American Literature

Talk for ‘A Sense of Nature’, SHNH International Summer Meeting, University of Glasgow, 19-20 June 2025.

While 18th-century naturalists commonly documented the emanations of plants and animals, references to smell have become increasingly rare in natural history treatises since the 19th century, and are virtually absent from modern field guides which have long been predominantly ocularcentric. The subjectivity of olfactory experience has been regarded as problematic in natural history, and in sciences in general. Linnaeus himself, although he proposed a categorization of plant odours, wrote in Systema naturæ (1735) that “odour never clearly distinguishes the species” and that “of all the senses [smell] is the least certain.” By the 19th century, the sense of smell was further devalued, often dismissed as a prerogative of “lower animals” and “savages,” incapable of producing reliable knowledge. As a result, the once-common practice of sniffing specimens to describe their specific scents was progressively abandoned among naturalists.

Yet, despite of this shift in favour of visual-knowledge, smell perceptions undeniably remained an important part of the naturalist experience in the 19th century, as evidenced by the new genre of Nature writing. Moving away from the Cartesian constraints of traditional treatises, nature essayists of that time combined scientific inquiry and first-person narratives based on empirical experiences, appealing to a fuller, more diversified sensorium. This paper will examine the attention to the olfactory in the writings of three 19th-century North-American naturalists with a keen sense of smell: Henry David Thoreau, John Burroughs, and John Muir. Their reflections about olfactory sensitivity in human- nature relations, as well as their evocative olfactory descriptions of flora and fauna, demonstrate that active use of the sense of smell in encountering the living world is, in spite of the modern prejudice against this sense in the West, highly valuable—both scientifically, philosophically and aesthetically.

This study is the second part of a three-part analysis (if it meets the review requirements) of emotions carried out by written documents. These documents were collected from eight students who took part in a three-day stock market experiment in January 2025. In the first part of this research (1), which was previously published, a lexical approach was used to analyze the words' emotional weight in the passages of the written documents. In this study, we considered all the passages in order to analyze a single written document for each student. To analyze the emotional charges in the documents, three Artificial Intelligences (ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek) have been used, and six queries have been selected. Using emotional couples, our results suggest different analytical processes depending on the Artificial Intelligence requested and a lack of uniformity in the emotional couples generated, according to the queries selected. At least, Artificial Intelligences are able to identify a strong primary and basic emotional trend but seem to have trouble capturing more nuanced emotional levels in a consistent manner. Using multiple queries does not improve the consistency of the results, and, indeed, the most generic query leads to the most uniform results among the selected artificial intelligences.

Resumo: O objetivo desse trabalho é analisar como o vestido branco de Emily Dickinson pode ser interpretado como simbolismo de sua escrita e estilo de vida. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) é uma das mais renomadas poetas americanas do século XIX, conhecida por sua escrita introspectiva e sua vida reclusa. No entanto, poucos sabem que o vestido branco foi uma peça de vestuário que desempenhou um papel simbólico na vida e na obra da autora, tornando-se uma parte central de sua identidade. Apesar de ser um traje simples, longe de parecer trivial, o vestido de Dickinson tinha conotações relacionadas à pureza, simplicidade e autenticidade que também podem ser interpretadas como uma metáfora de sua poesia. Não era um vestido particularmente incomum nem caro para a época, era confortável e fácil de limpar. Em termos de materiais e estilo (incluindo o bolso único do lado direito), o vestido era uma peça de roupa convencional e prática do início da década de 1880 (Wald, 2010). Além disso, o branco também era funcional e fácil de cuidar numa época em que o branqueamento era considerado a solução mais confiável para limpar roupas sujas. O vestido branco agora quase reverentemente associado à Emily Dickinson era uma peça de uso doméstico comum, utilizado pelas mulheres da época para a realização de tarefas rotineiras e outras atividades informais dentro de casa. Ao optar por bolsos no vestido para acomodar seus caderninhos e lápis, Emily tinha mais liberdade para ir e vir e fazer anotações nas mais variadas situações. Ao se diferenciar quanto ao vestuário, Dickinson se distanciou da moda e da ostentação, refletindo sua preferência pela simplicidade e sua expressão poética autêntica. Além disso, o vestido pode ser visto como um símbolo de sua rebelião silenciosa contra as normas de sua época, especialmente as expectativas de casamento e maternidade que eram impostas às mulheres daquele período.

