The Sizzling of Desire A Psychoanalytic Study of Clyde’s Character in An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy is a novel by Theodore Dreiser. It was published in 1925. The novel is a complicated account of an ambitious, ill-educated, and immature young protagonist named Clyde Griffith. It is a portrayal of the society whose values both shape Clyde's mimetic desires and seal his destiny. Since the novel revolves around the strong desires of Clyde and the way they reflect on him and others around him, this paper offers an analysis of the character through the lens of psychoanalysis. This study is an attempt to shed light on the deep-rooted desires of the protagonist and how they affect him for his assumed success in life. In this regard, the beliefs of Sigmund Freud and some other writers in the field are discussed.

A Study of the Reflection of Naturalism in the Heroine in Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is one of the greatest works composed by Theodore Dreiser, one of the representatives of naturalists in American literature at the beginning of the 20th century. Among numerous works of Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie enjoys a quite high literary status, and also meets with different comments after its publication. The novel mainly tells the personal experiences of a rural beautiful girl Carrie in the big city Chicago. Driven by natural desires and urban environment, she changes her social status and original values in the end. Naturalism is a scientific and literary approach employed here to depict the characters in the novel where a person's fate is decided or predetermined by impersonal forces of nature and environment beyond human control. The novel is an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the natural forces and survival laws that influence personal behaviors, emotion and fate. This paper introduces the origin, development and characteristics of naturalism in American literature, studies the effect of human weakness on their life, and makes clear the influences of environment on people’s way of thinking and way of life.

caso de Clyde Griffiths, de Erwin Piscator: Theodore Dreiser em versão épica

Este artigo apresenta a tradução do prólogo da peça inédita em português The Case of Clyde Griffiths, de Erwin Piscator, baseada no romance An American Tragedy, de Thedore Dreiser. Além da tradução, apresenta uma breve trajetória da escrita e de duas montagens do texto nos EUA, feitas em 1935 e 1936, bem como a análise de alguns recursos do teatro épico empregados pelo seu dramaturgo.

METAPHORS IN THE NOVEL “SISTER CARRIE” BY THEODORE DREISER

The thesis deals with the issue of investigation of metaphors in Theodore Dreiser's novel “Sister Carrie”. The use of metaphors makes the novel more expressive and imaginary. Key words: metaphor, expressive means, stylistic means, fiction, Sister Carrie The issue of expressiveness in fiction is exceptionally important in the perception of the main idea of the novel. Creative heritage of outstanding writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, always attracted and attracts the attention of most researchers, both linguists and literary critics. Study of language means of these writers bears a great sense for revealing many sides of national literary language as a whole, for example, its history, expressive possibilities, rules and tendencies of language development in a definite period of time. All of these are possible only due to the deep penetration of the researchers to the creative laboratory of the writer. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study, conditioned by the aims and task set before the research, requires the following methods: semantic – contextual and functional analysis of metaphors; descriptive method of various approaches to the use and nature of metaphors; the method of theoretical substantiation of the essence of this stylistic device; method of continuous sampling of the actual language material; the method of comparative-typology.

Songbooks

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

“Dear TD”: Ruth Epperson Kennell-Theodore Dreiser Correspondence, 1928-1929

During his travel to the Soviet Union (November 4, 1927 — January 13, 1928) and on his return to the USA Theodore Dreiser was keeping in touch and dealing with Soviet literary institutions, periodicals and his Russian acquaints — publishers, editors, critics, etc. Ruth Epperson Kennell (1889 –1977) played an important role in making and maintaining these contacts in late 1920s-early 1930s. Ruth Kennell, who spent almost ten years in the Soviet Union, was a reference librarian (1925 –1927) in the Comintern Library in Moscow. On November 4, 1927 she got acquainted with Dreiser and was hired by him to serve as his secretary and guide as he toured the Soviet Union. Her role as a “Russian secretary”, personal assistant and friend is depicted in Dreiser’s Russian Diary and Kennell’s memoir Theodore Dreiser and the Soviet Union (1969) as well as in their correspondence that lasted till Dreiser’s death. Kennell continued to take part in Dreiser’s life and creative work in the USA, especially during the years that immediately followed their return from the USSR. The paper dwells at some length on Kennell’s biography, her role in publishing Dreiser’s work in the Soviet Union and USA, her work as an editor, critic and reviewer. Kennel had a long and varied writing career, and Dreiser helped her to start write and publish fiction. Their correspondence portrays Dreiser as a patron taking care of a young author and promoting her work. Kennell’s letters to Dreiser (1928 –1929) stored in the Manusсript Division of A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature are published in the addendum together with the Russian translation of several Dreiser’s letters to Kennell included in Theodore Dreiser: Letters to Women. New Letters (2009).

