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Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (20/21 #11)
by Oren Izenberg"Because I am not silent," George Oppen wrote, "the poems are bad." What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? In Being Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems. Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
Being of Two Minds: Modernist Literary Criticism and Early Modern Texts
by Jonathan GoldbergBeing of Two Minds examines the place that early modern literature held in Modernist literary criticism. For T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson, the early modern period helps model a literary future. At stake in their engagements across time were ontological questions about literature and its ability to mediate between the one and the many, the particular and the general, life and death, the past and the present. If reading and writing literature enables the mind to be in two places at once, creative experience serves as a way to participate in an expanded field of consciousness alongside mortality.Goldberg reads the readings that these modernists performed on texts that Eliot claimed for the canon like the metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists, but also Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, and Margaret Cavendish. Ontological concerns are reflected in Eliot’s engagement with Aristotle’s theory of the soul and Empson’s Buddhism. These arguments about being affect minds and bodies and call into question sexual normativity: Eliot glances at a sodomitical male-male mode of literary transmission; Woolf produces a Judith Shakespeare to model androgynous being; Empson refuses to distinguish activity from passivity to rewrite gender difference.The work of one of our leading literary and cultural critics, Being of Two Minds spans centuries to show how the most compelling and surprising ideas about mind, experience, and existence not only move between early modernity, high modernism, and our own moment, but are also constituted through that very movement between times and minds.
Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918
by Tamara Trojanowska Joanna Nizynska Przemyslaw Czaplinski Agnieszka PolakowskaBeing Poland offers a unique analysis of the cultural developments that took place in Poland after World War One, a period marked by Poland’s return to independence. Conceived to address the lack of critical scholarship on Poland’s cultural restoration, Being Poland illuminates the continuities, paradoxes, and contradictions of Poland’s modern and contemporary cultural practices, and challenges the narrative typically prescribed to Polish literature and film. Reflecting the radical changes, rifts, and restorations that swept through Poland in this period, Polish literature and film reveal a multitude of perspectives. Addressing romantic perceptions of the Polish immigrant, the politics of post-war cinema, poetry, and mass media, Being Poland is a comprehensive reference work written with the intention of exposing an international audience to the explosion of Polish literature and film that emerged in the twentieth century.
Being Polite to Hitler: A Novel
by Robb Forman DewAfter teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes that she is truly weary of the routine her life has become. But how, at 51, can she establish an identity apart from what has so long defined her? Often eloquent, sometimes blunt, and always full of fire, The Scofield clan is not a family that keeps its opinions to itself. As much as she'd like to, Agnes can no more deflect their adamant advice than she can step down as their matriarch. And despite her newfound freedom, Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. She shepherds her daughter-in-law, Lavinia, who moves in with her own two daughters to escape her husband's drinking. She puts out fires, smoothes fraying nerves, and, stunned as anyone, receives a marriage proposal. Having expected her life to become smaller, Agnes is amazed to see it grow instead. Robb Forman Dew intricately weaves together personal and family life into a richly wrought tapestry of the country in the 1950s and beyond. Being Polite to Hitler is a moving, frank, and surprising portrait of post-World War II America.
Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man
by Joshua BennettA prize-winning poet argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. Throughout US history, black people have been configured as sociolegal nonpersons, a subgenre of the human. Being Property Once Myself delves into the literary imagination and ethical concerns that have emerged from this experience. Each chapter tracks a specific animal figure—the rat, the cock, the mule, the dog, and the shark—in the works of black authors such as Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Jesmyn Ward, and Robert Hayden. The plantation, the wilderness, the kitchenette overrun with pests, the simultaneous valuation and sale of animals and enslaved people—all are sites made unforgettable by literature in which we find black and animal life in fraught proximity. Joshua Bennett argues that animal figures are deployed in these texts to assert a theory of black sociality and to combat dominant claims about the limits of personhood. Bennett also turns to the black radical tradition to challenge the pervasiveness of antiblackness in discourses surrounding the environment and animals. Being Property Once Myself is an incisive work of literary criticism and a close reading of undertheorized notions of dehumanization and the Anthropocene.
