Download or read book Esther Happy written by Honoré de Balzac and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2021-04-10 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Esther Happy" is one of the four parts of the serial novel, "The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans (also known as, "A Harlot High and Low,") a novel by French novelist Honoré de Balzac. Lucien de Rubempré and Carlos Herrera (Vautrin) have made a pact, in which Lucien will arrive at success in Paris if he agrees to follow Vautrin's instructions blindly. Esther van Gobseck throws a wrench into Vautrin's best-laid plans, however, because Lucien falls in love with her and she with him. One night, however, the incredibly rich banker Baron de Nucingen spots Esther and falls deeply in love with her. When Vautrin realizes that Nucingen's obsession is with Esther, he decides to use her power as a tool to help advance Lucien by extrapolating the maximum amount of money from the Baron as possible. Something that will result in a series of tragic results...

Download or read book Exiled in Modernity written by David O'Brien and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-05-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notions of civilization and barbarism were intrinsic to Eugène Delacroix’s artistic practice: he wrote regularly about these concepts in his journal, and the tensions between the two were the subject of numerous paintings, including his most ambitious mural project, the ceiling of the Library of the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais Bourbon. Exiled in Modernity delves deeply into these themes, revealing why Delacroix’s disillusionment with modernity increasingly led him to seek spiritual release or epiphany in the sensual qualities of painting. While civilization implied a degree of control and the constraint of natural impulses for Delacroix, barbarism evoked something uncontrolled and impulsive. Seeing himself as part of a grand tradition extending back to ancient Greece, Delacroix was profoundly aware of the wealth and power that set nineteenth-century Europe apart from the rest of the world. Yet he was fascinated by civilization’s chaotic underbelly. In analyzing Delacroix’s art and prose, David O’Brien illuminates the artist’s effort to reconcile the erudite, tradition-bound aspects of painting with a desire to reach viewers in a more direct, unrestrained manner. Focusing chiefly on Delacroix’s musings about civilization in his famous journal, his major mural projects on the theme of civilization, and the place of civilization in his paintings of North Africa and of animals, O’Brien links Delacroix’s increasingly pessimistic view of modernity to his desire to use his art to provide access to a more fulfilling experience. With more than one hundred illustrations, this original, astute analysis of Delacroix and his work explains why he became an inspiration for modernist painters over the half-century following his death. Art historians and scholars of modernism especially will find great value in O’Brien’s work.

Download or read book Jewish American Literature written by Jules Chametzky and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2001 with total page 1264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of Jewish-American literature written by various authors between 1656 and 1990.

Download or read book Absorption and Theatricality written by Michael Fried and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1988-09-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With this widely acclaimed work, Michael Fried revised the way in which eighteenth-century French painting and criticism are viewed and understood. Analyzing paintings produced between 1753 and 1781 and the comments of a number of critics who wrote about them, especially Dennis Diderot, Fried discovers a new emphasis in the art of the time, based not on subject matter or style but on values and effects.

Download or read book Styles of Extinction Cormac McCarthy s The Road written by Julian Murphet and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-06-28 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection shows how Cormac McCarthy's The Road reacts aesthetically to many of the ethical, ontological, and political concerns that define our times.

Download or read book I Remember written by Georges Perec and published by Gallic Books. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

Download or read book Antarctica in Fiction written by Elizabeth Leane and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-29 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This first comprehensive exploration of literary responses to Antarctica maps the far south as a space of the imagination.

Download or read book The Ubu Plays written by Jeff Goode and published by Baker's Plays. This book was released on 1997-09 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise written by Georges Perec and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 113 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Darkly funny account of the office worker’s mindset by the celebrated French novelist A long-suffering employee in a big corporation has summoned up the courage to ask for a raise. But as he runs through the looming encounter in his mind, his neuroses come to the surface: What is the best day to see the boss? What if he doesn’t offer you a seat when you go into his office? The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise is a hilarious account of an employee losing his identity—and possibly his sanity—as he tries to put on the most acceptable face for the corporate world,with its rigid hierarchies and hostility to new ideas. If he follows a certain course of action, so this logic goes, he will succeed—but, in accepting these conditions, are his attempts to challenge his world of work doomed from the outset? Neurotic and pessimistic, yet endearing, comic and never less than entertaining, Perec’s Woody Allen-esque underling presents an acute and penetrating vision of the world of office work, as pertinent today as it was when it was written in 1968.