Greetings to each of you. In the words and in the majestic cadence of Dr. Maya Angelou, as she ended end her Inaugural Poem 'On the Pulse of Morning' (Clinton, 1993)…"And into your sister's eyes, into Your brother's face, your country… And say simply, Very simply…. With hope, Good morning.

The goal of this text is to produce a psychoanalytic approach to political discourse and the discourse of capitalism; to formalize the problems that affect the subjectivity of our time. The argumentative method is used to reach the results and the conclusions for the report of the annual period. We distinguish the political scene of the real political, shown at the event. Every political system is defined by the way of the sacred that is proper. The classic political discourse suffers a crisis and is replaced by the discourse of capitalism, producing new effects on subjectivity and the social field.

for something fun or unusual, as well as being a scholarly term for an archetypal story (Frye; Cawelti), a modern narrative of colonial violence or capitalist enterprise (Green, Dreams), and a genre of nineteenth-century British fiction (Kestner). Adventure should also be understood as a narrative mode that organizes stories and representations in contemporary popular culture, structuring meaning and affect in narratives featuring violence in a way similar to how melodrama organizes meaning and affect in narratives featuring suffering (Williams; Elsaesser; Brooks). According to Linda Williams, melodrama comprises a family of narrative features meant to create sympathetic identification with a virtuous victim (29). The pleasures of melodrama involve a complex play of intradiegetic misrecognitions and discoveries of the moral identity of key characters but especially the victimized hero or heroine. Adventure functions in an analogous way, but the main pleasures derive from identification with a hero successfully confronting danger and violence. The "basic moral fantasy implicit in this type of story," John G. Cawelti asserts, is "victory over death" (40). Ideologically, adventure can assume a range of political configurations, including progressive ones, as there is no inherent political coloring to stories about overcoming great challenges. Historically, however, adventure writing-both fictional and nonfictional-has been closely aligned with the colonial and imperial projects of modern nation states, casting

Batman fi rst appeared in 1939, close on the heels of the recently created and hugely successful Superman. The young comic book industry, just emerging as a separate medium from the newspaper comic strip, and hitherto mainly defi ned by men in suits, now demanded more visually appealing (i.e. costumed) characters. Batman was born as a darker and more complex variation on the red-caped superhero: he is Superman’s Gothic double.1 Although many superheroes were created in the 1940s and since then, Batman has remained the darkest and most problematic, not least because his powers come not from a magical source but from the brooding intensity of a childhood trauma. Over seventy years later, Batman has grown to become bigger than ever, eclipsing even Superman in recent decades. Why has this been the case? And how did this happen? In addressing these questions, I want to suggest that the main reason for the success of Batman in the twenty-fi rst century—a multi-billion dollar Batman indust...

This paper argues that Yuri Herrera's Signs Preceding the End of the World subverts US-centric discourses on border crossing by exposing them as artificial myths. Suspending said myths by superimposing an alternative mythical dimension rooted in Aztec cosmology and narratives about the descent into the underworld, the novel instead fosters a form of 'alternative knowledge' in which the liminal state of border-crossing bodies becomes detached from the negative stigma of hegemonic US-centric discourse. The ensuing study's main analysis aims to detail how the novel's narrative structure of descent reimagines the experiences of unauthorized border crossing as a mythical and transformative journey of self-discovery.

