Tolstoy and the Purple Chair
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1 Carol Shields's Swann
Ladies of the Ivory Tower Academic Feminism and Feminist Academics in Carol Shields’s Swann, David Lodge’s Nice Work, and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance Liv Christina Varen A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages University of Oslo in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the MA Degree Autumn 2012 II Ladies of the Ivory Tower Academic Feminism and Feminist Academics in Carol Shields’s Swann, David Lodge’s Nice Work, and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance Liv Christina Varen III © Liv Christina Varen 2012 Ladies of the Ivory Tower: Academic Feminism and Feminist Academics in Carol Shields’s Swann, David Lodge’s Nice Work, and A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance Liv Christina Varen http://www.duo.uio.no/ Trykk: Kopianstalten AS, Kristiansand IV Abstract This thesis explores the representation and negotiation of academic feminism and feminist academics in three best-selling campus novels: Carol Shields’ Swann (1987), David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), and A.S Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990). It is based on the assumption that academic fiction may function as a significant contribution to academic and social debate, allowing for other modes of staging and exploring feminist issues than those offered by academic non-fiction. The close-readings of these three novels are supplemented by discussions concerning interpretive possibilities and reception in relation to the authors’ public profiles, as these possibilities arguably entail a particular emphasis on representational responsibility in terms of reception. The latter is here assumed to depend, in part, on the cognitive interaction of the author’s public profile and the reader’s interpretive horizon. -
Addition to Summer Letter
May 2020 Dear Student, You are enrolled in Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition for the coming school year. Bowling Green High School has offered this course since 1983. I thought that I would tell you a little bit about the course and what will be expected of you. Please share this letter with your parents or guardians. A.P. Literature and Composition is a year-long class that is taught on a college freshman level. This means that we will read college level texts—often from college anthologies—and we will deal with other materials generally taught in college. You should be advised that some of these texts are sophisticated and contain mature themes and/or advanced levels of difficulty. In this class we will concentrate on refining reading, writing, and critical analysis skills, as well as personal reactions to literature. A.P. Literature is not a survey course or a history of literature course so instead of studying English and world literature chronologically, we will be studying a mix of classic and contemporary pieces of fiction from all eras and from diverse cultures. This gives us an opportunity to develop more than a superficial understanding of literary works and their ideas. Writing is at the heart of this A.P. course, so you will write often in journals, in both personal and researched essays, and in creative responses. You will need to revise your writing. I have found that even good students—like you—need to refine, mature, and improve their writing skills. You will have to work diligently at revising major essays. -
2008 Book Club Reads a Place Beyond: Finding Home in Arctic
2008 Book Club Reads A place beyond: finding home in arctic Alaska / by Nick Jans The sparrow / by Mary Doria Russell Grape thief / by Kristine Franklin The brief history of the dead / by Kevin Brockmeier The world is flat : A brief history of the 21st century / by Thomas L. Friedman The last report on the miracles at Little No Horse / by Louise Erdrich The Yiddish policemen's union / by Michael Chabon All over but the shoutin' / by Rick Bragg Children of God / by Mary Doria Russell The amateur marriage / by Anne Tyler Another place at the table: A story of shattered childhood and the redemption of love / by Kathy Harrison 2007 Book Club Reads Hey Rube: Blood sport, the Bush doctrine, and the downward spiral of dumbness: Modern history from the sports desk / by Hunter S. Thompson Everything is illuminated / by Jonathan Safran Foer Harvest for hope: A guide to mindful eating / by Jane Goodall The funnies / by J. Robert Lennon Middle passage / by Charles Johnson Reading Lolita in Tehran: A memoir in books / by Azar Nafisi The Time Traveler's Wife / by Audrey Niffenegger March / by Geraldine Brooks Life of Pi / by Yann Martel The worst hard time / by Timothy Egan The shadow of the wind / by Carlos Ruiz Zafon 2006 Book Club Reads The collected stories of Eudora Welty / by Eudora Welty Independence Day / by Richard Ford Me & Emma / by Elizabeth Flock Finding George Orwell in Burma / by Emma Larkin Under my skin / by Doris Lessing The true history of the Elephant Man / by Michael Howell and Peter Ford The English patient / by Michael Ondaatje My brother / by Jamaica Kincaid All creatures great and small / by James Herriot The years with Laura Diaz / by Carlos Fuentes To kill a mockingbird / by Harper Lee 2005 Book Club Reads Don't let's go to the dogs tonight: An African childhood / by Alexandra Fuller The loop / by Nicholas Evans After life / by Rhian Ellis The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy / by Douglas Adams Pope Joan / Donna Woolfolk Cross The lovely bones / by Alice Sebold The good earth / by Pearl S. -
Books I've Read Since 2002
