- Table View
- List View
Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?: And Other Essays
by Adam KirschFrom one of today’s keenest critics comes a collection of essays on poetry, religion, and the connection between the two Adam Kirsch is one of today’s finest literary critics. This collection brings together his essays on poetry, religion, and the intersections between them, with a particular focus on Jewish literature. He explores the definition of Jewish literature, the relationship between poetry and politics, and the future of literary reputation in the age of the internet. Several essays look at the way Jewish writers such as Stefan Zweig and Isaac Deutscher, who coined the phrase “the non‑Jewish Jew,” have dealt with politics. Kirsch also examines questions of spirituality and morality in the writings of contemporary poets, including Christian Wiman, Kay Ryan, and Seamus Heaney. He closes by asking why so many American Jewish writers have resisted that category, inviting us to consider “Is there such a thing as Jewish literature?”
Who Was Robert Ripley? (Who was?)
by Nancy Harrison Kirsten Anderson Tim FoleyEnter a world of shrunken heads, mystic holy men, shriveled aliens, and bizarre relics in the delightfully odd tale of Robert Ripley. Born in California, Ripley began his career as a sports cartoonist. He went on to chronicle global records and oddities in his weekly column, Believe It Or Not! After publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst took an interest in the column, it became a syndicated global success. Ripley spent his life traveling to more than 200 countries in search of strange objects and interesting facts. His penchant for the peculiar launched an entertainment empire, and his collection of artifacts can be seen worldwide at his famous Odditoriums. Believe It Or Not!
Who Was William Shakespeare
by Dympna CallaghanA new study of Shakespeare's life and times, which illuminates our understanding and appreciation of his works.Combines an accessible fully historicised treatment of both the life and the plays, suited to both undergraduate and popular audiencesLooks at 24 of the most significant plays and the sonnets through the lens of various aspects of Shakespeare's life and historical environmentAddresses four of the most significant issues that shaped Shakespeare's career: education, religion, social status, and theatreExamines theatre as an institution and the literary environment of early modern LondonExplains and dispatches conspiracy theories about authorship
Who Was William Shakespeare?
by Celeste Davidson MannisThe beloved plays of Shakespeare are still produced everywhere, yet the life of the world's most famous playwright remains largely a mystery. Young Will left the town of Stratford to pursue theatre in London, where his work eventually thrived and made him a famous and wealthy man. Celeste Davidson Mannis puts together the pieces of Shakespeare's life and work for young readers.
Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) A Jewish American Writer
by Derek RubinThis unprecedented collection brings together the major Jewish American writers of the past fifty years as they examine issues of identity and how they've made their work respond. E. L. Doctorow questions the very notion of the Jewish American writer, insisting that all great writing is secular and universal. Allegra Goodman embraces the categorization, arguing that it immediately binds her to her readers. Dara Horn, among the youngest of these writers, describes the tendency of Jewish writers to focus on anti-Semitism and advocates a more creative and positive way of telling the Jewish story. Thane Rosenbaum explains that as a child of Holocaust survivors, he was driven to write in an attempt to reimagine the tragic endings in Jewish history. Here are the stories of how these writers became who they are: Saul Bellow on his adolescence in Chicago, Grace Paley on her early love of Romantic poetry, Chaim Potok on being transformed by the work of Evelyn Waugh. Here, too, are Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Erica Jong, Jonathon Rosen, Tova Mirvis, Pearl Abraham, Alan Lelchuk, Rebecca Goldstein, Nessa Rapoport, and many more. Spanning three generations of Jewish writing in America, these essays -- by turns nostalgic, comic, moving, and deeply provocative- constitute an invaluable investigation into the thinking and the work of some of America's most important writers.