Marija Jurić Zagorka spisateljica je čiji su se povijesni romani uglavnom smatrali trivijalnim uratcima za neuki puk. Do promjene u kritičkoj recepciji Zagorkinih romana dolazi posljednjih nekoliko godina refl eksija čega je i ovaj rad koji pokušava iščitati njezinu Tajnu Krvavog mosta iz perspektive gotičke književnosti. Smjestivši Tajnu Krvavog mosta u kontekst svjetske i hrvatske gotičke književnosti, rad dokazuje pripadnost ovog Zagorkina romana gotičkom kanonu analizom njegovih naslova i teme, te gotičkih (progonjena protagonistica, muški likovi kao junaci ili demonski ljubavnici, elementi natprirodnog, gotička arhitektura) motiva prisutnih u narativnom prostoru romana.

Faulkner portraits, film posters, and other materials related to his life and work. Special Collections, located on the third floor of the Williams library, is open Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., except for University holidays. For more information, please call Jennifer Ford at 662-915-7408.

Las nociones de cuerpo y de nino atraviesan diferentes discursos y cada episteme posibilito conceptualizaciones de acuerdo con las funciones culturales a las que servia. A partir de la modernidad ambas nociones cobran lugares discursivos que posibilitaron cierta visualizacion del nino y por lo tanto una manera de idear el cuerpo del mismo. Desde los inicios, en el campo psicoanalitico la manera de concebir nino y cuerpo desarticularon los planteos provenientes de la psicologia y de la pedagogia, a la vez es posible observar que el psicoanalisis de ninos se vio entrampado en esos discursos.

Sylvia Plath's works have been the subject of analysis by so many critics with different approaches. What is common in almost all these studies is this American writer's inclination with such themes as distress, isolation and anxiety. This article is going to analyze a number of her poems and The Bell Jar as Plath's only novel in order to probe into the concept of childhood and how it was treated by her. As a matter of fact, the current study intends to prove that her childhood, motherhood, her parents and what happened in her marital life had a great influence on all her works and chased her up to the very end of her life. To achieve this goal, the writer will have a concise analysis of some poems which have been chosen randomly and her only novel through Lacan's theory of childhood. In other words, this paper is going to investigate Plath's preoccupation with childhood as displayed in her poetry. Through her unconcealed presentation of this fascination in many of her applauded poems, she tried to provide a touching and convincing study representing Lacan's theory.

Love is one of literature's favorite subjects. Ever since man has put pen to ink and paper, he has tried to give voice to this intensely felt and experienced feeling. From West to East and from South to North, world literature has introduced us to the written stories and to the pairs of lovers who, under the dictates of place and time, have or have not fulfilled their love. The Greeks bequeathed us a series of words to help us identify the type of love felt and experienced, while the Arabs, through their linguistic richness, have shown us that love is a gradual phenomenon, with stages of varying intensity. A.Z. Obiedat, through a linguistic analysis, identifies 14 such stages of love. The present paper thus aims to identify these stages in the love story between the Lebanese writer Kahlil Gibran and the Lebanese-Palestinian writer May Ziadah, as presented in the letters Gibran sent to the latter during their correspondence that spanned almost two decades.

This article suggests that Ulrich Beck's concept of the "risk society" provides a novel framework for interpreting literary texts, especially those dealing with themes such as uncertainty, disaster, and risk. Beck's theory delineates the transition from traditional to modern and postindustrial societies based on their perceptions of risk, hazard, and disaster, and this study focuses on John Cheever's seminal 1964 short story "The Swimmer" as it registers the historical shift from industrial to late-modern society. Beck's work has been influential in sociology but underutilized in literary studies, except for a limited number of narratives on climate change, environmental degradation, and nuclear disaster. Cheever's narrative, through the surreal and disorienting journey of its protagonist Neddy Merrill, is positioned in this article as an allegory of the rise of the risk society in the United States of America of the 1960s. "The Swimmer" is analyzed as a critique of the American dream and the existential decadence of affluent suburban life, where the protagonist's journey through suburban pools symbolizes a broader transition from the relatively predictable, orderly world of industrial modernity to the complex, unstable conditions of postindustrial society. The article argues that Cheever successfully captures the social consciousness of a period marked by growing awareness of insecurity, alienation, and risk. This interpretation contributes to the limited scholarly discourse on Cheever's story and offers a new perspective on the intersection of literature and sociological theories.

