Download or read book The Homeless of Ironweed written by Benedict Giamo and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Homeless of "Ironweed" is both a meditation on Kennedy's remarkable novel and a literary and cultural analysis. Benedict Giamo's explorations of the social conditions, cultural meanings, and literary representations of classic and contemporary homelessness in America and abroad inform his understanding of the literary merit and social resonance of Ironweed. Throughout Giamo remains grounded in a close reading of the novel. He moves with great relevance from Dante to Kenneth Burke, from Sartre to Robert Jay Lifton, to locate meaning and value in the lives of Kennedy's characters; by extension, with intelligence and compassion, he regards the lives of the homeless who wander through our streets and shefters today.
Download or read book Ironweed written by William Kennedy and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-12-22 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, basis of the film starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. Francis Phelan, ex-big-leaguer, part-time gravedigger, full-time bum with the gift of gab, is back in town. He left Albany twenty-two years earlier after he dropped his infant son accidentally, and the boy died. Now he's on the way back to the wife and home he abandoned, haunted at every corner by the ghosts of his violent life. Francis; his wino ladyfriend of nine years, Helen; and his stumblebum pal, Rudy, shuffle their ragtag way through the city's bleakest streets, surviving on gumption, muscatel, and black wit. estiny is not their business. 'The premise of Ironweed was so unpromising, that in marketing terms the writer still to this day finds it funny: the story of a bunch of itinerant alcoholics, knocking around Kennedy's hometown, falling out, having visions, trying to pass for sober to cadge a bed for the night in the homeless shelter.' Guardian 'But for all the rich variety of prose and event, from hallucination to bedrock realism to slapstick and to blessed quotidian peace, ''Ironweed'' is more austere than its predecessors. It is more fierce, but also more forgiving.' Quoted from the classic New York Times review of Ironweed, which made it an overnight sensation.
Download or read book The Homeless of Ironweed written by Benedict Giamo and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Homeless of Ironweed is both a meditation on Kennedy's remarkable novel and a literary and cultural analysis. Benedict Giamo's explorations of the social conditions, cultural meanings, and literary representations of classic and contemporary homelessness in America and abroad inform his understanding of the literary merit and social resonance of Ironweed. Throughout Giamo remains grounded in a close reading of the novel. He moves with great relevance from Dante to Kenneth Burke, from Sartre to Robert Jay Lifton, to locate meaning and value in the lives of Kennedy's characters; by extension, with intelligence and compassion, he regards the lives of the homeless who wander through our streets and shefters today.
Download or read book Homeless Come Home written by Benedict Giamo and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers a sympathetic yet critical look at the life of homeless advocate David Owen, who was tortured and killed in 2006 by those he intended to help.
Download or read book Billy Phelan s Greatest Game written by William Kennedy and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1983-01-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second novel in William Kennedy’s much-loved Albany cycle depicts Billy Phelan, a slightly tarnished poker player, pool hustler, and small-time bookie. A resourceful man full of Irish pluck, Billy works the fringes of the Albany sporting life with his own particular style and private code of honor, until he finds himself in the dangerous position of potential go-between in the kidnapping of a political boss’s son.
Download or read book The Existential drinker written by Steven Earnshaw and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-05 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looks at the nineteenth-century convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, and a new way of thinking about the self, which we came to label ‘existential’.
Download or read book Thinking Home written by Sanja Bahun and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-07 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thinking Home challenges and extends the existing scholarship on the subject of ‘home’ in a period which has seen unprecedented levels of movement cross the globe. Sanja Bahun and Bojana Petric have collated essays that revisit existing ideas to introduce new ways of thinking on home, from the individual and local, through communal, to the international levels. While home informs our feelings of belonging and displacement, and our activities, such as migration, housing, and language learning, Bahun, Petric and contributors look to specific under-studied areas and encompass them within a major framework that allows for assessment through multiple disciplinary and expressive lenses. Thinking Home examines examples such as temporary homes, homes on the road, new and emergent modes of home-making, and minority groups in home and housing debates. Fresh, timely and topical, Thinking Home is rooted in activism and policy-making in the sector of 'home'; the essays both challenge and extend the existing scholarship on this subject. This collection combines perspectives of aesthetics, anthropology, cultural and literary studies, law, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, political science and activist responses in one whole. It will be essential reading for students of anthropology, literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Homelessness written by David Levinson and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2004-06-21 with total page 928 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A readerʼs guide is provided to assist readers in locating entries on related topics. It classifies entries into 14 general categories: Causes, Cities, Demography and Characteristics, Health issues, History, Housing, Legal issues, Advocacy and policy, Lifestyle issues, Organizations, Perceptions of homelessness, Populations, Research, Service systems and settings, World perspectives and issues.