Who We're Reading When We're Reading Murakami
by David KarashimaHow did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive? A "fascinating" look at the "business of bringing a best-selling novelist to a global audience" (The Atlantic)―and a “rigorous” exploration of the role of translators and editors in the creation of literary culture (The Paris Review). Thirty years ago, when Haruki Murakami’s works were first being translated, they were part of a series of pocket-size English-learning guides released only in Japan. Today his books can be read in fifty languages and have won prizes and sold millions of copies globally. How did a loner destined for a niche domestic audience become one of the most famous writers alive? This book tells one key part of the story. Its cast includes an expat trained in art history who never intended to become a translator; a Chinese American ex-academic who never planned to work as an editor; and other publishing professionals in New York, London, and Tokyo who together introduced a pop-inflected, unexpected Japanese voice to the wider literary world. David Karashima synthesizes research, correspondence, and interviews with dozens of individuals—including Murakami himself—to examine how countless behind-the-scenes choices over the course of many years worked to build an internationally celebrated author’s persona and oeuvre. His careful look inside the making of the “Murakami Industry" uncovers larger questions: What role do translators and editors play in framing their writers’ texts? What does it mean to translate and edit “for a market”? How does Japanese culture get packaged and exported for the West?
"Who, What Am I?": Tolstoy Struggles to Narrate the Self
by Irina Paperno"God only knows how many diverse, captivating impressions and thoughts evoked by these impressions . . . pass in a single day. If it were only possible to render them in such a way that I could easily read myself and that others could read me as I do. . ." Such was the desire of the young Tolstoy. Although he knew that this narrative utopia—turning the totality of his life into a book—would remain unfulfilled, Tolstoy would spend the rest of his life attempting to achieve it. "Who, What Am I?" is an account of Tolstoy's lifelong attempt to find adequate ways to represent the self, to probe its limits and, ultimately, to arrive at an identity not based on the bodily self and its accumulated life experience. This book guides readers through the voluminous, highly personal nonfiction writings that Tolstoy produced from the 1850s until his death in 1910. The variety of these texts is enormous, including diaries, religious tracts, personal confessions, letters, autobiographical fragments, and the meticulous accounts of dreams. For Tolstoy, inherent in the structure of the narrative form was a conception of life that accorded linear temporal order a predominant role, and this implied finitude. He refused to accept that human life stopped with death and that the self was limited to what could be remembered and told. In short, his was a philosophical and religious quest, and he followed in the footsteps of many, from Plato and Augustine to Rousseau and Schopenhauer. In reconstructing Tolstoy's struggles, this book reflects on the problems of self and narrative as well as provides an intellectual and psychological biography of the writer.
Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?: Essays
by Jesse McCarthy"This is a very smart and soulful book. Jesse McCarthy is a terrific essayist." —Zadie Smith New York Times • "New Books to Watch For in March" A supremely talented young critic’s essays on race and culture, from Toni Morrison to trap, herald the arrival of a major new voice in American letters. Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to Toni Morrison’s revolutionary humanism to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s bracing essays investigate with virtuosic intensity the art, music, literature, and political stances that have defined the twenty-first century. Even as our world has suffered through successive upheavals, McCarthy contends, “something was happening in the world of culture: a surging and unprecedented visibility at every level of black art making.” Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? reckons with this resurgence, arguing for the central role of art and intellectual culture in an age of widening inequality and moral crisis. McCarthy reinvigorates the essay form as a space not only for argument but for experimental writing that mixes and chops the old ways into new ones. In “Notes on Trap,” he borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to reveal the social and political significance of trap music, the drug-soaked strain of Southern hip-hop that, as he puts it, is “the funeral music that the Reagan Revolution deserves.” In “Back in the Day,” McCarthy, a black American raised in France, evokes his childhood in Paris through an elegiac account of French rap in the 1990s. In “The Master’s Tools,” the relationship between Spanish painter Diego Velázquez and his acolyte-slave, Juan de Pareja, becomes the lens through which Kehinde Wiley’s paintings are viewed, while “To Make a Poet Black” explores the hidden blackness of Sappho and the erotic power of Phillis Wheatley. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Claudia Rankine, and Colson Whitehead survey the state of black letters. In his title essay, McCarthy takes on the question of reparations, arguing that true progress will not come until Americans remake their institutions in the service of true equality. As he asks, “What can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes?” For readers of Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things and Mark Greif’s Against Everything, McCarthy’s essays portray a brilliant young critic at work, making sense of our disjointed times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art, identity and representation.