The generation of poets to which Robert Lowell belongs was dominated by the literary theory and practice of T. S. Eliot. Lowell's birth in the same year (1917) in which Eliot's first major collection, Prufrock and Other Observations, was published, is the first of many coincidences in the poets' lives. Like Eliot thirty years before, Lowell was born into a highly distinguished New England family conspicuous in public service and cultural pursuits. It was said of Boston, in those days, that The Lowells talk only to Cabots And the Cabots talk only to God.

In this chapter, I propose to read the many racial performances of Blackness and Asianness in the Charlie Chan series against the grain, striving to see the generativity of these films while still acknowledging the ways they participated in employment discrimination and racist imaginaries. To queer minstrelsy is to situate it at the intersection of subjective agency and subjugation, between the ostensibly volitional performance choices shaped by professional acting norms, and the less conscious constraints on self-presentation shaped by performativity and its reliance on repetition and differentiation. In other words, how race is performed on-screen is not simply a racist fantasy but is inextricable from how race is lived off-screen, and the demands to perform the comic darky or compliant coolie exist within and alongside Black and Asian American attempts to push back against these roles despite the ease of inhabiting them. Continuing to draw on feminist and queer theory, I utilize the notion of queer kinship to conceptualize the AfroAsian connection in the Charlie Chan films beyond the terms of naturalized relationality, and to mark the strange and fleeting intimacies created through these encounters. Despite meeting only in a single film, Chan and Fetchit become something like the patres familias of a queered AfroAsian Chan clan united not only by an experience of racist interpellation through minstrelsy, but also in the service of a perverse reproduction of intertwined Black and Asian comedic performance that might even continue today.

The term magic(al) realism originated some one hundred years ago. Since then, it has been used to cover sometimes widely divergent literary productions. My argument will be that the success of magic(al) realism results from how it resonates with a set of literary-critical dispensations changing over time. I will discuss four of these.

On January 1,1863, a large audience gathered in Boston's Music Hall to celebrate the fulfillment of President Lincoln's pledge to free the slaves. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation prompted the "leading patriots in and around Boston"-among them Ralph Waldo Emerson-to call for a "Musical Festival of rejoicing" in honor of the event. The musicians had tuned their instruments and the "great audience" was waiting expectantly for the overture. But there came instead the unexpected announcement that Emerson had written a prologue for the occasion and that the poet himself would read it. The poem he read was the "Boston Hymn" and, according to one observer, no one who heard Emerson that day "could ever forget the tone and emphasis of the speaker."' The war years to this point had not been prosperous ones for Emerson. Only a year before the Music Hall recitation the poet had written his brother William that "almost all income from lectures has quite ceased," and "we are all trying to be as unconsuming as candles under an extinguisher. . . ."* Emerson had continued to lecture during 1861 and 1862, but his engagements were limited mainly to New England. Emerson's plans for 1863 included a lecture tour in the W e s t the first he had scheduled since 1860. A few days after the music festival he set out on his travels to New

Dorsey shares her practice of using a written play to connect the knowledge students bring to the classroom with Howard Gardner's concept of multiple intelligences. For several years, I have used August Wilson's play, A Piano Lesson, as a required supplemental text for my developmental reading classes. The colorful characters, festering family conflict, and illusory ghost immediately capture the attention of the students, catapulting them into the reading comprehension process which requires visualization, application of prior knowledge, and prediction. Besides providing lively classroom discussions and intriguing journal entries, the text lends itself easily to creation of exercises that appeal to the multiple intelligences and further enhance comprehension. Reading the play aloud, as a class, creates a community of readers who encourage

Edith Wharton has long been associated with misogyny and prudishness, both by scholars and by popular critics. This article examines Wharton's 1913 novel The Custom of the Country alongside contemporary feminist criticism such as Ariel Levy's 2005Female Chauvinist Pigs to argue that Wharton's acid-tongued portrayal of The Custom of the Country's antiheroine Undine Spragg is evidence of her forward-thinking critique of the replacement of authentic female sexual experience with the consumer-driven publicity. In Zibrak's reading, The Custom of the Country emerges as a prescient portrait of a culture saturated in sexual imagery but devoid of sexual pleasure.