Tracy Chevalier – Books I’ve read since 2002 2019 January The Mars Room Rachel Kushner My Sister, the Serial Killer Oyinkan Braithwaite Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret Craig Brown Liar Ayelet Gundar-Goshen Less Andrew Sean Greer War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (continued) February How to Own the Room Viv Groskop The Doll Factory Elizabeth Macneal The Cut Out Girl Bart van Es The Gifted, the Talented and Me Will Sutcliffe War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (continued) March Late in the Day Tessa Hadley The Cleaner of Chartres Salley Vickers War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (finished!) April Sweet Sorrow David Nicholls The Familiars Stacey Halls Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett May The Mercies Kiran Millwood Hargraves (published Jan 2020) Ghost Wall Sarah Moss Two Girls Down Louisa Luna The Carer Deborah Moggach Holy Disorders Edmund Crispin June Ordinary People Diana Evans The Dutch House Ann Patchett The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Anne Bronte (reread) Miss Garnet's Angel Salley Vickers (reread) Glass Town Isabel Greenberg July American Dirt Jeanine Cummins How to Change Your Mind Michael Pollan A Month in the Country J.L. Carr Venice Jan Morris The White Road Edmund de Waal August Fleishman Is in Trouble Taffy Brodesser-Akner Kindred Octavia Butler Another Fine Mess Tim Moore Three Women Lisa Taddeo Flaubert's Parrot Julian Barnes September The Nickel Boys Colson Whitehead The Testaments Margaret Atwood Mothership Francesca Segal The Secret Commonwealth Philip Pullman October Notes to Self Emilie Pine The Water Cure Sophie Mackintosh Hamnet Maggie O'Farrell The Country Girls Edna O'Brien November Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie (reread) The Wych Elm Tana French On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Ocean Vuong December Olive, Again Elizabeth Strout* Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead Olga Tokarczuk And Then There Were None Agatha Christie Girl Edna O'Brien My Dark Vanessa Kate Elizabeth Russell *my book of the year. -
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Honors a Distinguished Work of Fiction by an American Author, Preferably Dealing with American Life
Pulitzer Prize Winners Named after Hungarian newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction honors a distinguished work of fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life. Chosen from a selection of 800 titles by five letter juries since 1918, the award has become one of the most prestigious awards in America for fiction. Holdings found in the library are featured in red. 2017 The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 2016 The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen 2015 All the Light we Cannot See by Anthony Doerr 2014 The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt 2013: The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson 2012: No prize (no majority vote reached) 2011: A visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 2010:Tinkers by Paul Harding 2009:Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout 2008:The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 2007:The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006:March by Geraldine Brooks 2005 Gilead: A Novel, by Marilynne Robinson 2004 The Known World by Edward Jones 2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo 2001 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon 2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri 1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham 1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth 1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Stephan Milhauser 1996 Independence Day by Richard Ford 1995 The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields 1994 The Shipping News by E. Anne Proulx 1993 A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain by Robert Olen Butler 1992 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley -
Pulitzer Prize
1946: no award given 1945: A Bell for Adano by John Hersey 1944: Journey in the Dark by Martin Flavin 1943: Dragon's Teeth by Upton Sinclair Pulitzer 1942: In This Our Life by Ellen Glasgow 1941: no award given 1940: The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 1939: The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Prize-Winning 1938: The Late George Apley by John Phillips Marquand 1937: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 1936: Honey in the Horn by Harold L. Davis Fiction 1935: Now in November by Josephine Winslow Johnson 1934: Lamb in His Bosom by Caroline Miller 1933: The Store by Thomas Sigismund Stribling 1932: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck 1931 : Years of Grace by Margaret Ayer Barnes 1930: Laughing Boy by Oliver La Farge 1929: Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin 1928: The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder 1927: Early Autumn by Louis Bromfield 1926: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis (declined prize) 1925: So Big! by Edna Ferber 1924: The Able McLaughlins by Margaret Wilson 1923: One of Ours by Willa Cather 1922: Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington 1921: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 1920: no award given 1919: The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington 1918: His Family by Ernest Poole Deer Park Public Library 44 Lake Avenue Deer Park, NY 11729 (631) 586-3000 2012: no award given 1980: The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer 2011: Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 1979: The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever 2010: Tinkers by Paul Harding 1978: Elbow Room by James Alan McPherson 2009: Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout 1977: No award given 2008: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz 1976: Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow 2007: The Road by Cormac McCarthy 1975: The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara 2006: March by Geraldine Brooks 1974: No award given 2005: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson 1973: The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty 2004: The Known World by Edward P. -