Who Will Write Our History?: Rediscovering a Hidden Archive from the Warsaw Ghetto
by Samuel D. KassowIn 1940, in the Jewish ghetto of Nazi-occupied Warsaw, the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a clandestine scholarly organization called the Oyneg Shabes to record the experiences of the ghetto's inhabitants. For three years, members of the Oyneb Shabes worked in secret to chronicle the lives of hundereds of thousands as they suffered starvation, disease, and deportation by the Nazis. Shortly before the Warsaw ghetto was emptied and razed in 1943, the Oyneg Shabes buried thousands of documents from this massive archive in milk cans and tin boxes, ensuring that the voice and culture of a doomed people would outlast the efforts of their enemies to silence them. Impeccably researched and thoroughly compelling, Samuel D. Kassow's Who Will Write Our History? tells the tragic story of Ringelblum and his heroic determination to use historical scholarship to preserve the memory of a threatened people.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Who Words (Word Play)
by Carrie B. SheelyParents, sisters, brothers, friends, and teachers are just some of the people in children's lives. Bring these words about people to young learners, and watch their vocabularies grow! Words are carefully matched to engaging photos that will keep children captivated from beginning to end.
Who Writes for Black Children?: African American Children’s Literature before 1900
by Anna Mae Duane Katharine CapshawUntil recently, scholars believed that African American children&’s literature did not exist before 1900. Now, Who Writes for Black Children? opens the door to a rich archive of largely overlooked literature read by black children. This volume&’s combination of analytic essays, bibliographic materials, and primary texts offers alternative histories for early African American literary studies and children&’s literature studies.From poetry written by a slave for a plantation school to joyful &“death biographies&” of African Americans in the antebellum North to literature penned by African American children themselves, Who Writes for Black Children? presents compelling new definitions of both African American literature and children&’s literature. Editors Katharine Capshaw and Anna Mae Duane bring together a rich collection of essays that argue for children as an integral part of the nineteenth-century black community and offer alternative ways to look at the relationship between children and adults. Including two bibliographic essays that provide a list of texts for future research as well as an extensive selection of hard-to-find primary texts, Who Writes for Black Children? broadens our ideas of authorship, originality, identity, and political formations. In the process, the volume adds new texts to the canon of African American literature while providing a fresh perspective on our desire for the literary origin stories that create canons in the first place. Contributors: Karen Chandler, U of Louisville; Martha J. Cutter, U of Connecticut; LuElla D&’Amico, Whitworth U; Brigitte Fielder, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Eric Gardner, Saginaw Valley State U; Mary Niall Mitchell, U of New Orleans; Angela Sorby, Marquette U; Ivy Linton Stabell, Iona College; Valentina K. Tikoff, DePaul U; Laura Wasowicz; Courtney Weikle-Mills, U of Pittsburgh; Nazera Sadiq Wright, U of Kentucky.
Who Wrote Citizen Kane?: Statistical Analysis of Disputed Co-Authorship (Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences)
by Warren BucklandThis book offers a solution to one of film history’s major controversies: the long-running dispute over Orson Welles’ and Herman J. Mankiewicz’s contributions to the Citizen Kane screenplay. It establishes the vital importance of computing and statistics to solving previously intractable puzzles in the arts and humanities. Citizen Kane (1941) is one of the most acclaimed films in the history of cinema. For 50 years it topped the Sight & Sound film critics’ poll. Orson Welles directed the film and is credited with co-writing the screenplay with Herman J. Mankiewicz. But the co-writer credit generates furious disputes between those who argue Mankiewicz is the sole author of Citizen Kane and those who claim that Welles collaborated fully with its writing. The author employs computing and statistics to answer two questions: What are the distinguishing features of Welles’ and of Mankiewicz’s writing? And What did each contribute to the writing of the Citizen Kane screenplay? To answer these questions, the author bypasses opinions and impressions, and instead subjects the language of the Citizen Kane screenplay to a ‘forensic’ examination. Employing linguistics, basic statistical tests, plus computer technology and software, the author identifies the stylistic signature of each author – the combination of consistent and regular linguistic habits that make each author’s writing distinctive. This book replaces impressionistic discussions of Mankiewicz’s and Welles’ contributions to the Citizen Kane screenplay with a rigorous, experiment-driven statistical analysis. Earlier statistical studies of authorship have discovered that small, unassuming language features (such as punctuation, pronouns, and prepositions) in statistically significant quantities, constitute a screenwriter’s distinctive writing habits. Only with the extensive experimentation carried out in this volume, did the author decide Mankiewicz’s and Welles’ specific habits and their contributions to Citizen Kane.
