Download or read book The Sound and the Fury written by John T. Matthews and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book explains the novel's connection with the American South of the 1920s, illuminating its modernist style and exploring its autobiographical elements. After surveying criticism on the novel, the book examines the theme that dominates the work: the changes occuring in Southern race, class and gender definitions.

Download or read book Flaubert s Madame Bovary written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This non-academic author has previously brought you reader's guides to the depths and subtle pleasures of works by Joyce and Faulkner. With this book he brings you to the ultimate pleasures of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece. This author treats Madame Bovary as the Zen novel, working on the reader in the same way Zen works on a disciple. He shows how Flaubert uses a radically new style in order to create a literary breakthrough of a similar order as Zen and has composed the ultimate music of this novel in the counterpoint of style and plot. The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion and determinism. In the plot the inevitable demise of Madame Bovary is driven by her passionate nature and corresponding vulnerability to illusion. By contrast Flaubert's radical style is built on the philosophy of detachment. Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire. The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction. Emma or Madame Bovary is not free because she has the worm. Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more. Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society. Flaubert's novel shows through the fate of Emma Bovary the dangers of the worm. For those without freedom fate is in charge.

Download or read book Conrad s Victory written by John Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2004-08 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a detailed reader's guide to the power of Conrad's novel Victory. This non-academic author analyzes Conrad's format as a conflict between the life philosophies of Buddhist separation and Holy Spirit connection, a conflict played out dramatically in the emotional relationship of one man and one woman living on a remote south sea island. Anderson identifies the major themes as follows. Baron Axel Heyst, living alone to avoid emotional entanglements, nonetheless rescues Lena from a touring orchestra, and they escape to live together 24/7 on his remote island. Lena's connection to Heyst matures from initial interest to sexual love to selfless or spiritual love. But Heyst's response to her remains stuck in sexual possession. Given this failure of love connection, representatives of evil arrive on the island shortly thereafter. The victory of the title is Lena's victory over the fear of death that generates the selfish "me first" attitude in humans. Grounded in love for Heyst, she achieves a permanent and real sense of self and an ability to deal with evil. Finally the Holy Spirit force field powers her ultimate sacrifice for Heyst. He remains self-possessed, ultimately giving nothing of himself to Lena, but ironically without a secure sense of self or the ability to deal with evil. This author sees Conrad's large structure for Heyst's failure of the spirit as the biblical account of Mary Magdalene's part in the Resurrection of Christ. Heyst's failure to love Lena is his resurrection lost. This author also analyzes the sophisticated art of this novel as an unfolding from stem-cell metaphors into more specialized metaphors producing a powerful artistic victory.

Download or read book Faulkner s Absalom Absalom written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2003-07-01 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This non-academic author, a retired lawyer, brings William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to life as uncertainty in Dixie. He traces Faulkner's portrait of the efforts of Thomas Sutpen to create a family dynasty in wealth and community respect and of Rosa Coldfield to revenge Sutpen's treatment of her as a mere reproduction tool. Both efforts are analyzed as life sterilizers inevitably doomed to failure by the uncertainties in life and as examples of the tension between control of the future and love, a choice Faulkner had to make in his own personal life. Line by line analyses of critical portions of the novel reveal its subtleties to the reader. The explanation points out the intentional gaps and spaces in the story that invite reader participation as to what happened. This author gives you his interpretation. You are invited to create your own version of what "really" happened in this archetypal setting in Faulkner's famous Jefferson, Mississippi.

Download or read book William Faulkner s The Sound and the Fury written by Harold Bloom and published by Infobase Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents critical essays reflecting a variety of schools of criticism for The sound and the fury.