The Occasions of Theodore Dreiser’s Literary Criticism – a View from the Theodore Dreiser Edition

Theodore Dreiser published over fifty items of literary criticism between 1900 and 1945 on a wide variety of subjects, while additional discussion of literary matters is scattered through his correspondence, memoirs, unpublished speeches, and cultural and philosophical essays. Hitherto this work has proved useful piecemeal, in its illumination of Dreiser’s fiction, while a few outstanding pieces have served to define Dreiser’s version of realism or literary naturalism. This essay takes the literary criticism seriously as a body of work in itself, sketching out some categories and topics, and providing detailed historical contexts for several items, which reveal under-appreciated nuances and engagements in even better-known pieces such as “True Art speaks Plainly” and “Life, Art and America.” The essay sees coherence across the diverse foci of Dreiser’s literary criticism via the concept of the “occasions of literary criticism,” by which is meant the historical and cultural contexts into which he was writing. It charts the roots of Dreiser’s literary criticism in his need to respond to charges of “literary immorality,” its growth through his very particular response to censorship, and its maturity in his suggestion, in a speech given as part of the peace conference in Paris in 1938, of an American literary tradition dedicated to social justice, taking in Mark Twain and H. D. Thoreau as well as the expected cohort of realists and naturalists. The essay concludes by relating these contexts and preoccupations to the history and practice of the Theodore Dreiser Edition.

Linguistic peculiarities of functionality of authorial commentaries in the English literary text (based on the English-language novel “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser)

This article is dedicated to examination of verbal means of expression of authorial commentaries in English fiction. The relevance of the selected topic is defined by the fact that the question of characteristics of authorial commentaries remain an insufficiently studied area within the framework of interpretation of a literary work. Such linguists as R. Posner in the “Theory of Commentaries”, I. V. Arnold in the “Stylistics of Decoding”, and N. D. Arutyunova in her work “On the Problems of Structural Linguistics” have been dealing the topic at hand. Examination of the authorial commentaries allows assessing the depth and wholeness of the literary work. The article presents the analysis of linguistic means of functionality of authorial commentaries in the English-language novel “Sister Carrie” by Theodore Dreiser. Authorial commentaries manifest as one of the means for explication of dialogical nature of the literary text. Linguistic means emphasize the expressiveness of authorial commentaries within the framework of progression of a storyline. Most of the authorial commentaries in T. Dreiser's novel “Sister Carry” represent the contrasting contexts, reflected in the development of two thematic lines. To the first theme includes the associative series: beast – nature – the forces of life. The second semantic layer is demonstrated in the line: human – man – free will. Contrasting contexts originate the oppositions not only on the level of meaningful-logical information, but also on the level of subtext.

Limited Poetic Liability

Of all the corporate person’s vital qualities, the most powerful and contentious was limited liability: the rule that a corporation’s shareholders cannot be held responsible for more than the value of the shares they own. This chapter examines challenges to that rule and its effects in the world by analyzing the responses of three very different writers: law professor Maurice Wormser, novelist Theodore Dreiser, and poet and lawyer Charles Reznikoff. Should corporations be understood as veils for individuals or as fully formed entities inextricably meshed with their managers, owners, and environment? Each writer struggled to know a corporate person behind its “entity veil” (as Wormser terms it), coming to see that limited liability functioned to minimize the essential duties of managers, employees, and owners. While Wormser recommends “veil piercing” when corporations are taken over by nefarious individuals, Dreiser’s The Financier (1912) uncovers problems with this strategy, and Reznikoff’s epic poem Testimony (1965–78), maps out systemic injuries that limited liability generated. Dreiser and Reznikoff deploy literary form to think about this corporate person precisely when it did not acknowledge all of its attributes as a legal person. When the corporate person devolved and acted more like a tool or machine, how was society supposed to treat it? This chapter’s three conceptual explorations of corporate limited liability shine light on the legal system’s deficiencies when contending with the corporation’s social role. Each writer begins, in his own way, to envision solutions other than strictly legal remedies.