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Baudelaire, nature and the artist in societyHowell, Jane January 1980 (has links)
From Conclusion: The Artist can regard Baudelaire as a touchstone, as so many of his ideals and maxims are the ideals and maxims of the Artist himself. He teaches us many invaluable secrets of the universe and his lucid rendering of their explanations give us a clear insight into its mystery. He believed that Art was the ‘brainchild’ of Nature’s inspiration and that through its means and ways Natures mysteries will be revealed to us. He fought against all that the modern-day Artist is stiII fighting against. He rebelled against society1s false reasoning and its false morals. He became ‘self-exiled’ so that he could retain his individuality and reasoning. Like the Artist, his most valuable quality was his spontaneity and inspiration, given to him when his spirit moved him. His poems stand complete in themselves and yet all have a mysterious quality binding them. Likewise our paintings must also stand complete, they must be an end in themselves, each with its own singular message and yet a unity must prevaiI throughout. We must strive for that eternal quality that is so obvious in Baudelaire1s work. He can be read today at the distance of a century as if he had written for the present generation, with a knowledge of its problems and interests. His appeal is still vital because he was not fettered by the fashionable opinions and evanescent whims of his own age, and he made no concessions to the spirit of his own time in order to gain popularity.
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Locating Bosman : revaluating issues of culture, language and style in a selection of Herman Charles Bosman's English and Afrikaans short stories (1948-1951).Snyman, Salome 01 October 2007 (has links)
This dissertation addresses issues of culture, identity and style in Herman Charles Bosman’s bilingual writing, produced during the latter part of his life, in order to reassess his place in South African literature. Although questions pertaining to these issues are constantly debated by Bosman scholars, the focus has in the past mainly fallen on his English literary corpus. The bilingual dimension of his work has not received much academic attention. In fact, literary historiographers in South Africa appear to have been largely oblivious of Bosman’s contribution to this area. This situation may partly be ascribed to the ‘disappearance’ of his Afrikaans stories from the time of their publication, in popular periodicals of that time, until recently. Up until 2001 these stories, sixteen in total, have never been collected in book form. Stephen Gray and Craig MacKenzie decided to assign this project, as part of their Anniversary Edition, to Leon de Kock. This collection, aptly titled Verborge Skatte, contains all the Afrikaans stories which have been traced to their original publications as well as polemical and critical pieces written in or about Afrikaans by Bosman. From a literary-historical point of view, it would be untenable to call for a revaluation of Bosman’s place in South African literature on the basis of the mere existence of his Afrikaans writing – particularly given its rather slim substance. However, regarding Bosman’s Afrikaans stories, Leon de Kock draws the important conclusion that Bosman was ahead of his time by virtue of his metafictional skill, self-reflexive irony and political independence. De Kock goes on to highlight interesting aspects that emerge when Bosman’s Afrikaans short stories are compared to their English equivalents as well as the way in which Bosman makes certain cultural emphasis shifts when translating. The implications for South African literature of De Kock’s assertions are evident. They mean that, in addition to the general confusion about Bosman’s identity and place in South African literature, it would appear that he has not been recognised as an important Afrikaans short story writer, nor as an accomplished bilingual writer. De Kock ends his introduction with a call to researchers: “Much work lies ahead for the writers of dissertations, who will be able to lay out the evidence at greater leisure” (2001: 210). This study, then, represents the laying out of evidence that De Kock calls for. It does so through a detailed analysis of critical aspects of this ‘new’ dimension of Bosman’s oeuvre. To begin with, Bosman’s life is probed for possible motivations for his turning to bilingual writing. Key aspects of his English writing and how they are transposed into Afrikaans are then analysed and finally, his language proficiency is put to the test. In the end it is concluded that Bosman was indeed one of the most progressive writers of his time – in English as well as in Afrikaans – and that a revaluation based on a balanced and inclusive view of the unique impact of Bosman’s diverse corpus has been long overdue. It follows, therefore, that South African literature has been the poorer for the conspicuous absence of his Afrikaans short stories, in particular, and that, on the strength of his extraordinary contribution to both English and Afrikaans literatures, certain adjustments should be made to situate Bosman as a key figure in the South African literary canon.
