Revision, Origin, and the Courage of Truth

2021 ◽  
pp. 23-49
Author(s):  
Kevin Ohi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Middle Years ◽  
Multiple Accounts ◽  
The Moment ◽  
New York Edition

Henry James’s New York Edition prefaces contain multiple accounts of the genesis of the novels and tales that the edition collected: Some anecdotes tell of how the idea for the novel came to him, while others tell of the material circumstances of the text’s composition (where he was, for example, as he wrote). More often, the prefaces tell of the disappearance of the moment of genesis: of its having been forgotten, or there being no moment when the idea wasn’t somehow present in his mind. In the unrationalized relation among these different accounts, James implicitly theorizes the relation between art and life. Linking the prefaces to the autobiography, therefore, the chapter thus considers “revision” as a practice that maintains the potentiality of inception, seeking, in rereading, to return each text to incipience. Comparing James’s account of revision to Michel Foucault’s late turn to parrhēsia (as a mode of truth-telling) and to Gilles Deleuze’s account of the “act of creation,” the chapter links this potentiality to terms of ethical exhortation with which James ends the prefaces. Turning, finally, to James’s “The Middle Years,” the chapter ends with that story’s imagining of a life lived in the potentiality of revision.

James’s Late Theory of the Impression

2020 ◽  
pp. 133-152
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Major Phase ◽  
Individual Character ◽  
New York Edition

Chapter 4 explores the theoretical uses to which James puts the impression in the prefaces to the collected New York Edition of his work (1907–9). It serves as a preface in its own right to the final three chapters of the book, in which James’s fictional treatment of the impression in the three celebrated novels of the major phase is examined. James’s impression uneasily accommodates both empiricism and aestheticism. What James does with these uneasy accommodations is to make them the narrative focus of his late novels and, in the prefaces, to theorize the novels’ interest in these terms. The novel is still an impression, then, but of a different kind: thanks to James’s increasing use of restricted point of view, it is now, first and foremost, the impression of an individual character which lies at the heart of the novelist’s drama of consciousness.

Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism: Redefining Fundamentalism in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Quratulain Shirazi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
National Identities ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Immigrant Student ◽  
American System ◽  
American Nationalism ◽  
Globalized World

This article is based on a study of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), a novel by a Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid.  The novel is based on the  story of  transformation of an expat Pakistani living in New York from a true cosmopolitan to a nationalist. The article will explore the crisis of identity suffered by the protagonist in a new land where he reached as an immigrant  student and worker. However, he experienced a resurgence of nationalist and patriotic sentiments within him as 9/ 11 happened in 2001.  The force of American nationalism that was imperial in nature, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iran, triggered resentment in the protagonist who decided to leave America and went back to the country of his origin, Pakistan. During his stay in America, the protagonist redefined fundamentalism as an imperial tendency in the American system while rejecting the accusations hurled towards him of an Islamic fundamentalist. The article will explain that there is a loss of cosmopolitan virtue  in the post 9/11 era and the dream of universal peace and harmony  is shattered due to unbridled  state ambitions to invade foreign territories.   The article will conclude with the assertion that the loss of cosmopolitanism and reassertion of national identities give way to confrontation and intolerance destroying the prospects of peace and harmony in a globalized world.

L’absence chez Michel Butor. L’Emploi du temps et Degrés

2012 ◽  
pp. 66-80
Author(s):  
Michał Mrozowicki
Keyword(s):  
Human Memory ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Michel Butor ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
One Year ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Narrative Mode ◽  
The City

