Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Lena Cowen Orlin
Keyword(s):  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Historical Documents ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Textual Practices ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Natal Family

To introduce both the subject of the book and its methodological approach, the Introduction takes up the case study of the date of Shakespeare’s baptism: 26 April 1564. Those who want to believe that the national poet was born on the national feast day (23 April, or St George’s Day), have compiled ‘evidence’ to prove it, but under close analysis the evidence disintegrates. We know his day of baptism but cannot know his birthday. Much of Shakespeare’s biography has been built out of similar ‘evidence clusters’. The book interrogates many of these old clusters and also assembles new ones. This involves close reading familiar historical documents contextually, referring to other examples from the same record classes to show how their conventions and textual practices shape their meaning. A further strategy is to include mini-biographies for some of Shakespeare’s cognates in Stratford-upon-Avon, the stories of parallel lives through which we can learn more about his own. The chapter also introduces the members of Shakespeare’s natal family.

From a Distance: A Close Analysis of Skinner

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-425
Author(s):  
Laurence D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Close Analysis

Artistic-professional strategies in the music sector. The case of the jazz scene in Barcelona

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-163
Author(s):  
Marta Casals Balaguer
Keyword(s):  
Research Methods ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Main Research ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation

This article aims to analyse the strategies that jazz musicians in Barcelona adopt to develop their artistic careers. It focuses on studying three main areas that influ-ence the construction of their artistic-professional strategies: a) the administrative dimension, characterized mainly by management and promotion tasks; b) the artistic-creative dimension, which includes the construction of artistic identity and the creation of works of art; and c) the social dimension within the collective, which groups together strategies related to the dynamics of cooperation and col-laboration between the circle of musicians. The applied methodology came from a qualitative perspective, and the main research methods were semi-structured inter-views conducted with active professional musicians in Barcelona and from partic-ipant observation.

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

‘Nothing is simply one thing’: Woolf, Deleuze and Difference

2013 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 456-474
Author(s):  
Beatrice Monaco
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Similar Model ◽  
Complex Interplay ◽  
To The Lighthouse

This paper explores some key texts of Virginia Woolf in the context of Deleuzian concepts. Using a close reading style, it shows how the prose poetry in Mrs Dalloway engages a complex interplay of repetition and difference, resulting in a remarkably similar model of the three syntheses of time as Deleuze understands them. It subsequently explores Woolf's technical processes in a key passage from To the Lighthouse, showing how the prose-poetic technique systematically undoes the structures of logical fact and rationality inscribed in both language and everyday speech to an extremely precise level.

Resonance in Dhvani Aesthetics and the Deleuzian Logic of Sensation

2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Srajana Kaikini
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Normative Theory ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Literary Interpretation ◽  
Sanskrit Poetics ◽  
Comparative Framework ◽  
Time Image

This paper undertakes an intersectional reading of visual art through theories of literary interpretation in Sanskrit poetics in close reading with Deleuze's notions of sensation. The concept of Dhvani – the Indian theory of suggestion which can be translated as resonance, as explored in the Rasa – Dhvani aesthetics offers key insights into understanding the mode in which sensation as discussed by Deleuze operates throughout his reflections on Francis Bacon's and Cézanne's works. The paper constructs a comparative framework to review modern and classical art history, mainly in the medium of painting, through an understanding of the concept of Dhvani, and charts a course of reinterpreting and examining possible points of concurrence and departure with respect to the Deleuzian logic of sensation and his notions of time-image and perception. The author thereby aims to move art interpretation's paradigm towards a non-linguistic sensory paradigm of experience. The focus of the paper is to break the moulds of normative theory-making which guide ideal conditions of ‘understanding art’ and look into alternative modes of experiencing the ‘vocabulary’ of art through trans-disciplinary intersections, in this case the disciplines being those of visual art, literature and phenomenology.