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The Broken Mirror: Maternal Agency and Identity in Charles Dickens's Bleak HouseCash, Sarah E 19 March 2013 (has links)
This paper examined how Esther Summerson, Dickens’s ideal good mother, can be understood as a woman who has maternal agency and identity both as a character and as a narrator, and how she contrasts with other maternal characters in the novel, both major and minor. While more transgressive mothers, such as Lady Dedlock, Mrs. Jellyby and even Krook’s cat, are doomed to death, ineffectiveness and madness, Esther moves from a frozen, “unsexualized” state into a space of life and sexual possibility. In addition, Esther has agency and identity as a narrator since she shares the narration with a third-person male narrator. Esther becomes the one who speaks rather than the one who is spoken of, and her maternal, nurturing voice provides a balm for the often harsh, judgmental voice of the male narrator. As the narrator’s patriarchal voice dies away at the end, it is Esther’s maternal voice that survives.
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Charles Reade: a study of a literary reputationMcGechaen, John January 1946 (has links)
This essay seeks to explain why Charles Reade's fiction, which was once so popular, is no longer of interest to modern readers. By referring to the available material on the sale of his books, and by considering what reviewers in his own day said about them, an attempt is made to estimate his popularity with contemporary readers. His novels were melodramatic in style and sensational in content, for he exploited the social abuses common in England during the second half of the nineteenth century.
Modern critics of the novel believe that Reade failed to turn his material into sound and probable fiction. His plots are weak and his characters poorly drawn. For this reason his books ceased to interest readers as soon as the abuses with which he dealt were corrected. A certain amount of agreement is shown to exist between the opinions of modern students of the novel and those of Reade's more discerning contemporary critics who, throughout his career, urged him to change his method of writing fiction.
The shortcomings of his fictive theory are discussed and the inevitability of the eclipse of his fame is set forth in conclusion. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
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Tension and time in Charles Olson's poetryKasowitz, Daniel M. January 1972 (has links)
The primary act of nature is the transfer of energy. One thing passes its energy on to other things. This is how life survives. Each thing is receiving energy from other things and transferring its own energy to still other things. Nature is like an unending transitive sentence. If nature is transitive then poetry also must be transitive. For the poet receives energy from certain objects and transfers that energy via the poem over to the reader. The poet must be a conductor of the energy. He must be like a nerve connecting the object to the reader, making sure that all the impulses he receives from the object will be picked up and transmitted to the reader. He wants to give the reader excitement equal to the excitement the object stimulated in him. He does not want to lose any of the original power and spirit of the object in transferring it to the reader.
To keep the object alive the poet must enact the object. He must allow the object to transfer its energy, its identity, over to the reader. The poet helps this process by trying to coincide with the object and experience the object from the inside-out. He tries to apprehend the very growth-urge and motivating principle of the object, what causes it to act the way it does. He intuits the shape of the object, what it looks like. He even tries to grasp the object's "intentions" (its tendencies) and desires. Once he has identified with the object then his imagination goes to work. He lets the object act out its desires. He lets it fantasize. He enters a dream with the object where the object is allowed to become whatever it "wants" to become. It grows out of itself. It transforms into various images that seem to be the direct descendants of itself. The imagination allows the object to continually dissolve and re-create itself and thus play out its inherent fate. Through imagination the object performs itself and acts itself out for the reader. And the poet must write at the speed of imagination if he is to conduct all the split-second images that issue from the object.
To identify with the object the poet must first get into tension with the object. Every object, whether it be concrete or emotional, has tension. The tension of an object is its force of form. The way its parts are pulled into one another and cohere. Tension, in other words, is tropism. It is the way the object behaves and grows. The poet must identify with the object's tension. He must find the same tension in himself. He must feel the pull and strain of the object in himself. His whole body must be tense with the object. His heart must imitate the rhythm of the object and his throat imitate the squeeze of the object in order to squeeze it into words. If the poet writes a poem about a tree, he does not contemplate what words go with "treeness"; rather he begins imitating the tension of the tree. And imitating the tension of the tree creates a vortex into which the words are naturally pulled. The words that erupt will send forth not especially the look of the tree but the emotional pull of the tree, its tension. The words will be tense with the nerve of the tree itself. This is the act of metaphor, the words leaping immediately from the object to the reader.
