Mechanisms of Wonder: The Performance of Marvels in Don Quixote Part II

2021 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
CHRISTINA COLE

As many Cervantistas have explained, Don Quixote’s imagined reality in Part II of Don Quixote is markedly different from the one presented in Part I of the novel. His adventures are no longer solely the result of his own imagination, but rather carefully crafted and manipulated by secondary characters in the work, perhaps most notably by the duke and duchess. One thing that has not been so well explained in prior criticism, however, is that intimately tied to this manipulation is the production of marvels and spectacular performances. These marvels are objects that arouse the emotion of wonder in their audiences. Each of the three episodes under study involves inanimate objects that seem to possess animacy. Through the presentation of these marvels, Cervantes shows that the intentional manipulation of the senses is an important aspect of producing wonder, for it helps to keep hidden the cause behind the seemingly marvellous object.

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-529
Author(s):  
Thomas Irvine

Early in Wilhelm Heinse’s eccentric novel Hildegard von Hohenthal (1796) his characters confront the problem of how music works on the senses. The novel’s hero, Kapellmeister Lockmann, tunes a piano—to an idiosyncratic temperament of his own invention—as he proposes an intensely physical model for musical listening. He uses this demonstration, while simultaneously trying to start a love affair with the novel’s heroine, Hildegard von Hohenthal, to reclaim older ideas about natural temperaments and key characteristics in an era of heightened interest in the anatomy of cognition. But Heinse’s own opinions are not always the same as those of his characters. Drawing on his notebooks, I trace how Heinse struggled to come to terms with opposing views of his friend and colleague, the anatomist Samuel Thomas Soemmering, and of the philosopher Immanuel Kant of how sound affects the body. Soemmering’s Über das Organ der Seele (1796) and Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790) both act as intertexts and paratexts to the novel, and Heinse more than once splits his own opinions about both books between his characters. The tuning scene addresses important questions about the hierarchy of the senses, the creation of musical meaning, and the freedom of performers and listeners to form their own interpretations of music. Heinse’s naturalist ideas about musical agency rub against the grain of a narrative—still current today—dominated by a transaction between heroic composers on the one side and awe-struck listeners on the other. To re-assess these ideas is to re-imagine a crucial hinge in music history.


2019 ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Alan J. McComas

This chapter describes the novel findings of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel when recording from single cells in the primary visual cortex and how these findings supported the concept that the various features of the observed image underwent independent processing in parallel. Of the various sensory systems, the one about which most is known is the visual one. Vision is also the most complex sensory system, which is reflected in its large cortical territory. The chapter thus focuses on the sense of sight in particular as it explores the findings of Hubel and Wiesel. However, the chapter also presents an alternative to the now-classic Hubel–Wiesel scheme, one that, despite its fundamental differences, seems equally plausible.


2020 ◽  
pp. 182-197
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Goral

The aim of the article is to analyse the elements of folk poetics in the novel Pleasant things. Utopia by T. Bołdak-Janowska. The category of folklore is understood in a rather narrow way, and at the same time it is most often used in critical and literary works as meaning a set of cultural features (customs and rituals, beliefs and rituals, symbols, beliefs and stereotypes) whose carrier is the rural folk. The analysis covers such elements of the work as place, plot, heroes, folk system of values, folk rituals, customs, and symbols. The description is conducted based on the analysis of source material as well as selected works in the field of literary text analysis and ethnolinguistics. The analysis shows that folk poetics was creatively associated with the elements of fairy tales and fantasy in the studied work, and its role consists of – on the one hand – presenting the folk world represented and – on the other – presenting a message about the meaning of human existence.


Author(s):  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Dennis Walder

Dombey and Son ... Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.' The hopes of Mr Dombey for the future of his shipping firm are centred on his delicate son Paul, and Florence, his devoted daughter, is unloved and neglected. When the firm faces ruin, and Dombey's second marriage ends in disaster, only Florence has the strength and humanity to save her father from desolate solitude. This new edition contains Dickens's prefaces, his working plans, and all the original illustrations by ‘Phiz’. The text is that of the definitive Clarendon edition. It has been supplemented by a wide-ranging Introduction, highlighting Dickens's engagement with his times, and the touching exploration of family relationships which give the novel added depth and relevance.