Michel Butor, born in 1926, one of the leaders of the French New Novel movement, has written only four novels between 1954 and 1960. The most famous of them is La Modification (Second thoughts), published in 1957. The author of the paper analyzes two other Butor’s novels: L’Emploi du temps (Passing time) – 1956, and Degrés (Degrees) – 1960. The theme of absence is crucial in both of them. In the former, the novel, presented as the diary of Jacques Revel, a young Frenchman spending a year in Bleston (a fictitious English city vaguely similar to Manchester), describes the narrator’s struggle to survive in a double – spatial and temporal – labyrinth. The first of them, formed by Bleston’s streets, squares and parks, is symbolized by the City plan. During his one year sojourn in the city, using its plan, Revel learns patiently how to move in its different districts, and in its strange labyrinth – strange because devoid any centre – that at the end stops annoying him. The other, the temporal one, symbolized by the diary itself, the labyrinth of the human memory, discovered by the narrator rather lately, somewhere in the middle of the year passed in Bleston, becomes, by contrast, more and more dense and complex, which is reflected by an increasinly complex narration used to describe the past. However, at the moment Revel is leaving the city, he is still unable to recall and to describe the events of the 29th of February 1952. This gap, this absence, symbolizes his defeat as the narrator, and, in the same time, the human memory’s limits. In Degrees temporal and spatial structures are also very important. This time round, however, the problems of the narration itself, become predominant. Considered from this point of view, the novel announces Gerard Genette’s work Narrative Discourse and his theoretical discussion of two narratological categories: narrative voice and narrative mode. Having transgressed his narrative competences, Pierre Vernier, the narrator of the first and the second parts of the novel, who, taking as a starting point, a complete account of one hour at school, tries to describe the whole world and various aspects of the human civilization for the benefit of his nephew, Pierre Eller, must fail and disappear, as the narrator, from the third part, which is narrated by another narrator, less audacious and more credible.

The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry James
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The Other ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Ghost Story ◽  
Country House ◽  
Small Children ◽  
New York Edition

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, and ‘The Friends of the Friends’ – ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's ‘infernal imagination’, which torments but also entrals her? ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read’? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes.

Wieland; or The Transformation, and Memoirs of Carwin, The Biloquist

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Brockden Brown
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Spontaneous Combustion ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Small Community ◽  
Actual Case ◽  
Her Family ◽  
American Novels

One of the earliest American novels, Wieland (1798) is a thrilling tale of suspense and intrigue set in rural Pennyslvania in the 1760s. Based on an actual case of a New York farmer who murdered his family, the novel employs Gothic devices and sensational elements such as spontaneous combustion, ventriloquism, and religious fanaticism. The plot turns on the charming but diabolical intruder Carwin, who exercises his power over the narrator, Clara Wieland, and her family, destroying the order and authority of the small community in which they live. Underlying the mystery and horror, however, is a profound examination of the human mind's capacity for rational judgement. The text also explores some of the most important issues vital to the survival of democracy in the new American republic. Brown further considers power and manipulation in his unfinished sequel, Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist, which traces Carwin's career as a disciple of the utopist Ludloe.

Sick on the Frontlines:A Cross Sectional Study on COVID-19 Infection, Symptom Severity Amongst Emergency Medicine Residents and Fellows in Urban Academic Hospital Settings (Preprint)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacey Frisch ◽  
Sarah Jones ◽  
James Willis ◽  
Richard Sinert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Emergency Medicine ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Academic Hospital ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Time Period ◽  
High Infection ◽  
Novel Coronavirus ◽  
Specific Symptoms

BACKGROUND COVID-19, an illness caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, affected many aspects of healthcare worldwide in 2020. From March to May of 2020, New York City (NYC) experienced a large surge of cases. OBJECTIVE The authors aimed to characterize the amount of illness experienced by residents and fellows in 2 NYC hospitals during this time period. METHODS This was a cross-sectional observational study. An IRB-exempt survey was distributed to emergency medicine housestaff in May 2020 and submissions were accepted through August 2020. RESULTS 64 residents and fellows responded to our survey (a 62% response rate). 42% of responders tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. Most residents experienced symptoms that could be consistent with COVID-19 however few received PCR testing. Fevers and/or chills along with loss of smell and/or taste were the most specific symptoms for COVID-19, with p-values <0.05. All 13 housestaff who reported no symptoms during the study period tested negative for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. CONCLUSIONS Our study demonstrated that the rate of COVID-19 illness among emergency department housestaff is much higher than previously reported. Further studies are needed to characterize illness among medical staff in emergency departments across the nation. The high infection rate among emergency medicine trainees stresses the importance of supplying adequate PPE for healthcare professionals.

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