The poet, then, does not try to embalm the object, but to "enact" it. He does not try to paralyze the object, to photograph it (as a still picture) but to let the object evolve as if it were a movie picture. He wants to dramatize the object, to make it act out its fate. The poet does not want to analyze the object into its separate parts, but feel the cohesion of those parts, their tropism, and follow the tendencies of that tropism into speech and imagery. The poet does not seek to abstract any transcendental "essences" from the object, but rather release the object itself into action, thus liberating any "essences" it may partake. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
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l'influence allemande dans les contes de Charles NodierSchoenfeld, Marie-Luise January 1970 (has links)
Charles Nodier, who was born at Besançon in 1780 and who died in Paris in 1844, was a profuse writer in many fields (e.g. bibliography,
linguistics, entomology, criticism, romance). He stood at the crossroads of classicism and romanticism and tried to find a synthesis of the valuable aspects of both movements in their literary and their philosophical significance. He was unjustly forgotten because it was difficult to classify him: although his language and style conformed to the ideals of classic beauty, his ideas were in advance of his time. Thanks to a particularly remarkable ability in languages, Nodier drew upon the store of ideas of European literature as a whole, with particular emphasis on the fantastic literature of Germany. He praised lavishly the freedom of imagination of German thought. German influence has, therefore, been taken for granted by nearly all biographers
and never been explored in detail.
In chapters I and II of this work, we get to know Nodier from the testimony of his contemporaries and that of the scholarly biographers of the 20th century who rediscovered his "contes", as well as from an analysis of these "contes" and their symbolic significance. We arrived at the conclusion that Nodier did not merely try to escape from reality through writing fairy-tales, but that he relayed a distinct message: illuminism. The hidden didacticism accounts for a certain monotony in theme and dénouement. To explain this fact, we drew on general influences
of German thought, demonstrated by comparison with Herder, Tieck,
and others, whose attitudes are reflected in Nodier's criticism and style (chapter III). The full extent of German influence, examined in detail in chapter IV, reveals that the influence of Goethe is ultimately to be considered negative, i.e. Nodier's imitations of Goethe's Werther and Faust are deliberately distorted to convey his criticism. Positive influences are at work between Hoffmann and Nodier, and there are numerous
examples to prove this fact, the most important one being the comparison
of the autobiographical novel Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr intertwined with the Fragmentarische Biographie des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler by E.T.A. Hoffmann, with the largely neglected Histoire du roi de Bohême et de ses sept châteaux by Nodier. The latter work, an intentional conglomeration of pastiches presenting numerous ultra-modern features of style, incorporates two conventional, but likewise fragmented "contes", and thus undoubtedly borrowed its structure
and autobiographical form from Hoffmann.
The examination of German influence in detail shows that Nodier allowed his thoughts to be moulded only by writers with whom he had an affinity of beliefs and character, as in the case of Hoffmann. Otherwise he remained independent and critical. He did not identify with the then foremost German types Werther and Faust, and the overwhelming
praise of Germany seems, therefore, to be addressed to a Utopian country, an image created first by Mme de Staël, and used by her as by Nodier to reinforce their criticism of French literary conservatism.
German influence, while considerable in his "contes", is only incidentally German; Nodier, the bibliophile, was able to draw on the literature of all times and all peoples to feed his metaphysical, social and literary theories. His choice of models seems to prove
Sainte-Beuve's theory of the cohesion of "families of the spirit" untouched by time and space, rather than the notion of generalized national traits in literature. / Arts, Faculty of / French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies, Department of / Graduate
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From Dombey to Headstone : man in the city in the novels of Charles Dickens.Levine, Jennifer Ann January 1970 (has links)
The focus of this study is not so much the city in Dickens' novels, but man in the city, and particularly man in Victorian London - a city given over to the world of commerce. The conditions resulting from the victory of businessmen and the middle classes are central concerns in the later novels, and are mirrored in the city landscape: Dickens knows that it is in the industrial cities, and not in the countryside, that the social problems of his age must be resolved.
Through their insistence that money can do everything, the new powers of the city turn London into an ultimately demonic world, characterized by isolation, confusion, and sterility; shaped into prisons, labyrinths, and wastelands.
