Showing papers on "Theme (narrative) published in 1969"

Thinking about thinking: Studies in the background of some psychological approaches

Abstract: Originally published in 1965, this title is a series of exploratory essays on approaches to thinking. The central topic is the relation of processes of an associative kind (sometimes irrational, in so far as they are not enmeshed with a world of shared experience) to those involving some degree of reference to a common world and hence forming the basis of constructive, critical and logical thought. This theme ran through a good deal of psychological controversy at the time. It is a very old theme that had been dealt with many times and in many ways in the course of its history. One might have chosen to discuss approaches to it other than those considered in the present volume. These, however, were selected for their bearing on one another, and because they formed an interesting part of the background to contemporary psychological theory of the time.

Toward Comparative Community Research: A Factor Analyiis of United States Counties

Abstract: THE NEED for comparative research has been a persistent theme in the literature of community sociology for some time.' Although comparative studies are being undertaken with greater frequency, a major problem associated with their design and execution stems from the ambiguity of the concept "community" and an inadequate conceptualization of the dimensions along which these social units vary.2 One recent approach to this problem has been through the application of factor analysis.3 Two studies, in particular, serve as our point of departure-Jonassen and Peres' factor analysis of eighty-two variables operating in eighty-eight Ohio counties 4 and Hadden and Borgatta's factor analysis of sixty-five

Eternal Geomater: The Sexual Universe of Finnegans Wake

Abstract: "Finnegans Wake "has been the target of peripheral investigation for more than forty years, starting with early studies of this novel as a work in progress. Just now, however, are studies beginning to appear in which the book s basic plot and theme are closely examined. Of these new studies, there is no doubt that Margaret C. Solomon s close examination of the sexual universe created here by Joyce will prove especially illuminating to both scholars and general readers.In closely reasoned and richly detailed chapters in the three major parts of her book Mrs. Solomon examines individually the enigmatic figures, reveals the meanings of the passages or chapters which they have made hitherto obscure, and weaves them together to form a distinct pattern of sexual analogies. In Part 3, perhaps the most significant for future students of Joyce, the author, supported by the discoveries of the first two parts, examines the number-symbolism that obviously and enigmatically pervades the "Wake. "Her final chapter, The Coach with the Sex Insides, which brings to a climax her brilliant description of Joyce s sexual universe, examines the dreamer, Yawn, and the image of the bridal ship of Tristan and Isolde and reveals man-as-universe in the shape of a tesseract, a geometrical figure realizable only in a four-dimensional continuum."

The Theme of Forgiveness in the Plot and Subplot of "A Woman Killed with Kindness"

Abstract: In suggests his recent that study if the play of A were W oman performed Killed more with frequently, Kindness David many of Cook the objections raised by critics would prove untenable. Such a revival would show that the play "is not just a pleasing pastiche by a pocket Shakespeare, but a major work in its own right which must be very favorably compared to any other work of the same kind in English."1 Even a reading of the play will reveal its stage-worthiness ; 2 but while production might void the unfavorable criticisms, I suspect that in the after-theater parties we would hear again the interpretive rancor to which Heywood alludes in the epilogue : i. David Cook, "A Woman Killed with Kindness : An Unshakesperian Tragedy," ES, XLV (1964), 372 (hereafter cited as "Cook"). 2. A particular excellence of the play is the use of "unifying symbols" such as those pointed out by Ray Hefïner in Ben Jonson's comedy ( English Institute Essays , New York, 1955). The domesticity of the main plot is summarized by the table which appears again and again onstage; in both the main plot and the subplot relationships of the characters are frequently indicated by what they do with, or say about, their hands; and music, with the chief symbol being Anne's lute, is used to dramatize the decay of happiness in both plots.