Download or read book Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture written by Ana M. Manzanas and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-24 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body, the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville’s "Bartleby, the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY, during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.
Download or read book Tales of an American Hobo written by Charles Elmer Fox and published by Singular Lives. This book was released on 1989 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Reefer Charlie" Fox rode the rails from 1928 to 1939; from 1939 to 1965 he hitched rides in automobiles and traveled by foot. From Indiana to British Columbia, from Arkansas to Texas, from Utah to Mexico, he was part of the grand hobo tradition that has all but passed away from American life. He camped in hobo jungles, slept under bridges and in sand houses at railroad yards, ate rattlesnake meat, fresh California grapes, and fish speared by the Indians of the Northwest. He quickly learned both the beauty and the dangers of his chosen way of life. One lesson learned early on was that there are distinct differences among hoboes, tramps, and bums. As the all-time king of hoboes, Jeff Davis, used to say, "Hoboes will work, tramps won't, and bums can't." Tales of an American Hobo is a lasting legacy to conventional society, teaching about a bygone era of American history and a rare breed of humanity who chose to live by the rails and on the road.
Download or read book Ragged Company written by Richard Wagamese and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Four chronically homeless people–Amelia One Sky, Timber, Double Dick and Digger–seek refuge in a warm movie theatre when a severe Arctic Front descends on the city. During what is supposed to be a one-time event, this temporary refuge transfixes them. They fall in love with this new world, and once the weather clears, continue their trips to the cinema. On one of these outings they meet Granite, a jaded and lonely journalist who has turned his back on writing “the same story over and over again” in favour of the escapist qualities of film, and an unlikely friendship is struck. A found cigarette package (contents: some unsmoked cigarettes, three $20 bills, and a lottery ticket) changes the fortune of this struggling set. The ragged company discovers they have won $13.5 million, but none of them can claim the money for lack proper identification. Enlisting the help of Granite, their lives, and fortunes, become forever changed. Ragged Company is a journey into both the future and the past. Richard Wagamese deftly explores the nature of the comforts these friends find in their ideas of “home,” as he reconnects them to their histories.
Download or read book Bootlegger of the Soul written by Suzanne Lance and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning novelist William Kennedy is perhaps best known for his Albany Cycle, a series of novels that put Albany on the world's literary map alongside James Joyce's Dublin, Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo, and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Bootlegger of the Soul offers a fresh and authoritative overview of Kennedy's long literary career and his astonishing trajectory from journalist to struggling novelist to Pulitzer Prize winner. Included here are reviews, interviews, and scholarly essays on Kennedy's work, as well as essays, speeches, a play, and a short story by the author himself, together with more than fifty historical and personal photographs. Lively, readable, and brimming with the infectious wit and lyrical prose that animates Kennedy's novels, Bootlegger of the Soul is a celebration of a writer still working hard at his craft at age ninety.
Download or read book Kerouac the Word and the Way written by Benedict Giamo and published by SIU Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Kerouac, a "ragged priest of the word" according to Ben Giamo, embarked on a spiritual quest "for the ultimate meaning of existence and suffering, and the celebration of joy in the meantime." For Kerouac, the quest was a sustained and creative experiment in literary form. Intuitive and innovative, Kerouac created prose styles that reflected his search for personal meaning and spiritual intensity. These styles varied from an exuberant brand of conventional narrative (On the Road, The Dharma Bums, and Desolation Angels) to spontaneous bop prosody (Visions of Cody.Doctor Sax, and The Subterraneans). Giamo's primary purpose is to chronicle and clarify Kerouac's various spiritual quests through close examinations of the novels. Kerouac began his quest with On the Road, which also is Giamo's real starting point. To establish early themes, spiritual struggles, and stylistic shifts, however, Giamo begins with the first novel, Town and Country, and ends with Big Sur, the final turning point in Kerouac's quest. Kerouac was primarily a religious writer bent on testing and celebrating the profane depths and transcendent heights of experience and reporting both truly. Baptized and buried a Catholic, he was also heavily influenced by Buddhism, especially from 1954 until 1957 when he integrated traditional Eastern belief into several novels. Catholicism remained an essential force in his writing, but his study of Buddhism was serious and not solely in the service of his literary art. As he wrote to Malcolm Cowley in 1954, "Since I saw you I took up the study of Buddhism and for me it's the word and the way I was looking for." Giamo also seeks IT--"a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, suspending for the moment belief in the 'real' concrete grey everyday of facts of self and selfhood . . . its various meanings, paths, and oscillations: from romantic lyricism to 'the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being and from the void-pit of the Great World Snake to the joyous pain of amorous love, and, finally, from Catholic/Buddhist serenity to the onset of penitential martyrhood."