As the city expands through economic growth, it becomes a monster, threatening its inhabitants with a fearful 'otherness'. The first chapter of the study deals with the fact of change in Victorian London, a change defined by the victory of middle-class and free-enterprise 'Progress'. The succeeding five chapters describe the various ways in which Dickens' urban men attempt to evade the new facts of their environment: through ignorance and isolation, through the misuse of language, through the repression of sexuality and emotion, through the substitution of cash for all human relationships, and, finally, for the middle-classes, through physical escape into Suburbia. Dickens shows, however, that escape is futile: men can only defeat the demonic city by confronting it, and by rejecting (not protecting) its dehumanizing values. The final chapters offer an examination of the demonic and apocalyptic archetypes that structure Dickens' city and attempt to show that, in the later novels, it is necessary to pass through the demonic gulf in order to be redeemed into a happier vision of city life. The possibility of such a victory for urban men - if only on a limited scale, by a small number of characters - is testified to by the humour throughout the novels, and by the happy resolutions at the end.
London as the great commercial city is most extensively treated in Dombey and Son, Bleak House, Little,Dorrit, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend, and these are the novels round which most of the study is centred. Although in Hard Times Dickens focuses specifically on the new industrial city, Coketown is only partially like London: everything is on a much smaller - almost on an intimate - scale, and it lacks the compensating 'big city' pleasures that make life in London a more complex issue than merely Man versus Progress. For these reasons, Hard Times is not dealt with as a central text. By their extensive focus on life outside London, Martin Chuzzlewit and David Copperfield are also limited in their applications' to this particular study. In both these novels, the hero's struggle for happiness and self-knowledge is determined only to a small degree by the city itself. The early city worlds of Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist are used for two purposes. They point to some of the continuing concerns of Dickens' art, and they serve as a contrast to the later experiences of urban life: Pickwick Papers, through its ability to assimilate even the Fleet into a joyous vision of the world; and Oliver Twist, through its opposing insistence on a totally evil city. In the later novels, Dickens mediates between the two extremes: London lies somewhere between Eden and Hell.
The study is structured along thematic lines, rather than through a series of self-contained essays on individual novels. In its organization, therefore, it must sometimes sacrifice the sense of each novel as an autonomous :word-world with its own unique logic, in order to suggest the coherence within Dickens' works as a whole. The order of development mimics, in a sense, the Dickensian response to the city: it moves cumulatively and inevitably from the discussion of disintegration and isolation of the first chapters towards a vision of London as the demonic city in Chapter VII, and it is only at the end, in the concluding section, that it can move out of the hellish gulf into the world of comedy. For Dickens too, the comic redemption is essential and cannot be left out, but in relationship to the totality of the city, it takes up only a fraction of the whole. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
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The Theology of Charles WilliamsHendry, Robert J. 08 1900 (has links)
Since the publication of Charles Williams' novels, first in England and more recently in the United States, comment has varied between the extremes of "major" and "intolerable." It is desired to confine this study to the seven novels.
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De Gaulle's charisma as a public relations factor in implementing his political philosophyPapadopoulo, George S. January 1961 (has links)
Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University / This study has been undertaken to study what role charismatic characteristics in a man play in Public Relations. It is my contention that when such supernatural gifts are found in a person, then this person need not follow -- indeed as in the case of de Gaulle does not follow -- the traditional channels of P.R. to achieve his ends. His charisma takes the place of a planned Public Relations program in molding Public Opinion. It acts as a channel of communications between the leader and the masses.
It is an accepted fact that politcal leaders -- more so than other types (religious, educational, cultural) -- come to be what they are with the tide of historical circumstances. In times of crisis these leaders are selected from others -- maybe with similar personalities -- but with certain specific gifts of the body and spirit -- gifts that have been believed to be supernatural, and not accessible to everybody [TRUNCATED]
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How Libraries Should Adopt Trauma-Informed PrinciplesTolley, Rebecca 10 February 2021 (has links)
Trauma Informed Care is a framework that helps people recognize the widespread prevalence of trauma and integrate knowledge of its effects into policies and practices.
While libraries have a reputation for being places of sanctuary, the framework of TIC is not always evident in these environments, according to Tolley, whose book, “A Trauma-Informed Approach to Libraries,” was published by the American Library Association in 2020.
In her talk, Tolley will discuss the core concepts of TIC and illustrate the gaps of philosophy and service that are commonly experienced in libraries. She will set the foundation for why trauma-informed practices should be applied to libraries and provide suggestions of how to apply concrete TIC steps to construct an inclusive space for all.
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