The Use of Music in Daniel Deronda

Abstract: E _VER SINCE F. R. LEAVIS'S dogmatic distinction between the "good half" and the "bad half" of Daniel Deronda,' critics have generally agreed that the Gwendolen Harleth novel is artistically superior to the Daniel Deronda novel. This need not mean, however, that the book is fragmented in all respects; on the contrary, there are themes which cut across the two stories and unify them closely. In this essay, I propose not to deal with the artistic flaws in the presentation of the Jewish characters and subject matter, but to accept them as they are, and to concentrate instead upon one of the unifying threads of the novel as a whole: the theme of music. At first it may seem that music is a divisive, rather than a unifying, element, since nearly all the truly natural musicians in the book are Jews: Mirah, whose "voice was considered wonderful for a child" (157)2; Daniel, who, as a child, "had not only one of those thrilling boy voices which seem to bring an idyllic heaven and earth before our eyes, but a fine musical instinct" (124); his mother, the Princess Halm-Eberstein, who was a "born singer" (476), although in her case musical talent is treated as antagonistic to Jewishness; Mordecai, who, speaking of Jewish martyrs, says that the soul born within him "sang with the cadence of their strain" (375); and, of course, Herr Klesmer, whose very name means "musician" in Yiddish, and whom George Eliot quite evidently intended for a Jew, or at least a "part Semite" who in one place calls himself "the Wandering Jew" (179).3

The Oxford book of ballads

Abstract: The ballad is probably the most intensely dramatic of all poetic forms and its appeal has proved to be especially enduring In this anthology of the traditional ballads of England and Scotland, the material is grouped according to theme and mood and covers the whole range of the genre It includes romances, biblical ballads, magic tales and a miscellany of literary and historical ballads including the "riding ballads" of the Scottish border The author has consulted manuscripts and early printed sources in the pursuit of authenticity and is careful to avoid the amended or elaborate versions which are often presented as authentic The collection includes such favourites as "Tam Lin" and "The Bonny Earl of Murray" among its 150 ballads, 80 of which are accompanied by their tune and explanatory notes

The relevance of power theme's among male, negro and white, paranoid and non-paranoid schizophrenics.

Abstract: SINCE Freud’s analysis of Schreber’s autobiographical account of his mental illness, psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical discussions have emphasized intense ambivalence towards other men as one of the cornerstones of paranoid dynamics in males.6 Freud contended that in regard to heterosexual object choice paranoids submissively &dquo;retired from the conflict&dquo; in favor of the father’s superior aggressive potential. This renunciation of women was followed by seeking refuge in homosexual object choice, which, however, implied castration and hence generated covert retaliatory castration wishes creating chronic conflict with men.7

The City is Dead-- Long Live the City

Abstract: The theme of death and transfiguration recurs as a leit-motiv throughout the long history of sociological speculations about the city. Each time, so it seems, just as one particular manifestation of urbanism has approached its terminal stage, a theorist has hastened to equate its matured form with the essence of urbanism sui generie, and ideologists have responded, each according to his values, to eulogize the lost or to rejoice.

Supergrow: Essays and Reports on Imagination in America.

Abstract: A collection of 15 essays that appeared between 1966 and 1969 in publications such as the "American Scholar", "The New York Times", "Antioch Review", "Esquire", and the "Saturday Review". Author Benjamin DeMott discusses many different topics - music, improving one's sex life, violence in Mississippi, theatre, student revolts - but a single theme unifies the material: people ought to use their imaginations more. The volume starts from the assumption that our troubles stem from failures of the imagination. Overcome by mass media, we are too often oblivious to fresh and original ideas. This is a sociological and political critique of various aspects of everyday life in America, one informed by a powerful moral sensibility and an Emersonian sense of self-reliance. DeMott takes pop culture seriously, but exhibits an unwillingness to "go with the flow" and get caught up in fashionable intellectual fads. The author is not afraid to tackle difficult subject matter, from homosexuality and racism to popular music and child-rearing. He also provides an introduction to the essays in the volume.

The dreams of Benjamin Rush.

Abstract: Although Benjamin Rush disclaimed any tendency toward superstitious belief in dreams, he seems in fact often to have fallen under the spell of his own dreams and to have been quite affected by them. A common theme in Rush's dreams was the attempt to reconcile a conflict he was then experiencing: the struggle between his humanitarian sentiments and his need to earn a living, for example, and the frequent incompatibility of his personal political ambitions with his role as a doctor.