Le Nord du Maroc a conservé de nos jours un ensemble de coutumes, de traditions et de survivances, qui soulèvent des questions sur l'origine et les raisons de la continuité des traditions ancestrales. A travers le rituel de Bachikh et l'examen de ses composantes, il y a une manifestation de la conservation de rites et coutumes très anciens. Outre que Bachikh est un symbole de la résistance au temps et aux diverses cultures que d'autres régions du Maroc ont connues. La comparaison entre le spectacle de Bachikh et le culte de Bakchos permet de voir une survivance des vénérations ancestrales. C'est une sorte d'attachement à une identité proprement locale. En plus de la survivance, ce type d'étude permet de constater l'expansion et l'influence de certains cultes ancestraux puissants dans le monde méditerranéen.

uses recent discussions of ChatGPT as an entry point to explore what remains unique about the humanities in an age dominated by the natural sciences. Each chapter focuses on one of an eclectic mix of writers who reflect on the hold that science and technology have on our world. Through close readings of these authors, Aronowicz attempts to explain and demonstrate that the tools of the humanities distinguish human reasoning, creativity, and reflection from technological imitations. The title of the book is borrowed from Charles Péguy, and his critique of the pervasive narratives of the natural sciences forms the core of the book. Péguy is brought into conversation with each of the other authors, serving as the connective tissue between chapters. Aronowicz's reflections on AI are not always effectively integrated into the rest of the book, but they are suggestive enough to provoke further investigation. Her treatments of Don DeLillo's and Marilynne Robinson's use of metaphors are particularly strong. Aronowicz critiques reductive forms of scientific reasoning, but she consistently draws out her authors' appreciation for the humanistic potential of the natural sciences.

In order to describe the work of these authors, Matthiessen and others turned to literary labels popularized in reference to British authors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism, a literary movement emphasizing the freedom and originality of self-expression that began in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, also seemed to capture the spirit of nineteenth-century America and was frequently applied to authors of both prose and poetry. In the hands of these authors, the meadows of western Massachusetts replaced the Lake District as the source of inspiration, and the rejection of Puritan morality continued the American emphasis on freedom of expression. When Whitman and Dickinson began writing poetry in the 1850s, the thriving Abolitionist movement added urgency to the need for new voices and rapid change. When we refer to Whitman and Dickinson as late Romantics, we place them at the end of a period that begins in the 1820s, and we suggest that their works are merely derivative from those that preceded them chronologically. Yet Whitman's and Dickinson's poetry is contemporary with these other works, and it seems more fruitful to consider the differences in genre than the differences in chronology. Whitman and Dickinson achieved their fame by changing American poetry from patriotic and historical ballads to free verse-poetry that lacks both rhyme and regular meterand musically inspired celebrations of the individual in the American landscape. Whitman and Dickinson are the most famous of the Late Romantics, and their work inspired successive generations of American authors. From these poets, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Charles Chesnutt found the freedom to use a variety of American dialects in their work, the realists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries discovered the richness of the American landscape, and the Modernist poets located a source of new poetical forms to meet the needs of the adolescent Republic that came of age in the decades immediately following the Civil War. That national coming of age, in the years of Reconstruction, Western Expansion, Manifest Destiny, industrial might, and rapid immigration, also marks the traditional beginning of courses like this one. The Civil War, while not a precise dividing line, is regarded as the most reliable current method for marking the split between the first and second half of the literary history of the United States. Teachers and critics quickly realized, however, that the continued growth of the literary and cultural productions of the United States required more precise divisions than the chronological division into pre-bellum and post-bellum periods can provide. This collection of readings follows those new divisions, with chapters on Late Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Pre-Modernism, Modernism, and post-1945 American Literature, but the boundaries between these divisions remain fluid. The readings that follow are arranged loosely by chronology, and the authoreditors of this collection have tried to provide useful headnotes to the sections and the individual authors, but do not be afraid to draw connections beyond the loose boundaries and invent new terms that better describe these works. As American literature continues to grow, we create new categories that better describe our shared experience.