Who Wrote Shakespeare?
by James ShapiroThis ebook is an excerpt from Contested Will by James Shapiro, and originally appeared as the last section titled "Shakespeare." In this chapter, Shapiro succintly and eloquently makes the case for why no one else but Shakespeare could have written Shakespeare's plays.
Who Wrote That?: Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov
by Donald OstrowskiWho Wrote That? examines nine authorship controversies, providing an introduction to particular disputes and teaching students how to assess historical documents, archival materials, and apocryphal stories, as well as internet sources and news. Donald Ostrowski does not argue in favor of one side over another but focuses on the principles of attribution used to make each case.While furthering the field of authorship studies, Who Wrote That? provides an essential resource for instructors at all levels in various subjects. It is ultimately about historical detective work. Using Moses, Analects, the Secret Gospel of Mark, Abelard and Heloise, the Compendium of Chronicles, Rashid al-Din, Shakespeare, Prince Andrei Kurbskii, James MacPherson, and Mikhail Sholokov, Ostrowski builds concrete examples that instructors can use to help students uncover the legitimacy of authorship and to spark the desire to turn over the hidden layers of history so necessary to the craft.
Who Wrote This?: How AI and the Lure of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing
by Naomi S. BaronWould you read this book if a computer wrote it? Would you even know? And why would it matter? Today's eerily impressive artificial intelligence writing tools present us with a crucial challenge: As writers, do we unthinkingly adopt AI's time-saving advantages or do we stop to weigh what we gain and lose when heeding its siren call? To understand how AI is redefining what it means to write and think, linguist and educator Naomi S. Baron leads us on a journey connecting the dots between human literacy and today's technology. From nineteenth-century lessons in composition, to mathematician Alan Turing's work creating a machine for deciphering war-time messages, to contemporary engines like ChatGPT, Baron gives readers a spirited overview of the emergence of both literacy and AI, and a glimpse of their possible future. As the technology becomes increasingly sophisticated and fluent, it's tempting to take the easy way out and let AI do the work for us. Baron cautions that such efficiency isn't always in our interest. As AI plies us with suggestions or full-blown text, we risk losing not just our technical skills but the power of writing as a springboard for personal reflection and unique expression. Funny, informed, and conversational, Who Wrote This? urges us as individuals and as communities to make conscious choices about the extent to which we collaborate with AI. The technology is here to stay. Baron shows us how to work with AI and how to spot where it risks diminishing the valuable cognitive and social benefits of being literate.