2012 ◽  
Vol 2012 ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. P. Li

Energy-efficient processing of TiB compound with nanowhiskers by micropyretic synthesis is investigated in this paper. Micropyretic synthesis not only offers shorter processing time but also excludes the requirement for high-temperature sintering and it is considered as the one of the novel energy-saving processing techniques. Experimental study and numerical simulation are both carried out to investigate the correlation of the processing parameters on the microstructures of the micropyretically synthesized products. The diffusion-controlled reaction mechanism is proposed in this study. It is noted that nanosize TiB whiskers only occurred when the combustion temperature is lower than the melting point of TiB but higher than the extinguished temperature. The results generated in the numerical calculation can be used as a helpful reference to select the proper route of processing nanosize materials. The Arrhenius-type plot of size and temperature is used to calculate the activation energy of TiB reaction. In addition to verifying the accuracy of the experimental measures, the reaction temperature for producing the micropyretically synthesized products with nanofeatures can be predicted.


PMLA ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-27
Author(s):  
Leon F. Seltzer

In recent years, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, a difficult work and for long an unjustly neglected one, has begun to command increasingly greater critical attention and esteem. As more than one contemporary writer has noted, the verdict of the late Richard Chase in 1949, that the novel represents Melville's “second best achievement,” has served to prompt many to undertake a second reading (or at least a first) of the book. Before this time, the novel had traditionally been the one Melville readers have shied away from—as overly discursive, too rambling altogether, on the one hand, or as an unfortunate outgrowth of the author's morbidity on the other. Elizabeth Foster, in the admirably comprehensive introduction to her valuable edition of The Confidence-Man (1954), systematically traces the history of the book's reputation and observes that even with the Melville renaissance of the twenties, the work stands as the last piece of the author's fiction to be redeemed. Only lately, she comments, has it ceased to be regarded as “the ugly duckling” of Melville's creations. But recognition does not imply agreement, and it should not be thought that in the past fifteen years critics have reached any sort of unanimity on the novel's content. Since Mr. Chase's study, which approached the puzzling work as a satire on the American spirit—or, more specifically, as an attack on the liberalism of the day—and which speculated upon the novel's controlling folk and mythic figures, other critics, by now ready to assume that the book repaid careful analysis, have read the work in a variety of ways. It has been treated, among other things, as a religious allegory, as a philosophic satire on optimism, and as a Shandian comedy. One critic has conveniently summarized the prevailing situation by remarking that “the literary, philosophical, and cultural materials in this book are fused in so enigmatic a fashion that its interpreters have differed as to what the book is really about.”


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


JURNAL SPHOTA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-31
Author(s):  
I Wayan Sidha Karya ◽  
Ida Bagus Adhika Mahardika

Long and short sentences affect the reader’s pace of reading story since they have to farce the complexity of the sentences and words used in it. In this study the impact of the use of long and short sentences on the pace of the story as implemented by Anthony Horowitz, a novelist, in his novel Raven’s Gate, is being explored. Especially the researchers looked at what types of long and short sentences were being used in the novel and how they were building up the story line and their effect on the pace of the story. A sentence with the length of up-to fourteen (14) words is considered to be short and the one over 14 words is considered to be long in spite its grammatical form, whether it is simple or complex. The criteria are based on empirical study as mentioned by Casi Newell in the AJE (American Journal Experts) retrieved from https://www.aje.com/en/arc/editing-tip-sentence-length/, that “the average sentence length in scientific manuscripts is 12-17 words,” with JK Rowling—the writer of Harry Potter—who can be considered to be representative of a modern English writer with a general audience, having the average of 12 words. For convenience we take the liberty of taking 14 words for the longest sort sentences and those which have 15 or more words are considered to be long sentences


Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219
Author(s):  
Liz Shek-Noble

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.


PMLA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 81 (5) ◽  
pp. 381-388
Author(s):  
William Park

But the Discovery [of when to laugh and when to cry] was reserved for this Age, and there are two Authors now living in this Metropolis, who have found out the Art, and both brother Biographers, the one of Tom Jones, and the other of Clarissa.author of Charlotte SummersRather than discuss the differences which separate Fielding and Richardson, I propose to survey the common ground which they share with each other and with other novelists of the 1740's and 50's. In other words I am suggesting that these two masters, their contemporaries, and followers have made use of the same materials and that as a result the English novels of the mid-eighteenth century may be regarded as a distinct historic version of a general type of literature. Most readers, it seems to me, do not make this distinction. They either think that the novel is always the same, or they believe that one particular group of novels, such as those written in the early twentieth century, is the form itself. In my opinion, however, we should think of the novel as we do of the drama. No one kind of drama, such as Elizabethan comedy or Restoration comedy, is the drama itself; instead, each is a particular manifestation of the general type. Each kind bears some relationship to the others, but at the same time each has its own identity, which we usually call its conventions. By conventions I mean not only stock characters, situations, and themes, but also notions and assumptions about the novel, human nature, society, and the cosmos itself. If we compare one kind of novel to another without first considering the conventions of each, we are likely to make the same mistake that Thomas Rymer did when he blamed Shakespeare for not conforming to the canons of classical French drama.


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