Diblomaasi waa deggel hormuud u ah falanqeynta Siyaasadda Arrimaha Dibadda, wararka madaxa bannaan iyo ajendaha-dejinta wararka, falanqaynta siyaasadeed iyo faallooyinka fikirka-gaarka ah ee sida gaar ah loogu qoray/diyaariyey jiilka cusub. Diblomaasi waxay daabacdaa majaladdo si joogta ah usoo baxo bil dhaaf. Ujeedka rasmiga ah ee majaladda Diblomaasi ayaa ah in la helo goob si joogto ah ugu faallooto su’aalaha caalamiga ah ee saameynaya Soomaaliya, iyadoo la isu keenayo aqoonyahano aqoon u leh diblomasiyadda, nidaamyada dawladeed, maaliyadda, warshadaha, waxbarashada, iyo sayniska. Majaladdaha ay soo saarto Diblomaasi waxaa lagu tiriyaa mid kamid ah majaladaha siyaasadda arrimaha dibadda ee Soomaaliya loogu akhriska badan yahay. Majaladda waxay daabacday dhowr maqaallo oo faallooyin cajiib ah ka bixiyay geedi socodka dowladnimada Soomaaliya iyo xariirka caalamiga oo ay kamid yihiin,…Danaha Qaranka. Danta Qaranka ayaa sharxi karta himilooyinka gobolka. Waxaa sidoo kale looga faa’iideysan karaa iyadoo lagu shaqeynayo fulinta siyaasadaha iyo barnaamijyada dhabta ah ee la raacay. Waxaa loo isticmaali karaa si xeeladaysan doodaha siyaasadeed si loo sharaxo, loo maleeyo, ama loo naqdiyo. Khilaafaadka casriga ah ee ku saabsan siyaasadda arrimaha dibedda inta badan waxa ka soo baxa madmadow mana aha oo kaliya fikradaha kala duwan ee ku saabsan nuxurka danaha qaranka. Si kasta oo ay tahay madmadowga, fikradda danta qaranka waxay udub-dhexaad u tahay isku day kasta oo lagu sharaxayo, lagu saadaalinayo, laguna fahmayo hab-dhaqanka caalamiga ah.

Mala socotaa in aad kamid noqon karto qorayaasha wax ku qori kara Diblomaasi.com, waa haddii aad tahay qof wax qora, jecel in bulshada wanaag iyo baraarujin usoo gudbiyo? jawaabtaada haddii ay ‘Haa tahay, waxaad nagala soo xariiri kartaa emaylka hoose ee qoraaga loogu tala galay. https://www.diblomaasi.com/

Alice Malsenior Walker, born (February 9, 1944) in Eatonton, Georgia is the youngest of eight children to sharecroppers, Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Lou Tallulah Grant. After an early day's misfortune which blinded her in one eye, she went on to become valedictorian of her neighboring school, and attended Spellman College and Sarah Lawrence College on scholarship. Alice Walker volunteered in the voter registration drives of the 1960s in Georgia, and went to job after college in the Welfare Department in New York City. She was married in 1967, and unfortunately divorced in 1976. Her first volume of poems was published in 1968 and her earliest novel was published just after her daughter's birth in 1970. Her poems, novels and short stories dealt with the themes of troubled relationships, violence, rape, multi-generational perspectives, isolation, sexism and racism etc. About the themes and issues Gilbert and Susan say:

In her book The Translation Zone, Emily Apter proposes a critical history of modern comparative literary studies that begins with an encounter between East and West. In this case, it was in Istanbul in the 1930s and 40s, the city where the German critics Leo Spitzer and Eric Auerbach are said to have inaugurated the modern European discipline of comparative literature through their encounter with the Turkish university system : it was where Auerbach wrote his book Mimesis, and Spitzer pioneered seminars on comparative philology. Moreover, Apter claims that their project retains a relevant, if controversial, legacy for contemporary literary studies. She credits Leo Spitzer in particular, with his interest in translation studies, as being the forerunner of a "transnational humanism" which attempts to explore cultural and linguistic differences in a spirit of a self -critical and secular inquiry (56). For Apter, writing after 9/11, comparative criticism must rethink the literary and cultural status of religious discourse (especially the transcendent claims of fundamentalism) from a perspective of an inclusive, and non -coercive, secularism (75). The lasting legacy of Istanbul is, then, the attempt to rethink the global position of the European : "As the status of European traditions within postcolonial studies continues to be negotiated, this transnational humanism may be construed as a critical practice that reckons with the uncertain status of European thought in the future global marketplace of culture" (46). Humanism here names that practice of cosmopolitan or intercultural exchange that is said to be the proper object of world literature. This paper addresses the relationship of comparative literature, religion and secularism through another example of East/West comparison from the late 1930s. This will be the rather less well -known example of the British scholar in Japan Reginald Horace Blyth, and in particular a book he published in the difficult circumstances of 1942, Zen In English Literature and the Oriental Classics. While this is not a well -known work that carries much influence

The Counterlife of Knight Errant Christie McKay is a novel about a man with two lives. Christie McKay is a middle-aged academic who has a self-harming partner he cannot leave. On a sabbatical studying Don Quixote he meets another woman and falls in love. However, instead of leaving his self-harming nemesis, he concocts an absurd fantasy that will allow him to lead a double life and have a relationship with both women at the same time. His attempts to compartmentalize both lives leads to tragedy as the one crashes into the other with dire consequences. The novel was partly inspired by Philip Roth?s notion of ?the counterlife?, this being the double life that is created in order to make the official one somehow more manageable. Thus the rococo fantasies of a Billy Liar or, more commonly, the prosaic extramarital affair. The Trials of Philip Roth: Writing as Ordeal and Punishment examines the influence of a recurring trope in the writings of Philip Roth which I have called ?The Trial?....

Le tarot est un thème récurrent dans le genre de la fantasy. Dans un article bibliographique, Emily E. Auger compte une trentaine de romans ou de séries de romans de fantasy faisant usage du motif du tarot entre 1967 et 1989, puis encore une trentaine d'autres entre 1990 et 2005. Les deux séries de romans des cycles d'Ambre de Roger Zelazny se trouvent tout en haut, chronologiquement, de cette liste. Avec quelle particularité et selon quelles modalités ? Cet article porte sur l'usage des cartes, en particulier des Atouts du tarot, dans un univers fictionnel, mais aussi sur les réemplois du thème du tarot dans une des déclinaisons transmédiatiques de l'oeuvre.

Reuben Gold Thwaites'in kaleme aldığı The Romance of Mississippi Valley History, Mississippi Vadisi'nin zengin ve dramatik tarihini, epik bir anlatımla sunuyor. İlk yerli halkların yaşamından, Avrupalı kaşiflerin maceralarına, sınır boylarındaki destansı mücadelelere ve kıtanın şekillenmesine kadar uzanan bu eser, tarihin kuru bir anlatıdan çok daha fazlası olduğunu gösteriyor. Thwaites, tarih ile hikâye anlatıcılığının iç içe geçtiği bir yaklaşımla, okuyucularına Mississippi Vadisi'nin bilinmeyen köşelerini keşfetme fırsatı sunuyor. Kolonileşme dönemindeki Fransız, İspanyol ve İngiliz etkilerini, Amerikan Devrimi’nden Batı’nın fethine uzanan olayları ve vadinin nasıl bir ulusun kaderini şekillendirdiğini, büyüleyici bir üslupla aktarıyor. Tarih, yalnızca akademik bir alan değil, bir milletin kimliğini oluşturan canlı bir hikâyedir anlayışıyla yazılan bu eser, tarih severler kadar edebiyat tutkunları için de kaçırılmayacak bir kaynak. Mississippi Vadisi'nin romantizmi ve destansı geçmişiyle tanışmaya hazır olun!