Download or read book Joyce s Finnegans Wake written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2010 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fourth in a series continues this non-academic author's ground-breaking word by word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This volume covers all of chapters 1.7, 1.8 and 2.1 with the intent to explore them as art objects. In chapters 1.7 and 1.8 Aesthetics meets Theosophy meets Metaphysics. Together they share a common subject-how one part or whole treats another part. These two chapters move from shun to share, hurt to help, male to female. In aesthetics, from bad art to good art. In theosophy, from TZTZ god to ES god. In metaphysics a la Arthur Schopenhauer, from male to female aspects of Will. Featuring an all male cast, chapter 1.7 is a stinging criticism of Shem by Shaun-brother against brother. Chapter 1.7 is intentionally bad art. In aesthetic terms, the whole of the chapter is at odds with the parts and the parts at odds with other parts. With an all female cast, chapter 1.8 features a young washerwoman and old washerwoman washing clothes and talking together across a river. The main point is that they are working together, and Old shares knowledge of the eternal feminine with Young. Sharing replaces shunning. Part helps part. Chapter 1.8 is intentionally divine art. Chapter 2.1 starts Part II that features the Earwicker children, the human expression of the death defying new. As children, they come with the potential for new possibilities. Initially, however, their realization is limited by youth, when they are more under instinct-based and parental control than under self-control. Chapter 2.1 features a children's game fueled by immature sexual intoxication and loss of self-control. Joyce presents this come-on game in the rhythms and rhymes of children's stories, poems and songs, that is in children's art limited by the purpose to please a young mind. Chapter 2.1 takes the form of a play. The action in the play is the children's game. It is a play about play. With drama in the structure, Joyce weaves Macbeth into the chapter and like Shakespeare's bearded witches, boils the pot with male and female. Hermetic magic supplies the metaphors and concepts for chapter 2.1. Hermetic magic is the art of accessing the celestial force field known as the Astral Light. In order to have strong magic the magus must be in equilibrium and must know him or herself. Magus Joyce notes that these same requirements are necessary for the highest art.

Download or read book The Making of a Bestseller written by Arthur T. Vanderbilt and published by McFarland. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald's career itself is a metaphor for the vagaries of book publishing. If Fitzgerald would have had his way, we would today refer to The Great Gatsby as either Gold-Hatted Gatsby, Trimalchio in West Egg, or The High-Bouncing Lover. A few years before Gatsby, Fitzgerald had become a literary sensation at the age of 23; Helen Hooven Santmyer, a contemporary of Fitzgerald's, would not have a successful novel published until she was 88 and living in a nursing home. In this book, the author explores that mysterious place in publishing where art and commerce can either clash, mesh, or both. Along the way, a wide range of authors--from the literary greats to today's commercial superstars--editors, agents and publishers share their thoughts, insights and experiences: What inspires writers? (John Steinbeck, for example, wrote every novel as if it were his last, as if death were imminent.) Why are some books successful and appreciated, while others fall into oblivion? The answers are often elusive, never absolute, but the stories and anecdotes are always fascinating.

Download or read book The Poltergeist in William Faulkner s Light in August written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama. BACK COVER: This non-academic author exposes the poltergeist lurking in the cellar of Faulkner's uncanny and haunting novel Light in August as the ghost of Faulkner's first child Alabama. She was born prematurely and died tragically after only nine days, apparently in the clutches of fetal alcohol syndrome. Faulkner couldn't write anything substantial for 7 months and then started this disturbing novel. The author demonstrates how Faulkner's own grief experience shaped the characters and the action and how he grounded part of his personal poltergeist in this novel. The resulting novel is full of tension and alienation. Strangers occupy Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi against the background of the culturally reft South post-Civil War. The author shows how Faulkner shrouded his intensely personal grief experience in a conceptual wardrobe borrowed from the philosopher and Nobel Prize winning Henri Bergson. Faulkner borrowed Bergsonian concepts of the life and death currents for the contrast in characters between those free in the present and those prisoners of the past. Lena Grove the young and pregnant country girl walking for weeks to find the father of her child bears the life current and Joe Christmas the orphan turned rapist and murderer the death current. The author demonstrates how Faulkner created the novel's other vivid characters using similar contrasts and how the plot strands tie together in a resonating whole. The author's detailed textual analysis of important passages brings this difficult novel into focus. Like the author's other books on Joyce and Faulkner, use of this analysis either as literary foreplay or afterplay will enhance your reading experience of Faulkner's novel.

Download or read book Conrad s Lord Jim written by John Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This non-academic author explores Conrad's classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad's character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named the Patna, he is judged by a court of inquiry and humiliated. Pathologically subject to shame because of the lack of any secure self, the dependent Jim attempts to hide by moving from port to port and finally into the jungle in out of the way Patusan. Crowned Lord Jim by the natives, he meets a seemingly inevitable fate because of his continuing need for approval from others. The independent Marlow helps Jim and in the process develops nuanced attitudes beyond conventional morality. Anderson sees the principal art of the novel as the connection Conrad forged between Jim and the Patna. Damaged by a submerged object while carrying Muslim pilgrims on their annual pilgrimage, the cause and effect of damage to the ship are metaphors for the cause and effect of Jim's psychic damage, damage that makes him susceptible to the pressure of opinions of others. Damaged early by the lack of a mother's nurture, Jim has no strong inner bulkheads to resist the pressure of the opinions of others. This author views the background of the novel, the background against which Conrad constructed Jim's life drama, to include the Garden of Eden myth and the attitudes towards free will in Islam and Christianity. As he did with works by Joyce, Faulkner and Flaubert, Anderson gives his analysis in a chapter by chapter and selected paragraph by paragraph reading of the novel.