Being Reflected Upon (Penguin Poets)
by Alice NotleyA memoir in verse from one of America's legendary poetsIn a New York Times review of Alice Notley&’s 2007 collection In the Pines, Joel Brouwer wrote that &“the radical freshness of Notley&’s poems stems not from what they talk about, but how they talk, in a stream-of-consciousness style that both describes and dramatizes the movement of the poet&’s restless mind, leaping associatively from one idea or sound to the next.&” Notley&’s new collection is at once a window into the sources of her telepathic and visionary poetics, and a memoir through poems of her Paris-based life between 2000 and 2017, when she finished treatment for her first breast cancer. As Notley wrote these poems she realized that events during this period were connected to events in previous decades; the work moves from reminiscences of her mother and of growing up in California to meditations on illness and recovery to various poetic adventures in Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, and Edinburgh. It is also concerned with the mysteries of consciousness and the connection between the living and dead, &“stream-of-consciousness&” teasing out a lived physics or philosophy.
Being Roy
by Julie AitchesonIf you ask Roy Watkins who she is, she’ll look you in the eye and say “an artist.” If you asked her whether she identifies as straight or gay, male or female, proud-of-it trailer trash or hick town refugee, she’ll tell you to mind your own damn business. As this unique coming of age story unfolds, Roy finds her greatest challenge in defining herself before the world does it for her—and she’s in no hurry to force herself into a slot. Growing up Roy in a West Virginia trailer park in the early nineties is one thing, but when she gives up her childhood love for a scholarship to snooty Winchester Academy in the hunt country of Virginia, the state line isn’t the only boundary she’ll have to cross to find out what she’s really made of. In the company of Reenie (Roy’s New Age trucker mom), her immigrant sweetheart Oscar, and the privileged Winchester girls determined to befriend her whether she likes it or not, Roy encounters one intersection after another where she must face the complex nature of her identity, and how it will shape her future.
Being Sloane Jacobs
by Lauren MorrillA new novel about following your dreams . . . and finding your heart from the author of Meant to Be. Meet Sloane Emily Jacobs: a seriously stressed-out figure skater who choked during junior nationals and isn't sure she's ready for a comeback. What she does know is that she'd give anything to escape the mass of misery that is her life. Now meet Sloane Devon Jacobs, a spunky ice hockey player who's been suspended from her team for too many aggressive hip checks. Her punishment? Hockey camp, now, when she's playing the worst she's ever played. If she messes up? Her life will be over. When the two Sloanes meet by chance and decide to trade places for the summer, each girl thinks she's the lucky one. But it didn't occur to Sloane E. that while avoiding sequins and axels she might meet a hockey hottie--and Sloane D. never expected to run into a familiar (and very good-looking) face from home. It's not long before the Sloanes discover that convincing people you're someone else might be more difficult than being yourself.
Being Someone: A Gripping Novel about Looking for Love and Finding Yourself
by Adrian HarveyA lonely man falls in love and will do anything to maintain that feeling, in this tale of romance, self-discovery and the eternal search for happiness.James has fallen through life, plotting a course of least resistance, taking each day as it comes and waiting for something to turn up, to give his existence meaning.His journey lacks one vital element: a fellow traveller. Then he meets Lainey, an American working in London. She’s confident, beautiful, and captivating.When James set out to win her heart, Lainey gives James a reason to grow, and promises the happy ending he has sought so keenly.But is sharing life with another everything he hoped?
Being Someone Else
by J R LindermuthSome believe violence foreign to our nature. Dan 'Sticks' Hetrick, retired chief and now consultant to the Swatara Creek police department, knows better. We put a lid on our natural tendency to violence when we started living in groups, devising moral codes to hold it in check and allow us to live in harmony with others. But, deep down in the id--the site of instinct--there's always that tendency to violence. When an out-of-state reporter is found murdered at a disreputable bar the tendency to violence spirals in the rural Pennsylvania community, and the investigative trail keeps bringing Hetrick and his team back to the family of a wealthy doctor who has come home to retire. Hetrick and his protégé Officer Flora Vastine are joined by an old friend from his State Police days as they unravel old secrets and mysteries in a tale with as many shocking twists as a country road.
