of the world into two parts: one, the understanding of our relation to the world; and the other, the concept of our relation to God. Humility consists in the knowledge of self and the forsaking of self. I find in myself nothing that is my own but to know and to will. I therefore must be conscious of all that I do, and that of which I am not conscious is not the product of my own causality. Hence the universal principle of causality--quod nescis quo modo fiat, non facis—if you do not know how a thing is done then you do not do it. He also states a form of this principle in his Metaphysica vera.[11] Since then, the movements of my body take place without my knowing how the nervous impulse passes to the muscles and there-causes them to contract I do not cause my own bodily actions. "I am therefore a mere spectator of this machine. In it I form naught and renew naught, I neither make anything here nor destroy it. Everything is the work of someone else" (III, 33). This one is the Deity who sees and knows all things. The second part of Geulincx's philosophy is connected with Occasionalism as the effect with the cause. Its guiding principle is: Where you can do nothing there also you should desire nothing (III, 222). This leads to a mysticism and asceticism which however must not be taken too seriously for it is tempered by the obligation of caring for the body and propagating the species.
http://www.geulincx.org/research/devlee.html
06-27-2015
, 09:24 AM
Wag the Dog is a 1997 black comedy film[3] produced and directed by Barry Levinson. The screenplay by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet was loosely adapted from Larry Beinhart's novel American Hero. The film stars Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro, with Anne Heche, Denis Leary, and William H. Macy in supporting roles.
Just days before a presidential election, a Washington, D.C. spin doctor (De Niro) distracts the electorate from a sex scandal by hiring a Hollywood film producer (Hoffman) to construct a fake war with Albania.
The film was released one month before the outbreak of the Lewinsky scandal and the subsequent bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan by the Clinton Administration, which prompted the media to draw comparisons between the film and reality
06-28-2015
, 07:59 AM
that of a myth - monstrous, and arising from the slumber of reason"
The full epigraph for capricho No. 43 reads; "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Spanish: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) is an etching by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Created between 1797 and 1799,[1] it is the 43rd of 80 etchings making up the suite of satires Los Caprichos.[2] Goya imagines himself asleep amidst his drawing tools, his reason dulled by slumber and bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. The work includes owls that may be symbols of folly and bats symbolising ignorance. The artist's nightmare reflected his view of Spanish society, which he portrayed in the Caprichos as demented, corrupt, and ripe for ridicule.[
The full epigraph for capricho No. 43 reads; "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."
The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Spanish: El sueño de la razón produce monstruos) is an etching by the Spanish painter and printmaker Francisco Goya. Created between 1797 and 1799,[1] it is the 43rd of 80 etchings making up the suite of satires Los Caprichos.[2] Goya imagines himself asleep amidst his drawing tools, his reason dulled by slumber and bedeviled by creatures that prowl in the dark. The work includes owls that may be symbols of folly and bats symbolising ignorance. The artist's nightmare reflected his view of Spanish society, which he portrayed in the Caprichos as demented, corrupt, and ripe for ridicule.[
06-30-2015
, 07:11 AM
[by any measure]
By any measure, it was endless
winter. Emulsions with
Then circled the lake like
This is it. This April will be
Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose
early, erased for an hour
Silk-brush and ax
I'd like to think I'm a different person
latent image fading
around the edges and ears
Overall a tighter face
now. Is it so hard for you to understand
From the drop-down menu
In a cluster of eight poems, I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
but could not
remember the dream
save for one brief shot
of a woman opening her eyes
Ari, pick up. I'm a different person
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
By Ben Lerner
Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor.[1] Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
By any measure, it was endless
winter. Emulsions with
Then circled the lake like
This is it. This April will be
Inadequate sensitivity to green. I rose
early, erased for an hour
Silk-brush and ax
I'd like to think I'm a different person
latent image fading
around the edges and ears
Overall a tighter face
now. Is it so hard for you to understand
From the drop-down menu
In a cluster of eight poems, I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
but could not
remember the dream
save for one brief shot
of a woman opening her eyes
Ari, pick up. I'm a different person
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
By Ben Lerner
Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the National Book Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", making him the first American to receive this honor.[1] Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
06-30-2015
, 07:14 AM
07-02-2015
, 08:52 AM
Ralph Waldo Ellison (March 1, 1914[1] – April 16, 1994) was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.[2] He also wrote Shadow and Act (1964), a collection of political, social and critical essays, and Going to the Territory.
Ralph Ellison, named after Ralph Waldo Emerson,[3] was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Lewis Alfred Ellison and Ida Millsap. Research by Lawrence Jackson, one of Ellison's biographers, has established that he was born a year earlier than had been previously thought. He had one brother named Herbert Millsap Ellison, who was born in 1916. Lewis Alfred Ellison, a small-business owner and a construction foreman, died when Ralph was three years old from stomach ulcers he received from an ice-delivering accident.[3] Many years later, Ellison would discover that his father hoped Ralph would grow up to be a poet.
In 1933, Ellison entered the Tuskegee Institute on a scholarship to study music. Tuskegee's music department was perhaps the most renowned department at the school,[citation needed] headed by the conductor William L. Dawson. Ellison also had the good fortune to come under the close tutelage of the piano instructor Hazel Harrison. While he studied music primarily in his classes, he spent increasing amounts of time in the library, reading up on modernist classics. He specifically cited reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land as a major awakening moment for him.[4]
As a child, Ellison began what would become a lifelong interest in audio technology. Ellison began by taking apart and rebuilding radios, and later moved on to constructing and customizing elaborate hi-fi stereo systems as an adult (an obsession which he would explore in his short essay "Living With Music", published in the December 1955 issue of the magazine High Fidelity.)[5] Ellison scholar John S. Wright contends that this deftness with the ins-and-outs of electronic devices went on to inform Ellison's approach to writing and the novel form