Download or read book Steve McQueen written by Marc Eliot and published by Crown Archetype. This book was released on 2011-10-25 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve McQueen is one of America’s legendary movie stars best known for his hugely successful film career in classics such as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, and The Towering Inferno as well as for his turbulent life off-screen and impeccable style. His unforgettable physical beauty, his soft-spoken manner, his tough but tender roughness, and his aching vulnerability had women swooning and men wanting to be just like him. Today—nearly thirty years after he lost his battle against cancer at the age of fifty—McQueen remains “The King of Cool.” Yet, few know the truth of what bubbled beneath his composed exterior and shaped his career, his passions, and his private life. Now, in Steve McQueen, New York Times bestselling author, acclaimed biographer, and film historian, Marc Eliot captures the complexity of this Hollywood screen legend. Chronicling McQueen’s tumultuous life both on and off the screen, from his hardscrabble childhood to his rise to Hollywood superstar status, to his struggles with alcohol and drugs and his fervor for racing fast cars and motorcycles, Eliot discloses intimate details of McQueen’s three marriages, including his tumultuous relationships with Neile Adams and Ali MacGraw, as well as his numerous affairs. He also paints a full portrait of this incredible yet often perplexing career that ranged from great films to embarrassing misfires. Steve McQueen, adored by millions, was obsessed by Paul Newman, and it is the nature of that obsession that reveals so much about who McQueen really was. Perhaps his greatest talent was to be able to convince audiences that he was who he really wasn’t, even as he tried to prove to himself that he wasn’t who he really was. With original material, rare photos, and new interviews, Eliot presents a fascinating and complete picture of McQueen’s life.

Download or read book Art and Objecthood written by Michael Fried and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1998-04-18 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much acclaimed and highly controversial, Michael Fried's art criticism defines the contours of late modernism in the visual arts. This volume contains 27 pieces--uncompromising, exciting, and impassioned writings, aware of their transformative power during a time of intense controversy about the nature of modernism and the aims and essence of advanced painting and sculpture. 16 color plates. 72 halftones.

Download or read book Gadsby written by Ernest Vincent Wright and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-28 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gadsby is a novel by Ernest Vincent Wright. A fading fictitious city known as Branton Hills is rejuvenated due to the efforts of central character John Gadsby and a youth organizer. A humorous read!

Download or read book Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults written by Balaka Basu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Children’s Literature Association Edited Book Award From the jaded, wired teenagers of M.T. Anderson's Feed to the spirited young rebels of Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games trilogy, the protagonists of Young Adult dystopias are introducing a new generation of readers to the pleasures and challenges of dystopian imaginings. As the dark universes of YA dystopias continue to flood the market,Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers offers a critical evaluation of the literary and political potentials of this widespread publishing phenomenon. With its capacity to frighten and warn, dystopian writing powerfully engages with our pressing global concerns: liberty and self-determination, environmental destruction and looming catastrophe, questions of identity and justice, and the increasingly fragile boundaries between technology and the self. When directed at young readers, these dystopian warnings are distilled into exciting adventures with gripping plots and accessible messages that may have the potential to motivate a generation on the cusp of adulthood. This collection enacts a lively debate about the goals and efficacy of YA dystopias, with three major areas of contention: do these texts reinscribe an old didacticism or offer an exciting new frontier in children's literature? Do their political critiques represent conservative or radical ideologies? And finally, are these novels high-minded attempts to educate the young or simply bids to cash in on a formula for commercial success? This collection represents a prismatic and evolving understanding of the genre, illuminating its relevance to children's literature and our wider culture.