Tanaka Kinuyo

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Development ◽  
Japanese Woman ◽  
Cultural Construction ◽  
Public Image ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Japanese Cinema ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
History Of

This is the first book in English dedicated to the actress and director Tanaka Kinuyo. Praised as amongst the greatest actors in the history of Japanese cinema, Tanaka’s career spanned the industrial development of cinema - from silent to sound, monochrome to colour. Alongside featuring in films by Ozu, Mizoguchi, Naruse and Kurosawa, Tanaka was also the only Japanese woman filmmaker between 1953 and 1962, and her films tackled distinctly feminine topics such as prostitution and breast cancer. Because her career overlaps with a transformative period in Japan, especially for women, this close analysis of her fascinating life and work offers new perspectives into the Japanese history of women and classical era of national cinema. The first half of the book focuses on Tanaka as actress and analyses the elements and meanings associated with her star image, and her powerful embodiment of diverse, at times contradictory, ideological discourses. The second half is dedicated to Tanaka as director and explores her public image as filmmaker and her depiction of gender and sexuality against the national history in order to reflect on her role and style as author. With a special focus on the melodrama genre and on the sociopolitical and economic contexts of film production, the book offers a revision of theories of stardom, authorship, and women’s cinema. In examining Tanaka’s iconic reification of femininities in relation to politics, national identity, and memory, the chapters shed light on the cultural construction of female subjectivity and sexuality in Japanese popular culture.

On the Primacy of Matter: Neoplatonism Right-Side Up

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Tritten
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
After Effect ◽  
The One

This chapter provides a close reading of Schelling’s early commentary on Plato’s Timaeus and then contrasts this reading with Neoplatonism’s, particularly Proclus’, understanding of this same text. While Neoplatonism views being according to a hierarchy of degradation or descent, with matter at the bottom, Schelling affirms that being potentiates itself into higher and greater degrees of order such that matter is not the last but the first. He is able to do this, however, only by rejecting the Platonic notion of participation. For Schelling, the participating acquires an independence from the participated so that an effect can be greater than its cause and, moreover, the effect exerts a retroactive after effect on the cause. The identity of a cause or antecedent is only constituted in and through its consequents. If matter is said to process from the One, then matter, in turn, is the consequent condition of the identity of the One as one rather than as many.

Tennyson Echoing Wordsworth

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jayne Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Close Analysis ◽  
In Memoriam

This book explores Tennyson’s poetic relationship with Wordsworth through a close analysis of Tennyson’s borrowing of the earlier poet’s words and phrases, an approach that positions Wordsworth in Tennyson’s poetry in a more centralised way than previously recognised. Focusing on some of the most emblematic poems of Tennyson’s career, including ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Ulysses’, and In Memoriam, the study examines the echoes from Wordsworth that these poems contain and the transformative part they play in his poetry, moving beyond existing accounts of Wordsworthian influence in the selected texts to uncover new and revealing connections and interactions that shed a penetrating light on Tennyson’s poetic relationship with his Romantic predecessor.

Transformation and Education in GDR Youth Literature: A Script Theory Approach

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82
Author(s):  
Jean E. Conacher
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
National Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Theory Approach ◽  
Conceptual Blending ◽  
Script Theory ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Youth Literature

Youth literature within the German Democratic Republic (GDR) officially enjoyed equal status with adult literature, with authors often writing for both audiences. Such parity of esteem pre-supposed that youth literature would also adopt the cultural–political frameworks designed to nurture the establishment of socialism on German soil. In their quest to forge a legitimate national literature capable of transforming the population, politicians and writers drew repeatedly upon the cultural heritage of Weimar classicism and the Bildungsroman, Humboldtian educational traditions and Soviet-inspired models of socialist realism. Adopting a script theory approach inspired by Jean Matter Mandler, this article explores how directive cultural policies lead to the emergence of multiple scripts which inform the nature and narrative of individual works. Three broad ideological scripts within GDR youth literature are identified which underpin four distinct narrative scripts employed by individual writers to support, challenge and ultimately subvert the primacy of the Bildungsroman genre. A close reading of works by Strittmatter, Pludra, Görlich, Tetzner and Saalmann reveals further how conceptual blending with classical and fairy-tale scripts is exploited to legitimise and at times mask critique of transformation and education inside and outside the classroom and to offer young protagonists a voice often denied their readers.

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