Being Taught
by Ethan StoneI'm a virgin. I think I want that to change tonight. I want someone to fuck me, but I also want to be shown what to do. I want to be taught. I might get nervous, and I need someone who won't get angry if I say stop. ... No names. No feelings. When it's over, we say goodbye and never see each other again. We both get something out of the deal.
Being Teddy Roosevelt
by Claudia Mills R. W. AlleyRiley O'Rourke is writing his report on President Teddy Roosevelt in preparation for the fourth-grade biography tea, but he has a far more important goal: to get a saxophone so he can take instrumental music. His mother can't afford to rent him a sax, and he's sure he'll never save up enough money to buy one. But as Riley learns more about Roosevelt's "bully" spirit, he realizes that there just might be a way to solve his problem after all. <P>Claudia Mills' sparkling story about the influence of important historical figures is enhanced by tender, insightful illustrations. <P>Being Teddy Roosevelt is a 2008 Bank Street-Best Children's Book of the Year.
Being Thankful
by Mercer MayerJoin Little Critter® as he learns why it's important to be thankful for what he has--not to be upset about what he doesn't. Since 1975, Mercer Mayer has been writing and illustrating stories about Little Critter® and the antics he stumbles into while growing up. Tommy Nelson is thrilled to bring this beloved brand to the Christian market with the Inspired Kids line of faith-based books featuring Little Critter.In Being Thankful, Little Critter isn't gettinganything he wants. Gator gets cool brand-new sneakers, while Little Critter is stuck with his boring blue ones. Tiger's dad has a boat--but not Little Critter's dad. And even at the ice cream shop, Little Critter can't enjoy his chocolate ice cream cone because he would rather have a huge ice cream sundae instead. But on a trip to the farm, Grandma shows Little Critter why thankfulness is so important and helps make any situation seem so much happier.Based on Psalm 107:1, this book will show children what gratitude is and why we should be thankful for all of the blessings God has given us.Features & Benefits:Little Critter® brand has humorously portrayed issues kids face for almost 40 yearsFaith-inspired message shows kids how to be thankful for the things they haveMore than 150 million Little Critter books sold
Being There
by Jerzy KosinskiChance is a man without a past. Raised in the home of a wealthy old man, isolated from the world, he experiences only what he sees on television and his only other activity is daily work in the garden. When the old man dies and Chance is evicted, he steps into the path of a car. From then on, he begins a series of adventures that lead him into a world of wealth, politics, and celebrity. In this cuttingly funny novel, Kosinski shows how a man with practically no resources whatever can become a symbol of power, intellect, and sex appeal, merely by "being there."
Being There (Kosinski, Jerzy Ser.)
by Jerzy KosinskiA quirky, brilliant novel starring Chauncey Gardiner, an enigmatic man who rises from nowhere to become a media phenomenon—“a fabulous creature of our age” (Newsweek). One of the most beloved novels by the New York Times–bestselling and National Book Award–winning author of The Painted Bird and Pinball, Being There is the story of a mysterious man who finds himself at the center of Wall Street and Washington power—including his role as a policy adviser to the president—despite the fact that no one is quite sure where he comes from, or what he is actually talking about. Nevertheless, Chauncey “Chance” Gardiner is celebrated by the media, and hailed as a visionary, in this satirical masterpiece that became an award-winning film starring Peter Sellers. As wise and timely as ever, Being There is “a tantalizing knuckleball of a book delivered with perfectly timed satirical hops and metaphysical flutters” (Time).