Downloaded from Brill.Com09/24/2021 05:47:45AM Via Free Access Review Articles 103
nwig New West Indian Guide 87 (2013) 102-121 brill.com/nwig Bookshelf 2012 Richard Price & Sally Price In this moment of transition for the New West Indian Guide (as it becomes a publication of Brill), it may be appropriate to look back on the history of the book review section as well as forward to plans for its expansion. Founded in 1919 as the Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, the NWIG published book reviews only sporadically, and almost always in Dutch, for its first six-plus decades. As part of its revitalization in 1982 it became an exclusively English-language publication and a book review editor was appointed, charged with find- ing reviewers for Caribbean books published in all languages. Sally Price served in this capacity during the first five years, producing an average of 36 reviews (plus some 3 review articles) annually. After Rolph Trouillot succeeded her, the annual number declined to 21 (with almost no review articles). Then, in the early 1990s the team of Rich and Sally took over and began publishing about 60 reviews and 6 review articles per year, with the rate stabilizing for more than a decade at some 52 reviews plus 4 or 5 review articles annually. We are pleased to announce that with the current issue, we move up to a steady offering of 100 reviews a year (fifty reviews plus 1 to 3 review articles in each issue). The annual “Bookshelf ” section, inaugu- rated in 1993, will continue to offer brief discussion of books on Caribbean subjects that aren’t receiving full reviews. -
A Dub Approach to Defining a Caribbean Literary Identity in the Contemporary Diaspora
ABSTRACT Title of Document: ON THE B-SIDE: A DUB APPROACH TO DEFINING A CARIBBEAN LITERARY IDENTITY IN THE CONTEMPORARY DIASPORA Isis N. Semaj, Doctor of Philosophy, 2013 Directed by: Professor Merle Collins, Department of English Drawing from Jamaica’s socio-politically distinct dub musical genre, “On the B: Side” argues that the literary aesthetics of Caribbean migration and history can be analyzed according to a model of dub. As I define it, the dub aesthetic is marked by erasures, repairs, re-invention, and re-creation. It is thematically and formally captured in migration and represented in the experience of dislocation and home(lessness), memory and the layering of time, political silences and cultural amplification, and the distinct social climate associated with the 21st century push toward celebrating diasporic communities and marking progress through globalization. Given these contemporary circumstances, the Caribbean subject at home locally and at home in the diaspora necessarily demonstrates an acute investment in memory recall and a strong motivation toward building cultural posterity. This dissertation, therefore, explicates how the more recent literature reaches back in new ways that facilitate the survival of a uniquely Caribbean literary identity into the future. This dissertation analyzes works by Ramabai Espinet, Edwidge Danticat, and Anthony Winkler to highlight the ways in which relocation and dislocation intersect for the Caribbean subject. Additionally, I examine works by Marion Patrick Jones and Diana McCaulay, who represent another category of unbelonging and homelessness in the Caribbean that is read in the middle class’s exclusion from national and regional discourse on authenticity. Interrogating the space of Caribbean fiction, the dissertation moves through the deconstruction and reinvention of migration to arrive at the diasporic intersections of erasure, rupture, and repair. -
Interview with Carol Shields About Happenstance (The Husband's Story)
Interview with Carol Shields about Happenstance (The Husband’s Story) Winnipeg Radio 2 1981 Transcription of audio tape INT: Carol Shields is a Winnipeg writer. Her latest book is called Happenstance, a novel about a middle-aged survivor. I talked with Carol about her interesting views on being an author. Carol, I’d like to begin by asking you about the title of your novel Happenstance. You have a quote in there about the hero, Jack Bowman, and it is pure happenstance that made him into a man without serious impairment or unspeakable losses and explain the significance of that. CS: Well happenstance is a strange word. It means half chance, half circumstance I think. I think really most of us are the people we are by chance. We don’t write our own script I suppose is what I’m saying. We can’t really blame all the forces around us – our parents and our happy or unhappy childhood – for the way we turn out. I think it’s all a matter of chance or happenstance. INT: How does that philosophy know itself in your books? CS: I’m not sure it really does. It’s something I’ve just started thinking about. The other thing is this book is about history and our own history we carry around, the sort of baggage of our earlier years. So I think that’s the way I could believe those things that happen to us and pile up in our lives exist by happenstance. We can’t affect them very much. -