Download or read book The Covert Sphere written by Timothy Melley and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In December 2010 the U.S. Embassy in Kabul acknowledged that it was providing major funding for thirteen episodes of Eagle Four—a new Afghani television melodrama based loosely on the blockbuster U.S. series 24. According to an embassy spokesperson, Eagle Four was part of a strategy aimed at transforming public suspicion of security forces into something like awed respect. Why would a wartime government spend valuable resources on a melodrama of covert operations? The answer, according to Timothy Melley, is not simply that fiction has real political effects but that, since the Cold War, fiction has become integral to the growth of national security as a concept and a transformation of democracy. In The Covert Sphere, Melley links this cultural shift to the birth of the national security state in 1947. As the United States developed a vast infrastructure of clandestine organizations, it shielded policy from the public sphere and gave rise to a new cultural imaginary, "the covert sphere." One of the surprising consequences of state secrecy is that citizens must rely substantially on fiction to "know," or imagine, their nation’s foreign policy. The potent combination of institutional secrecy and public fascination with the secret work of the state was instrumental in fostering the culture of suspicion and uncertainty that has plagued American society ever since—and, Melley argues, that would eventually find its fullest expression in postmodernism. The Covert Sphere traces these consequences from the Korean War through the War on Terror, examining how a regime of psychological operations and covert action has made the conflation of reality and fiction a central feature of both U.S. foreign policy and American culture. Melley interweaves Cold War history with political theory and original readings of films, television dramas, and popular entertainments—from The Manchurian Candidate through 24—as well as influential writing by Margaret Atwood, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E. L. Doctorow, Michael Herr, Denis Johnson, Norman Mailer, Tim O’Brien, and many others.

Download or read book Utopian Moments written by J. C. Davis and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2012-04-12 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within literature, history, politics, philosophy and theology, the interpretation of utopian ideals has evolved constantly. Juxtaposing historical views on utopian diagnoses, prescriptions and on the character and value of utopian thought with more modern interpretations, this volume explores how our ideal utopia has transformed over time. Challenging long-held interpretations, the contributors turn a fresh eye to canonical texts, and open them up to a twenty-first century audience. From Moore's Utopia to Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Utopian Moments puts forward a lively and accessible debate on the nature and significance of utopian thought and tradition. Each essay focuses on a key passage from the selected work using it to encourage both the specialist and the reader new to the field to read afresh. Written by an international team of leading scholars, the essays range from the sixteenth century to the present day and are designed to be both stimulating and accessible.

Download or read book Children of Clay written by Raymond Queneau and published by Sun and Moon Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of French society in the first half of the century. The protagonists are the family of a man who made a fortune from wireless radio and the novel follows their intrigues, which are of great interest to their employees.

Download or read book Nicholas Ray written by Patrick McGilligan and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From award-winning biographer Patrick McGilligan comes an eye-opening life of the troubled filmmaker behind Rebel Without a Cause Nicholas Ray spent the glory years of his career creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish—from his career-defining debut, They Live by Night (1948), to his enduring masterwork, Rebel Without a Cause (1955); from the noir thriller In a Lonely Place (1950), pairing his second wife, the blond bombshell Gloria Grahame, with Humphrey Bogart, to cult pictures like Johnny Guitar (1954) and Bigger Than Life (1956). Yet his work on-screen is more than matched by the passions and struggles of his personal story—one of the most dramatic lives of any major Hollywood filmmaker. In Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure of an American Director, Patrick McGilligan offers a revelatory biography of Ray, a man whose troubled life was marked by creative peaks and valleys alike. As a young man, Ray personified the rambling spirit of twentieth-century America, learning from luminaries like Thornton Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright; mingling with future legends like Elia Kazan, Joseph Losey, and John Houseman; and carousing with musicians like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie. Notoriously self-destructive but irresistibly alluring—to men and women alike—Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood, a talent that allowed him to create characters of true complexity on-screen. His youthful association with radical politics nearly killed his nascent film career—until a secret agreement to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities saved him. His tumultuous second marriage, to Grahame, was shattered after Ray found her in bed with his teenage son from his first marriage. He romanced stars and starlets, including Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Joan Crawford, and the teenage Natalie Wood, but never enjoyed a stable home life. The triumph of Rebel Without a Cause, his masterpiece of teenage angst, led to a burgeoning partnership with James Dean, but Dean’s untimely death devastated the filmmaker, who fell into a spiral of drinking and drug addiction. Less than a decade later, Ray’s career was effectively over . . . until the adoration of European critics, and a frantic last-ditch burst of creativity, nearly restored him to glory before his tragic early death in 1979. Meticulously detailed and compulsively readable, this new biography reconstructs the tortuous journey of one of the most enduringly fascinating figures in American film.