Download or read book A Companion to Faulkner Studies written by Charles Peek and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2004-06-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faulkner scholarship is one of the largest critical enterprises currently at work. Because of its size and scope, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference includes chapters on individual approaches to Faulkner studies, including archetypal, historical, biographical, feminist, and psychological criticism, among others. Each chapter is written by an expert contributor and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner scholarship. The volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms. William Faulkner is one of the most widely read and studied American writers. His works have also generated a vast body of scholarship and elicited criticism from a wide range of approaches. Because of its size, scope, and diversity, accessing that scholarship has become difficult for scholars, students, and general readers alike. This reference comprehensively overviews the present state of Faulkner studies. The volume includes chapters written by expert contributors. Each chapter defines a particular critical approach and surveys the contributions of that approach to Faulkner studies. Some of the approaches covered are archetypal, biographical, feminist, historical, and psychological, among others. The book closes with a selected, general bibliography and glossary of critical terms.

Download or read book Mann s Doctor Faustus written by John Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2007 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reader s guide to Mann s classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized land of music, the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? The noble purposes of this novel are to understand the nature and sources of Nazi evil and to help ban it from the ring in the future. As you will note, Mann s explanation is relevant for events in Iraq in 2007. Mann gives a new answer to this question the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, serial music composed without freedom but with strict controls. Founded on repetition, this new and ultra-control German music arrived with the advent of the Nazis. Actually invented by the German Arnold Schoenberg, in the novel it is invented by a fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann believed that this kind of music contains the key to what happened politically in Germany starting at that same time. The first composition using the serial method was published in 1921, the same year Hitler became head of the National Socialist party. The key is that the music is composed with a rigid set of rules that must be slavishly followed. Based in repetition, these rules were to govern all aspects of music melodic progression, chord structure, rhythm. The rules denied composer freedom. This kind of music is discussed against the philosophical implications of the music of various composers such as Bach and Beethoven. Mann presents the view that Beethoven s late period music paved the way to Leverkuhn s serial music, to Gestapo music. Mann finds a demonic energy field at the heart of both serial music and of Nazism. Both triggered the rise of a demonic force by reason of blind and slavish obedience to rigid rules designed to establish control over too much, control over so much that freedom-denying methods were necessary to try to hold the result together. But Mann means something radically different by a demonic energy field. This is not your father s devil and this devil does not wear Prada. Mann s demonic is real and intangible but not a supernatural force. It is triggered by humans trying to control too much, even if the control is ostensibly designed for a good purpose. It happens when the end justifies the means. Then the means can and often become anti-humanitarian. Does that sound familiar? In the demonic energy field and like Doctor Faustus before him, Leverkuhn receives genius level energy but is rendered impotent of love, the demonic destroying the freedom that is the foundation for love. Genius-powered Leverkuhn produces serial music of a dissonant, fragmented and irreconciled character. His music is presented as the inevitable product of his pride twisted soul, which also has the uncanny power to influence otherwise natural events toward evil. In order to indicate that the same demonic process was at work on the national level in the case of the Nazis, Leverkuhn is given many of the personal characteristics of Hilter, including syphilis, and Leverkuhn s biography is told in a brilliantly structured counterpoint against the last years of the Third Reich [from 1943 to 1945].

Download or read book The Sound and the Fury in the Garden of Eden written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2002 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This non-academic author brings the Garden of Eden myth alive as sophisticated poetry and a polemic for women and the consciousness of freedom. The myth is explored line by line using the tools of literary analysis and modern ideas, including Freudian concepts. The analysis shows how its "J" author, thought to be a woman in the royal court of Judah around 1000 BCE, uses the techniques of sound association, puns and other sophisticated means to get her messages across. The analysis probes how after thousands of years this myth still speaks to us about the critical human experiences of sex and death and their bigger brothers freedom and limitation.

