Joyce's Voices


Hugh Kenner - 1978
    Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird


Amit Ray - 2011
    Life was beautiful but war devastates everything. The story runs through her joy, pain, anguish, struggle and wisdom. For most birds life is simply eating, drinking and raising their chicks. This bird finds a higher purpose which turns to a mission in her life. Through the nightmare of war, she comes to the realization that she needs to do something for healing the soul of humanity. With the help of her guide Yashir, she follows her dream to spread peace on earth. This is a fable about the healing and raising the human consciousness on earth for peace on our planet. We are not helpless, each of us has a role and the story shows us the way.

The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays


Guy Davenport - 1981
    In the 40 essays that constitute this collection, Guy Davenport, one of America's major literary critics, elucidates a range of literary history, encompassing literature, art, philosophy and music, from the ancients to the grand old men of modernism.

Seven Nights


Jorge Luis Borges - 1977
    The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.

Integral Christianity: The Spirit's Call to Evolve


Paul R. Smith - 2011
    The perspectives of integral theory and practice, articulated by Ken Wilber, help uncover the integral approach that Jesus advocated and demonstrated in the metaphors of his time and that traditional Christianity has largely been unable to see. Smith incorporates elements of traditional, modern, and postmodern theological viewpoints, including progressive, New Thought, and emerging/emergent ones. However, he goes beyond all of them and moves to a Christianity that is devoted to following both the historical Jesus and the Risen Christ whose Spirit beckons to us from the future. Smith says, "The oldest thing you can say about God is that God is always doing something new. Jesus pushed his own religion to newness by including the best of its past, and transcending the worst of its present. He calls us to do the same, whatever our religion is today."

Joyce's Book of the Dark: Finnegans Wake


John Bishop - 1986
    

How to Be Alone


Jonathan Franzen - 2002
    Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the fate of the American novel in what became known as "the Harper's essay," as well as his award-winning narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature


Peter J. Leithart - 1999
    If you fall asleep in your English classes, this book is like drinking ten cups of coffee. Maybe eleven, depending upon your body weight. For high school students and up."The most obvious virtue of Leithart's book is its scope. In a single volume he provides a defense for the value of reading classical literature, a methodology for integrating that literature with the Christian faith, and a reader's guide to the works of classical literature that a contemporary reader would most benefit from reading." -Leland Ryken, Wheaton College"[A]nyone can read this volume and expect to gain a heightened awareness of the importance of Christian thinking to all of life and the great void that exists in societies that are not undergirded by such thinking." -Byron Snapp, Calvary Herald

What Ever Happened to Modernism?


Gabriel Josipovici - 2010
    For novelist and critic Gabriel Josipovici, the contemporary novel in English is profoundly disappointing—a poor relation of its groundbreaking Modernist forebears. This agile and passionate book asks why.Modernism, Josipovici suggests, is only superficially a reaction to industrialization or a revolution in diction and form; essentially, it is art coming to consciousness of its own limits and responsibilities. And its origins are to be sought not in 1850 or 1800, but in the early 1500s, with the crisis of society and perception that also led to the rise of Protestantism. With sophistication and persuasiveness, Josipovici charts some of Modernism’s key stages, from Dürer, Rabelais, and Cervantes to the present, bringing together a rich array of artists, musicians, and writers both familiar and unexpected—including Beckett, Borges, Friedrich, Cézanne, Stevens, Robbe-Grillet, Beethoven, and Wordsworth. He concludes with a stinging attack on the current literary scene in Britain and America, which raises questions about not only national taste, but contemporary culture itself.Gabriel Josipovici has spent a lifetime writing, and writing about other writers. What Ever Happened to Modernism? is a strident call to arms, and a tour de force of literary, artistic, and philosophical explication that will stimulate anyone interested in art in the twentieth century and today.

Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide


Lois Tyson - 1998
    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.