Being True
by Jacob Z. FloresTruman L. Cobbler has not had an easy life. It's bad enough people say he looks like Donkey from Shrek, but he's also suffered the death of his policeman father and his mother's remarriage to a professional swindler, who cost them everything. Now dirt poor, they live in the barrio of San Antonio, Texas. When Tru transfers to an inner-city high school halfway through his senior year, he meets Javi Castillo, a popular and hot high school jock. Javi takes an immediate liking to Tru, and the two become friends. The odd pairing, however, rocks the school and sets the cliquish social circles askew. No one knows how to act or what to think when Mr. Popular takes a stand for Mr. Donkey. Will the cliques rise up to maintain status quo and lead Tru and Javi to heartbreak and disaster or will being true to who they are rule the day? Sensual Reads Reviewers' Choice New Adult Award 2014
Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion (Southern Literary Studies)
by Monica Carol MillerIn the South, one notion of “being ugly” implies inappropriate or coarse behavior that transgresses social norms of courtesy. While popular stereotypes of the region often highlight southern belles as the epitome of feminine power, women writers from the South frequently stray from this convention and invest their fiction with female protagonists described as ugly or chastised for behaving that way. Through this divergence, “ugly” can be a force for challenging the strictures of normative southern gender roles and marriage economies. In Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion, Monica Carol Miller reveals how authors from Margaret Mitchell to Monique Truong employ “ugly” characters to upend the expectations of patriarchy and open up more possibilities for southern female identity. Previous scholarship often conflates ugliness with such categories as the grotesque, plain, or abject, but Miller disassociates these negative descriptors from a group of characters created by southern women writers. Focusing on how such characters appear prone to rebellious and socially inappropriate behavior, Miller argues that ugliness subverts assumptions about gender by identifying those who are unsuitable for the expected roles of marriage and motherhood. As opposed to familiar courtship and marriage plots, Miller locates in fiction by southern women writers an alternative genealogy, the ugly plot. This narrative tradition highlights female characters whose rebellion offers a space for re-imagining alternative lives and households in opposition to the status quo. Reading works by canonical writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, and Eudora Welty, along with recent texts by contemporary authors like Helen Ellis, Lee Smith, and Jesmyn Ward, Being Ugly offers an important new perspective on how southern women writers confront regressive ideologies that insist upon limited roles for women.
Being with Henry
by Martha BrooksForced out of his home by a disagreeable and bullying stepfather, sixteen-year-old Laker moves to another town and strikes up an unexpected friendship with a frail but determined old man.
Being with Henry
by Martha BrooksThe car lurches to a halt.The old man finally rolls down his window, studies Laker for one eternal moment while his daughter, behind the steering wheel, fumes and listens to the radio. Laker stands, shrunken and zipped and snapped and collared inside his damp, sweaty leather jacket, and then he hears this unexpected question: Do you do yard work? Kicked out of his house, sleeping on the street, Laker Wyatt meets eighty-three-year-old Henry Olsen, a lonely widower with family troubles of his own -- a bossy daughter and a beautiful granddaughter, Charlene, with whom Henry admits he doesn't always get things right. Eventually, Laker's stay with Henry leads him not only to the revelation of a long-kept secret, but to a deeper understanding of the mysteries and difficulties of love.
Being With Him (Horizons Series #6)
by Mickie B. AshlingA Horizons Series NovellaZeb Araneda leaves his privileged but closely supervised life in the Philippines to study architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where his new roommate is openly gay Luca Dilorio. Alex Boulet is a successful print model who appears to have it all, but on closer inspection, the ready smile never reaches his mesmerizing green eyes. Tired of living alone, Alex moves in with fellow model Chyna Davidson, Luca’s boyfriend. Away from his father’s watchful eye, and with Luca’s help, Zeb learns to navigate his new environment, and experiences freedom of choice for the first time. This fresh perspective allows him to step out of his comfort zone and act on his attraction to Alex. The holiday season has always been difficult for Alex. Sappy commercials tug at his heart, and storefront windows depict idealized scenes that remind him of what he’ll never have: a loving partner willing to accept his truth. Will this Christmas be another disappointment, or will Santa finally make his wish come true?