Download or read book Sixteen Modern American Authors written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Durham [N.C.] : Duke University Press. This book was released on 1989 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the earlier edition: "Students of modern American literature have for some years turned to Fifteen Modern American Authors (1969) as an indispensable guide to significant scholarship and criticism about twentieth-century American writers. In its new form--Sixteenth Modern American Authors--it will continue to be indispensable. If it is not a desk-book for all Americanists, it is a book to be kept in the forefront of the bibliographical compartment of their brains."--American Studies

Download or read book Kafka s Last Pipes written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2017-01-22 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fresh from the twilight zone of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, this non-academic author treats on a line by line basis two of Kafka's last stories, stories written while he was wheezing with tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, these stories features pipes, just what Kafka was thinking about all the time while he was bed ridden, his sore pipes. Kafka experienced the threat of death at the same time as he experienced the love of his life with Dora Diamant. In these two stories Kafka spot-lights fear and love, the most basic human issues and those that had taken possession of Kafka's life. Fear and love in the lives of a mole-like creature alone in a burrow and mice in a crowded colony. In stories with no humans, Kafka teaches us what is most important in being human. The Burrow examines fear-based isolation of a mole-like creature living all alone in his underground burrow. The only connection with others is fear-based taking, taking by claws and teeth. You are either the diner or dinner, never a guest or host. You are alone but not independent because fear eats your life possibilities independence could give. You are your own worst enemy. Josephine the Singer features love-based giving through art, Kafka's last word on the purpose of art. Like a loving parent giving to her child, the artist mouse Josephine attempts to inspire independent individuality in other mice in the colony through the example of her unique and spontaneous singing. This she gives free of charge. Because of fear of survival stoked by the colony leadership, the rest of the mouse collective hears her singing as a mouse but not as an individual. They remain in fear-based group think with reduced life possibilities. In both stories, the issue is the effect of fear or love on independent individual identity and life possibilities. For Kafka, this was the uber human issue as he prepared to meet his maker.

Download or read book The First Book of Moses Called Genesis written by and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 1999 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as "the most radical repackaging of the Bible since Gutenberg", these Pocket Canons give an up-close look at each book of the Bible.

Download or read book Guide to Enjoying Salinger s The Catcher in the Rye Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters written by John P. Anderson and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This non-academic author presents a study of Salinger’s major writings, a study designed to enhance the reader’s enjoyment even in a reread. The study is an analysis of their artistic structure, especially Salinger’s sophisticated use of the narrator’s voice or voices. Catcher comes off as the Hindu Connection, Franny and Zooey as Take Out Zen and Raise High as Kabbalah Reception. The Hindu connection structures what happens to Holden in Catcher, and fast as take out Zen structures what happens to Franny in Franny and Zooey. Principal tenants of Kabbalah influence and structure important aspects of the story Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, particularly the lack of civil reception of “others” at the wedding reception. These choices were no doubt influenced by Salinger’s experiments with different forms of spirituality. Salinger apparently came to the conclusion that your spiritual soul lies in your individual identity, a conclusion Joyce and others had reached earlier from connection with Eastern Spirituality. Direct versions of Jesus and Buddha dwell within you just waiting to be discovered. You don’t need an escort. For many young readers in the 20th century, these stories made up the New Testament, the new gospel as to what was important in life values. Read here how and why they were so powerful.

Download or read book Prescription for a Superior Existence written by Josh Emmons and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-10 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jack Smith is your average single thirtysomething businessman. That is, his life revolves around work, failed relationships, alcohol, painkillers, and pornography, and he sees no reason to change. But when he unwittingly comes into conflict with a burgeoning new California religion called Prescription for a Superior Existence, his routine is shattered and put back together so fantastically that his actions could impact the whole world. Against a backdrop of environmental cata-strophe and postmillennial tension, Jack's troubles begin when he is fired from his job and falls in love with Mary, the daughter of PASE's founder, and they reach an apex with his ab-duction and installation at one of the religion's spiritual training centers near San Francisco. As he is forced to learn about PASE's ascetic practices, his aversion and skepticism are challenged by a sense of community and purpose previously unknown to him. In the context of PASE, Jack discovers that he might not be average, that he might in fact be extraordinary, and the discovery is intoxicating. Nothing is as it seems, however -- not PASE, its enigmatic founder, his comrades, or even Mary -- and the question of whether he and those around him are headed toward group transcendence or its opposite takes on global significance A thrilling and timely novel about a flawed, ordinary man who is torn between love and the appeal of a powerfully seductive cult, Prescription for a Superior Existence explores the bounds of faith and human connection, and showcases the spectacular imagination of one of our most talented young writers.