William S. Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night Trilogy: Writing Outer Space

2006 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 523-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEX HOUEN
Keyword(s):  
Outer Space ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Norman Mailer ◽  
Mary Mccarthy ◽  
Henry Miller ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
Space Age ◽  
The Way

In August 1962 the American novelist Mary McCarthy surprised everyone by extolling the virtues of William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), thereby raising the public profile of both the novel and novelist. The occasion was an Edinburgh conference on writing and censorship organized by the publisher John Calder, and attended by literary luminaries such as Norman Mailer and Henry Miller. For McCarthy the virtue of Naked Lunch was its timeliness, the way it appeared “sort of speeded up like jet travel”; “it has that somewhat supersonic quality.” Addressing the conference audience, Burroughs went a step further, heralding a new epoch of space writing: I feel that a new mythology is now possible in the space age and that we can again have heroes and villains, with respect to the planet, and in closing I would say that the future of writing is in space and not in time.

Rereading the Future

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 640-646
Author(s):  
Cynthia Port
Keyword(s):  
Graduate School ◽  
The Novel ◽  
High Expectations ◽  
Opening Scene ◽  
Love Story ◽  
Dynamic Relation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Central Station ◽  
The Way ◽  
The House Of Mirth

I noticed the dynamic relation between age and narrative the second time i read edith wharton's the house of mirth. on my first experience of reading the novel, as an undergraduate of eighteen, I was engaged by its thwarted love story and saddened by Lily Bart's tragic but honorable end. When I reread the novel in graduate school, however, I was about to turn twenty-nine, the age at which Lily's marriage prospects and high expectations for the future begin to fade. Although Lily is widely admired for her remarkable beauty, readers are alerted in the novel's opening pages to the incipient erosion of that beauty. Even as Lawrence Selden finds his eyes “refreshed” when he catches a glimpse of Lily at Grand Central Station, remarking that “he had never seen her more radiant” (37), he credits this impression to the way her dark hat and veil have temporarily restored “the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing” (38). While Selden silently muses about her age (“here was nothing new about Lily Bart. … [H]ad she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?” [37–38]), Lily declares that she's “as old as the hills” (38); she perceives that “people are getting tired” of her and saying she “ought to marry” (42). Lily is ambivalent about marriage as her “vocation” (as Selden puts it [43]) but undertakes this quest. By the end of the novel, having lost her social and economic standing and failed to secure a husband—and thereby a future—she puts her affairs in order and overdoses on chloral (43). Her age is certainly not the only factor contributing to her decline: Selden's continuing fascination with Lily affirms that she has remained dis-tractingly attractive (even if, perhaps, “ever so slightly brightened by art” [39]), and the novel attributes her social descent more directly to her financial circumstances than to her age. Nevertheless, the opening scene of The House of Mirth emphatically establishes twenty-nine as a precipice over which Lily Bart falls to her doom.

The Public Festival: Inspiration and interconnectivity at the heart of festivals

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathrin Deventer
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Political Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Abstract Theory ◽  
The Public ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

Festivals have been around, and will always be around; no matter the political context they are embedded in, supported by, or hindered by. Why? Simply because society develops, it transforms, it is dynamic and it needs space for reflection and inspiration. Festivals are platforms for people to meet, and for artists to present their work, their creations. This gives festivals an enduring, quite independent mission and reason to exist: as long as festivals strive to offer a biotope for artists and audiences alike and point to questions which concern the way we live and want to live, they will be a fertile ground for a meaningful development of society – and an offer for serving the public wellbeing. What are the challenges festivals are facing today? There are a series of very complex questions related to festivals’ positioning us as human beings in an interconnected, global society, our relation to nature and the immediate surroundings, our stories of life so that as many citizens as possible can be part of the societal discourse, can be enriched, can be touched, can be heard, can be moved. Individuals, interest groups, nationalities, countries, even continents are interconnected. What does this mean for a festival? Travelling across Europe for work and pleasure and meeting citizens from all walks of life has taught me that citizens, a term that connects individuals to some larger constructed community, are just people, everyday people, going about their lives. People connect with other humans and their human stories, real life encounters. Abstract theory and jargon are meaningless when they lack real life connections. Meaningful festivals of the future will offer possibilities for new connections among people: they invite people to travel in time and in space; they inspire to connect human stories, enriching them with new, unexpected, colourful stories!

‘Your memorials shall survive the grave’: elegy and remembrance

2018 ◽  
pp. 118-149
Author(s):  
Alison Morgan
Keyword(s):  
Central Feature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Vernacular Culture ◽  
The Future ◽  
Broadside Ballads ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Way

The sixteen ballads and songs within this section fall into two camps: elegy and remembrance. Whilst a central feature of elegiac poetry is the way in which it remembers or memorialises the dead, the dead a poem which is one of remembrance is not necessarily an elegy. Several of the songs herein use the date of Peterloo as a temporal marker – with an eye both on the contemporaneous reader or audience and the future reader. Included in this section are broadside ballads by Michael Wilson and elegies by Samuel Bamford and Peter Pindar. These songs display a self-awareness in their significance in marking the moment for posterity and in their attempts to reach an audience beyond Manchester and ensure that the public knew what had happened on 16th August as well as preserving the event in English vernacular culture. It is also a quest for ownership of the narrative of the day; the speed with which so many of these songs were written and published not only suggests the ferocity of emotions surrounding events but also the need to exert some control over the way in which they were represented.

scholarly journals Working in the world of the pandemic

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 97-102
Author(s):  
Luke Tredinnick ◽  
Claire Laybats
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Information Professionals ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
The Way

This paper compiles a series of responses from key information professionals to the novel coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Respondents were invited to answer the questions how the pandemic has impacted on their work, and how it might change the way of working in the future. Contributors to the article include Scott Brown, Steve Dale, Denise Carter, Alison Day, Hal Kirkwood and Emily Hopkins.