395 Njelle W. Hamilton How Does One Read Musical Novels?
Book Reviews 395 Njelle W. Hamilton, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019. xiv + 222 pp. (Paper US$34.95) How does one read musical novels? Njelle Hamilton proposes that novels in which music and recording technologies figure prominently offer an opportu- nity to consider a variety of themes, including memory, nostalgia, belonging, and the making of exilic identities. Phonographic Memories admirably ignores the Anglo/Hispanic Caribbean divide and takes as its objects of study Lawrence Scott’s Night Calypso, Oscar Hijuelos’s Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Daniel Maximin’s Lone Sun, Colin Channer’s Waiting in Vain, and Ramabai Espinet’s Swinging Bridge. In all of these, recorded music is related to memory, and Hamilton explores the variety of ways it acts as the medium through which the characters negotiate their relationship to place and to their own pasts. The main characters, she argues, are frequently constrained by the nostalgia and inherent conservatism of recording technology and of certain musical genres. But they also find a way forward, a way into the future that music opens up for them. Hamilton relies on music and technology to bear a large proportion of the analytical burden. They are metaphors and archives as well as indications of certain identity formations; they both silence and give voice to the charac- ters’ thoughts and feelings. The methodological approach consists principally of careful, detailed analysis of the plots and characters. These range widely and represent aspects of Caribbean life from Cuban exiles’ love-hate relation- ship with Cuba, domestic violence in Trinidad, and the transnational and peri- patetic experiences of young professionals in London, New York, and Kingston. -
1 Introduction: Birth, Death and Resurrection
Notes 1 Introduction: Birth, Death and Resurrection 1. Seán Burke, Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 145. 2. Carol Shields, Mary Swann (London: Flamingo, 1993); Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1995); Antonia Byatt Possession: A Romance (London: Vintage, 1991). 3. Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1998); Margaret Atwood, Lady Oracle (London: Virago Press Ltd., 1982); Ursula Le Guin, ‘Sur’, The Compass Rose (London: Victor Gollancz, 1983). 4. Alice Walker, ‘Everyday Use’, In Love and Trouble (London: The Women’s Press Ltd., 1984); Antonia Byatt, ‘Art Work’, The Matisse Stories (London: Vintage, 1994). 5. The history and etymology of the term, ‘author’, are usefully discussed in Donald E. Pease, ‘Author’, in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds) Critical Terms for Literary Study (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 105–117. 6. See, for example, Grace Stewart, A New Mythos: The Novel of the Artist as Heroine 1877–1977 (Montreal, Canada: Eden Press Women’s Publications, 1981); Linda Huf, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1983); Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985); Gayle Greene, Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991); Lisa Maria Hogeland, Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1998). 7. Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, Fictions of the Female Self: Charlotte Brontë, Olive Schreiner, Katherine Mansfield (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. -
A Personal Reminiscence of Carol Shields
“Excursions into the Sublime”: A Personal Reminiscence of Carol Shields SCL/ÉLC Interview by Nora Foster Stovel first had the pleasure of meeting Carol Shields in Ottawa in 1993 when she read from The Stone Diaries just before it won the Governor General’s Award, followed by the Pulitzer Prize, cata- Ipulting her to instant fame. When I spoke with her afterward to tell her how much I had enjoyed her work, she was just as friendly and unpretentious as I had heard she was. When my proposal for a study of her writing was awarded a research grant in the spring of 2003, I screwed up my courage to email her to ask if I might visit. She replied simply, “When can you come?” When I telephoned to arrange a date (they were listed in the phone book as “Shields, Carol and Don”), she said, “You realize that I’m at the end of a long illness. So sooner is better than later.” When I arrived at their airy home in the exclusive Rocklands district of Victoria on a beautiful day in early May, I could hear children’s foot- steps running through the house. A little girl opened the door, saying, “Grandma’s in the kitchen.” Carol Shields emerged from the kitchen and took my hand warmly. She invited me into her sunroom, where we chatted over tea (she apologized for the lunch crumbs on the table), getting to know one another. I had an unfair advantage, as readers do with writers, since I had been reading her novels for nearly twenty years and felt that I knew her in a way.