Being A Writer: A Community of Writers Revisited
by Peter Elbow Patricia BelanoffBeing A Writer is a brief rhetoric that explores writing processes with an emphasis on their variety; invention, with an emphasis on its playfulness; revision as a technique of invention; collaboration as a means of revision; and personal engagement in academic writing, from literary analysis to argument.
Being You: A Girl's Guide to Mindfulness
by Catharine HannayDo you ever feel stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed? As a teen girl, you're under a lot of pressure. Mindfulness can help. Being You explores mindfulness as a simple but powerful way to center oneself and tap into one's own inner wisdom and strength. This book:
Being Youngest
by Jim Heynen"It's not as if grown-ups will let you be average if you're youngest. If you're not fat, they call you Skinny or Bones. If you're not skinny, they call you Hippo or Tubby."Henry and Gretchen are the youngest children in two Iowa farm families. Being youngest, they get left out, blamed, ignored, and picked on all the time. At least that's how, being youngest, they tend to see it.In a summer filled with change, Henry and Gretchen swap stories, become friends, fight with their older brothers and sister, and get to know the odd old couple down the road. Between the old fan's habit of plucking nails out of the ground and the old woman's weird "children" who are kept locked in a room upstairs, they are strange enough. But are they just strange, or could the old folks actually be dangerous?Jim Heynen's story of one farm summer has fun, humor, some scary moments, and many wonderful insights into what being youngest means."Before Henry and Gretchen went their separate ways, they didn't compare the stories they were going to tell at home. They did agree they'd tell something--but not all. They both had learned to hide the best part. They knew that to keep a secret you had to hide it down a blind alley of stories that are only part of what happened. You didn't want to pretend that nothing happened. Too much silence was like honey to a hungry bear, and grown-ups were bound to start pawing around in it. It was best to throw them a few scraps of the truth to keep them away from the real honey of what you did."
Beirut Blues
by Hanan Al-ShaykhWith the acclaim won by her first two novels, Hanan al-Shaykh established herself as the Arab world's foremost woman writer. Beirut Blues, published to similar acclaim, further confirms her place in Arabic literature, and brings her writing to a new, groundbreaking level. The daring fragmented structure of this epistolary novel mirrors the chaos surrounding the heroine, Asmahan, as she futilely writes letters to her loved ones, to her friends, to Beirut, and to the war itself--letters of lament that are never to be answered except with their own resounding echoes. InBeirut Blues, Hanan al-Shaykh evokes a Beirut that has been seen by few, and that will never be seen again.
Beirut File
by Dale A. DyeWhen his wife disappears on a deep, dark intelligence mission, gunner Shake Davis is desperate to find her and apologize for his precarious behavior in the past. Chan has been out of contact since their blow-up in South Korea, and Shake at first assumes he's being fed a dose of his own medicine, but his investigation among old pals in the game quickly indicates there's a much more to it than a simple domestic dispute. His quest to find his wife leads the retired Tier One Special Operator through the tragic Boston Marathon bombing and back to Beirut, Lebanon, where Shake served on active duty as part of the Multi-National Peacekeeping Force in the early 1980s.Intending to get as close as possible to his wife, Shake finds himself drafted into a mission designed to procure samples of chemical warfare attacks being conducted in Syria. What seems like a simple, straightforward courier assignment rapidly turns into a deadly confrontation with Hezbollah forces in Lebanon's turbulent Beqaa Valley. The mission leads Shake into contact with a Kurdish female warrior who delivers the samples from Syria and then leads him on a desperate escape and evasion run along the Syrian border with the Hezbollah on their trail. His determination to accomplish the mission, reunite with his wife, and save the woman who risked so much to deliver proof of WMDs used on rebel factions in Syria gets Shake Davis captured and tortured by the Hezbollah. The tables are suddenly and unexpectedly turned--and Shake must rely on old and new friends to save his life.