Pindar’s Ninth Olympian

Abstract: The theme of the ode is replacement, new persons put in new situations to increase their glory, thus Heracles and his myth replaced by the victor and his city’s story

Symbolic Patterns in Call It Sleep

Abstract: The revival in this decade of Henry Roth's remarkable and long-neglected novel, Call It Sleep, has occasioned much critical enthusiasm. The book has been widely praised for its language, its characterizations, its sympathy and compassion, its psychological validity, its painfully faithful portrayal of the terrors of childhood.' But it was not until the publication of Kenneth Ledbetter's article, "Henry Roth's Call It Sleep: the Revival of a Proletarian Novel,"2 that the book was subjected to the kind of close critical scrutiny it deserves. Other critics have acknowledged the strength and complexity of Roth's symbol system,3 but only Ledbetter (although he concedes the "tentative" nature of his "probings") 4 has made a careful and systematic attempt to analyze the work. However, the central theme of Ledbetter's article that Call It Sleep is the finest of American proletarian novels is not, I think, a fully satisfactory approach to the meaning of the book. Certainly Ledbetter defines the proletarian novel very broadly and loosely as "a novel by and about the proletariat in which it is seen as a separate class with u n i q u e experiences and responses."5 Furthermore, his critical insights are thoughtful and pertinent, particularly when he n o t e s that, through Roth's major symbols, the protagonist "David re-enacts a basically human yet emphatically proletarian pattern of experience repeated thrusts into the world, each followed by a withdrawal back into the self."6 Roth's symbols are, like those of any major novelist, so rich and complex that they can be interpreted in a variety of ways and made to fit any number of critical frameworks. We can indeed argue that, on one level, Call It Sleep is a proletarian novel.7 But it is surely an error to argue that the primary and fundamental meaning of the book lies in its proletarian nature. For Call It Sleep is essentially the story of the development of a religious sensibility. Its implications are far more profoundly theological, even metaphysical, than they are social. The novel is concerned with a small boy's quest for reality and meaning amid a multiplicity of fearfully oppressive tensions. David Schearl must meet the challenges posed by time, by the ugliness and hostility of the external world, by his Jewishness, by his excessive sensitivity, and by the mysterious and frightening power of ex. Throughout much of the novel, he struggles unsuccessfully to find security and meaning through denial, through the repudiation of all those forces in life which threaten to disrupt his sense of what is permanent and whole and good. But ultimately he learns that he cannot do so, that he must somehow accept life's ambiguous coherence. The novel records the

Petrus Borel, Prison Horrors, and the Gothic Tradition

Abstract: Madame Putiphar (1838) should be better known. Petrus Borel, a member of the "petit cenacle" to which Theophile Gautier and Gerard de Nerval also belonged, was one of the most colorful exponents of "frenetic" literature. He liked to call himself le lycanthrope-the wolf-man. Champavert (1833), subtitled "Contes immoraux," established him as a specialist in gory tales at a time when "charnelhouse" writing was in fashion. Some of Flaubert's early exercises in literary violence were heavily influenced by these texts; even as late as 1861, when he was writing Salammbo, he had Petrus Borel in mind as he himself described tortures and disembowelments. Rape and child murder are among the more innocent subjects of Borel. At first glance, Madame Putiphar-Borel's only full-length fiction-appears a less outrageous work than Champavert. As for the title, it is meant to evoke not a Biblical setting but the aspect of the Joseph story that deals with temptation, purity, and injustice. The "madame" in question is Mme. de Pompadour, and her victim is a handsome young Irishman in exile whom she has jailed for life when he rejects her lascivious advances. The lasciviousness is suggested with skill. But it is the desolation and despair in the prisoner's underground dungeon that are at the center of this novel and that account for its most powerful pages. The story opens with a prefatory poem, an allegorical prologue in which the soul is assailed by three temptations: the world, the cloistered existence, and the seduction of Death. In part, this moralistic beginning is a concession to the taste of the time. "Philosophical" considerations frequently surrounded the flimsiest fictional productions, and the theme of metaphysical temptations was popular. Borel's preliminary poem about surrender to life, withdrawal from worldly involvement, and attraction to nothingness and non-being is, however, of particular importance. First, because of its tense, feverish, obsessive tone that prefigures the pungency and affective concentration of some of Baudelaire's finest poetry.

Social Class in a New Town: a Comment

Abstract: This note continues discussion on the theme of an article by B. J. Heraud (Urban Studies, Vol. 5, No. i), in relation to recent social changes in Crawley New Town. The comments are based largely on surveys in that area and relate to the impact of Crawley as a sub-regional centre and to the changing social structure of the town.

Shakespeare's repentance plays : the search for an adequate form

Abstract: Follows the treatment of repentance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest to show the relationship of theme and form, and the dramatist's experimentation with forms until he accomplished his goal--the probing psychological exploration of men who sin, repent, and achieve redemption.