Download or read book Notes from the Bowery written by Benedict Giamo and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-01-06 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the U.S., the homeless have traveled from the freight train to the shelter. Skid row was an extended stop along the way. Giamo reveals his encounter with the city and old Bowery of the 1970s. He simply followed the drift of homelessness. When it led him to the Bowery, the historic skid row, he dropped down to what had been, and still was at that time, the netherworld of New York City. Striving to attain authenticity, the author and his collaborator immersed themselves in the usual activities of the area and befriended the residents. As a result, they were enlightened about the lifestyle and meaning of skid row homelessness. Notes from the Bowery combines the personal essay, literary nonfiction, and cultural history to represent the significance of American life in the city and on the skids. Engaging, insightful, and deeply felt, Notes from the Bowery will give readers an enriching experience as they accompany the author on a journey of descent and discovery. For more information on this book, log on to www.Xlibris.com.
Download or read book Marginalisation and Utopia in Paul Auster Jim Jarmusch and Tom Waits written by Adriano A. Tedde and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-03-30 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how three contemporary American artists through the mediums of film, literature and popular music have contributed to the tradition of American progressivism, and provides an invaluable companion to the understanding of complex issues such as inequality and social and economic decline that are apparent in America today. Connecting the works of these artists through a fictional country – the ‘Other America’ – the book shows how they have refuted middle-class values and goals of success, money and social affirmation to unveil the less celebrated, dark side of contemporary America, which, despite the troubles currently faced, never loses hope for a better future. This utopic vision in the face of adversity is explored through the plots, characters and mis-en-scène of Auster and Jarmusch’s work and Waits’s lyrics and sound. This vision challenges the dominant narratives of America as the land of opportunity and values democracy, civic engagement, communitarianism and egalitarianism. Offering an important new perspective to literature on contemporary American culture, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of American studies, film studies, popular music, postmodern literature, cultural studies and sociology.
Download or read book Psychological Political and Cultural Meanings of Home written by Mechthild Hart and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-16 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover different dimensions of the meaning of home across political, cultural, and geographic boundaries! Psychological, Political, and Cultural Meanings of Home brings a unique multidisciplinary, multicultural approach to address the interconnection of diverse experiences with the meaning of home. Filled with useful insights from respected authorities, this book shows you that the meaning of home can be incredibly varied, especially when viewed in the context of community psychology and social work. Explore the multiple facets of the meaning of “home,” and discover how our personal, professional, cultural, and political background contributes to how we envision or experience home. From physical dwellings such as a convent or a prison, through political frameworks that confirm or challenge the status quo, on through the related meanings of home that cross cultural and geographical boundaries, Psychological, Political, and Cultural Meanings of Home presents an added dimension of what home truly can be. You will learn that home is a volatile mix of yearning and loss, of being at home or searching for it, and that this very mix is the framework that reflects each differing belief. With Psychological, Political, and Cultural Meanings of Home you’ll explore: the changing meanings of home for Taiwanese employers of foreign domestics under globalization the opportunities and critical success factors for work and career in the home the complexities and restrictions of convent life as home how women detainees in a large urban county jail form altered definitions of “home” how novelists can give a powerful voice to the homeless by creating an inner image that contains all essential elements of home the cultural constructions surrounding the ambiguous lyrics of “Sweet Home Chicago” the role of childhood immigration in the construction of self-identity the relationship between country of origin and the ability to create a sense of home in other countries and cultures the recreation of home in diverse places by the nomad, who carries home as an essential psychological belonging within Psychological, Political, and Cultural Meanings of Home is a fascinating, eye-opening book for those in community studies, psychology, sociology, culture studies, literature, and women’s studies.
Download or read book After the End of History written by Samuel Cohen and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-10-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold book, Samuel Cohen asserts the literary and historical importance of the period between the fall of the Berlin wall and that of the Twin Towers in New York. With refreshing clarity, he examines six 1990s novels and two post-9/11 novels that explore the impact of the end of the Cold War: Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Roth's American Pastoral, Morrison's Paradise, O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods, Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, Eugenides's Middlesex, Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, and DeLillo's Underworld. Cohen emphasizes how these works reconnect the past to a present that is ironically keen on denying that connection. Exploring the ways ideas about paradise and pastoral, difference and exclusion, innocence and righteousness, triumph and trauma deform the stories Americans tell themselves about their nation’s past, After the End of History challenges us to reconsider these works in a new light, offering fresh, insightful readings of what are destined to be classic works of literature. At the same time, Cohen enters into the theoretical discussion about postmodern historical understanding. Throwing his hat in the ring with force and style, he confronts not only Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist response to the fall of the Soviet Union but also the other literary and political “end of history” claims put forth by such theorists as Fredric Jameson and Walter Benn Michaels. In a straightforward, affecting style, After the End of History offers us a new vision for the capabilities and confines of contemporary fiction.