Cervantine Criticism since 2000 and into the Future

2021 ◽  
pp. 647-680
Author(s):  
Bruce R. Burningham
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Current Century ◽  
Critical Perspectives ◽  
The Way

The past two decades have seen an explosion in Cervantes scholarship. Indeed, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to suggest that the last twenty years arguably represent the Golden Age of Cervantes criticism: slightly more than half of scholarly works written since 1888 have been published during the last two decades. In other words, during the last twenty years, the body of Cervantes knowledge has more than doubled, greatly expanding our variety of critical perspectives along the way. This chapter discusses the ‘across the centuries’ trend resulting from the various anniversary celebrations related to Cervantes, the ‘Cervantes and the Americas’ collections, Cervantes’s treatment of Islam, and the modernity of the novel, among other trends that have expanded Cervantine criticism since the turn of the current century.

Vampire Religion

2002 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Herbert
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Religious Motivation ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Christian Religion ◽  
The Future ◽  
Moral Conception ◽  
William Robertson ◽  
European Civilization ◽  
The Way

THIS ESSAY HIGHLIGHTS AND SEEKS to trace the conflicted logic of the strong religious motivation exemplified in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). First it analyzes the tensions in Stoker's polemic against the primitive other of religion/ superstition, setting that polemic off against those of two late-Victorian anthropologists, William Robertson Smith and James Frazer. For these theorists, the basis of the superstitious mentality lies in the principle of taboo, according to which the divine and the unclean are one and the same and divinity manifests itself in contagious physical transmission. Dracula on the level of its overt homiletic rhetoric presents the campaign waged against vampirism by Van Helsing and his friends as an allegory of the suppression of wicked archaic superstition in the name of enlightened, spiritualized Christian religion. Yet the novel is itself an emanation of a deeply superstitious mentality: it powerfully endorses a moral conception (a familiar one to the Victorian middle classes) based on the perils of the contagious transmission of uncleanness, it portrays the disgustingly filthy Count as an object of religious veneration, and it ascribes frightening magical agency to religious instruments like crucifixes and communion wafers. Along the way it proclaims an ideology of the violent purification of society from the influence of enemies of religion, particularly unclean women and, implicitly, Jews - the ideology against which Frazer particularly warns as posing a lethal danger for the future of European civilization. The argument of Dracula about the relations of religion and superstition is irresolvably contradictory. At the same time, Stoker carries out an exposéé (or offers a case in point) of the perversely reflexive relations obtaining between vampirism and Christian religion in the age of the dominance of evangelicalism. He echoes earlier writers, notably Feuerbach, in diagnosing a strain of vampiric sadism at the heart of Christian piety. In its theme of erotically charged blood-drinking, Dracula evokes in particular the dominant motifs of the Wesleyan hymnal, and thus bears witness to the pathology that energizes Victorian spirituality.

Public Violence as Private Pathology: Noir Affect in The End of a Primitive

Noir Affect ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Christopher Breu
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
The Public ◽  
Interracial Sex ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
The Way

This chapter argues that Chester Himes’s midcentury noir, The End of a Primitive, explores the forms of private violence produced by the repressive public sphere of what he terms the short 1950s. Like many of Himes’s narratives, the novel foregrounds interpersonal antagonisms around race and sex, emphasizing the way in which what is repressed in the public sphere (interracial political struggle but also interracial sex) returns with a vengeance in the private sphere. In attending to the novel’s dramatizing of noir affects, the essay also articulates the value of the negative political and historiographical vision advanced by Himes’s noir narrative.

The Future of Correction: A Defense Attorney's View

1971 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 266-270
Author(s):  
Michael Meltsner
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Best Interests ◽  
National Program ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Way

The author, former legal director of an organization conducting a national program of test litigation in the correctional area, describes a variety of cases that have led him to take a pessimistic view of the future of correction. He states that (1) a defendant cannot put much faith in a criminal justice system which makes his pretrial freedom dependent on the amount of money he has; (2) considering the lack of resources provided for those in jail but presumably innocent pending trial, one can expect little in the way of correctional resources for convicts; (3) longstanding prison abuses are still widespread; (4) judges and administrators ignore the failures of experimental programs in order that they may continue to require inmates to participate in them; and (5) the correctional process is perhaps most dangerous when it justifies itself as acting in the defendant's best interests. In conclusion, the author suggests that correctional personnel should play a more active role in exposing negative aspects of imprisonment to the public.

scholarly journals Covid-19, Fourth industrial revolution and the future of elections in Africa

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Joseph Olusegun Adebayo ◽  
Blessing Makwambeni ◽  
Colin Thakur
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Human Existence ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fourth Industrial Revolution ◽  
The Future ◽  
Potential Impact ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Initial Focus ◽  
The Way

The initial focus of this study was on exploring the potential impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) on future elections in Africa. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is fundamentally changing the way we live, work and relate to one another. In its scale and complexity, 4IR could change humanity and human existence as we presently know it. The suddenness with which the novel coronavirus pandemic has shut down life across the globe, including the cancellation and postponement of scheduled elections, led to a realignment of the research goals. The study thus includes ways in which 4IR and unforeseen global emergencies like pandemics can impact future elections, with specific reference to Africa.

The Politics of Public Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen M. Gunter
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Public Education ◽  
Education Policy ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Way

At a time when public education and reform agendas are changing the way we approach education, this book critically examines the key issues facing the public with implications for education policy makers, professionals and researchers. Drawing on empirical evidence gathered over 20 years, the book confronts current issues about social justice and segregation. The book uses Arendtian ideas to help the reader to ‘think politically’ about education and how and why public services education can be reimagined for the future.

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