The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everthing Else
by Christopher R. BehaThis unique memoir of reading the classics to find strength and wisdom &“makes an elegant case for literature as an everyday companion&” (The New York Times Book Review). While undergoing a series of personal and family crises, Christopher R. Beha discovered that his grandmother had used the Harvard Classics—the renowned &“five foot shelf&” of great world literature compiled in the early twentieth century by Charles William Eliot—to educate herself during the Great Depression. He decided to follow her example and turn to this series of great books for answers—and recounts the experience here in a smart, big-hearted, and inspirational mix of memoir and intellectual excursion that &“deftly illustrates how books can save one&’s life&” (Helen Schulman). &“As he grapples with the death of his beloved grandmother, a debilitating bout with Lyme disease and other major and minor calamities, Beha finds that writers as diverse as Wordsworth, Pascal, Kant and Mill had been there before, and that the results of their struggles to find meaning in life could inform his own.&” —The Seattle Times &“An important book [and] a sheer blast to read.&” —Heidi Julavits
The Whole Harmonium: The Life of Wallace Stevens
by Paul MarianiA perceptive, enlightening biography of one the most important American poets of the twentieth century--Wallace Stevens--as seen through his lifelong quest to find and describe the sublime in the human experience.Wallace Stevens lived a richly imaginative life that found expression in his poetry. His philosophical questioning, spiritual depth, and brilliantly inventive use of language would be profound influences on poets as diverse as William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. The Whole Harmonium presents Stevens within the living context of his times, as well as the creator of a poetry which has had a profound and lasting impact on the modern imagination itself. Stevens established his career as an executive even as he wrote his poetry, becoming a vice president with an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. His first and most influential book, Harmonium, was not published until he was forty-four years old. In these poems, Stevens drew on his interest in and understanding of modernism. Over time he became acquainted with the most accomplished of his contemporaries, Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams among them, but his personal style remained unique. He endured an increasingly unhappy marriage, losing himself by writing poetry in his study. Yet he had a witty, comic, and Dionysian side to his personality, including long fishing (and drinking) trips to Florida with his pals and a fascination with the sun-drenched tropics. People generally know two things about Wallace Stevens: that he is a "difficult" poet and that he was an insurance executive for most of his life. Stevens may be challenging to understand, but he is also greatly rewarding to read. Now, sixty years after Stevens's death, biographer and poet Paul Mariani shows how over the course of his life, Stevens sought out the ineffable and spiritual in human existence in his search for the sublime.
The Whole Journey: Shakespeare's Power of Development
by C. L. Barber Richard P. WheelerThis title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1986.
Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography
by Reed WhittemoreOriginally published in 1989. In this companion volume to the acclaimed Pure Lives, Reed Whittemore probes the often-complex motives behind the relationships of modern biographers to their subjects. Whittemore's description of biography's uneven path toward comprehensive character study begins with Thomas Carlyle, whose biography of Frederick the Great broke with tradition by tracing the roots of its subject's character to childhood trauma. (A strict disciplinarian, Frederick's father once considered having his rebellious teenage son executed.) Whittemore examines the work of Leslie Stephen, the Dictionary of National Biography's first editor, who admired Carlyle but disliked his style—and was convinced that Carlyle disliked him. And in a chapter on Sigmund Freud, Whittemore traces the revolution in writing biography that began with Freud's speculations on the nature and origin of Leonardo da Vinci's homosexuality. Few have escaped Freud's influence. While Leon Edel argues that biographers should not psychoanalyze their subjects, his biography of Henry James does precisely that. Richard Ellman tempers his impulse for Freudian probing of Joyce, Yeats, and Oscar Wilde with the explication of their often difficult works. Kenneth Lynn's recent biography of Hemingway takes the opposite approach. "The Hemingway industry," Whittemore explains, "is like Marilyn Monroe's in having much of the sensational in it, including suicide, so that the problems of having to deal with Hemingway as a writer, good or bad, can always be put on the back burner for a few chapters while Hemingway the braggart and liar performs." Thomas Parton and Benjamin Franklin, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Erik Erikson and Martin Luther, biographers and their subjects continue to engage our attention. Whole Lives offers an informative—and refreshingly informal—look at one of the most enduringly popular genres.
Whore Biographies, 1700-1825, Part I Vol 3
by Julie PeakmanFocuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets. These provide sources for the study of sexuality, gender, women's studies and the literature and history of the eighteenth century.
Whore Biographies, 1700-1825, Part II vol 5
by Julie PeakmanAcross eight volumes, this two-part collection of selected texts focuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets.
Whore Biographies, 1700-1825, Part II vol 6
by Julie PeakmanAcross eight volumes, this two-part collection of selected texts focuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets.
Whore Biographies, 1700-1825, Part II vol 7
by Julie PeakmanAcross eight volumes, this two-part collection of selected texts focuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets.
Whore Biographies, 1700-1825, Part II vol 8
by Julie PeakmanAcross eight volumes, this two-part collection of selected texts focuses on autobiographies and biographies of courtesans, directories of whores, erotic poems dedicated to harlots, jocular descriptions of prostitutes and jest books on strumpets.