scholarly journals Hard Times as Bodie: the allegorical functionality in E.L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times (1960)

Literator ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
P. Van der Merwe
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Hard Times ◽  
The Town ◽  
Basic Level

“Welcome to Hard Times” (1960), E.L. Doctorow’s first novel, differs from the rest of his oeuvre because it is not set in a metropolitan context like New York. References to historical events that contain an apparent “mixture” of “factual” and fictional elements that are typical of Doctorow’s oeuvre are less prominent than in his other fiction, though definitely not absent. An analysis of the pioneer setting, the town Hard Times, reveals that other settings (including metropolitan ones like New York) are not merely representations of specific contexts, but portrayals with allegorical elements. Criticism of Doctorow’s fiction does not sufficiently point out the rationale of Doctorow’s fiction in relation to his first novel: it is not just the basic level that contains the true topicality but also the underlying causal and thematic relationships. This article sets out to explore “Welcome to Hard Times” as a case in point. The objective of this article is therefore also to show that an analysis of this novel provides a valuable basis for understanding the allegorical character of his fiction. Angus Fletcher’s theoretical analysis, “Allegory: the theory of a symbolic mode” (1964), serves as a useful starting point for the analysis of the allegorical value of space and the town Hard Times as a microcosmic or symbolic society, as well as the “daemonic agents” in the town and the role of causality.

A 1939 World's Fair Souvenir Plate

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 8-10
Author(s):  
shax riegler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
World's Fair ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Common ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

The 1939 World's Fair in New York City celebrated the future—“The World of Tomorrow”—while also commemorating the one-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of George Washington's inauguration as first president of the United States. (His swearing-in ceremony had taken place in the city.) This essay examines the odd juxtaposition of imagery depicting both events on a blue-and-white transfer-printed ceramic souvenir plate from the fair. In the central portion of the plate, a god-like Washington, seen from behind, stands on a neoclassical balcony gazing out over the fairgrounds toward the iconic Trylon and Perisphere; around the rim small illustrations show several of the significant structures at the fair. Using the plate as a starting point, this essay considers the contemporary significance of and enduring interest in the fair. It explores the role of food and food-related displays at the fair, and it offers an explanation for the style and form of this particular plate, and other souvenir plates, intended for display yet also referencing the everyday functionality of the common household dinner plate.

scholarly journals Music in art

2019 ◽  
pp. 65-96
Author(s):  
Ruth Dorot
Keyword(s):  
Musical Instrument ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Music In Art ◽  
Basic Level

In this article I shall describe the various roles and meanings of music in selected works of different artists, styles and periods, from the basic level of imitating and portraying reality to more covert meanings. The choice of works was based on the starting point of the centrality of music or the role of the musical instrument, or both as a key to understanding and interpreting the painting.

Cultural Memory in the Novel Unterstadt by Ivana Šojat-Kuči

2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-126
Author(s):  
Jakov Sabljić ◽  
Tina Varga Oswald
Keyword(s):  
National Minority ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Cultural Constructs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Family Saga ◽  
Mother And Daughter ◽  
Point Of Intersection ◽  
The Town

AbstractUnterstadt (2009) by Ivana Šojat-Kuči can serve as an example of a literary and artistic intervention in the process of cultural oblivion. It is a novel that has won numerous literary awards in Croatia for its innovativeness. For the first time, it tells a story in which minority culture members themselves narrate about their ideologically suppressed family memory in order to imaginatively (re)construct the past, considering the needs of re-examining the destiny of a bourgeois family of German ancestry in the town of Osijek. Themes such as reminiscence, remembering and raising awareness of the town space are a textual polygon for telling the story as a family saga about the destiny of women in four generations – great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and daughter. Remembering and reminiscence are considered as social and cultural constructs that arise out of mutual interaction between the members of a specific family and community. Thereunto, the role of remembering and forgetting in the process of establishing historical events, female identity and the town’s toponymy as cultural/material objects should be determined, and vice versa, the role of culture-moulded objects in memory formation should be defined. There are three methodological approaches or perspectives to the reading of the novel. First, the historiographic layer of the novel is analysed, followed by the analysis of the town as a physical givenness and a cultural construct – a point of intersection of different identities, but also as an area of trauma. The issue of oblivion and reminiscence of the German national minority in the context of specifically female history is tackled as the third perspective. The novel Unterstadt is an example of a text presenting the mechanism of official remembering and forgetting and re-creation of the past by using the discursive act of narrating human fates conditioned by great historical events.

The Role of Disease and Desiccation in the Population Dynamics of the Gypsy Moth Porthetria dispar (L.) (Lepidoptera: Lymantriidae)

1963 ◽  
Vol 95 (4) ◽  
pp. 426-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert W. Campbell
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Gypsy Moth ◽  
Disease Incidence ◽  
Egg Mass ◽  
Population Reduction ◽  
Porthetria Dispar ◽  
Insect Density ◽  
The Town

AbstractThe population dynamics of the gypsy moth, Porthetria dispar (L.), are being studied on 10 sites in the Town of Glenville, New York. This paper discusses the role of disease and a condition here termed “desiccation” in the dynamics of these populations during a 4-year period, 1958-1961 inclusive.The term “desiccation” refers to dead pre-pupae that appeared shriveled, and were stiff to the touch, and which had a solid mass of food in their gut. The incidence of desiccation among pre-pupae was closely related to the number of eggs per egg mass produced at the end of the generation (a measure of relative insect density).Disease incidence among larval gypsy moth populations was directly related to insect density. Disease incidence was also related to site conditions, with higher mortality occurring in wet sites.When larval populations reached high densities, they always declined from the dense level within a few generations. These declines ranged from a sudden drastic reduction to a much more gradual decline. The former was preceded by virtual food exhaustion, while the latter was not usually preceded by exhaustion of the food supply.Disease and desiccation were primary factors in producing the sudden type of population reduction noted above. Pathogens may also play an important part in the more gradual type of decline, but this point remains to be clarified.

INTERPRETATION OF SINO-RUSSIAN CULTURE AND HUMANITIES COOPERATION IN THE NEW ERA

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 186-193
Author(s):  
REN YANYAN ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Current Status ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
New Era ◽  
Russian Culture ◽  
The People ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cooperative Partnership ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
The Belt And Road

The friendship between nations lies in the mutual affinity of the people, and the people’s affinity lies in the communion of hearts. The cultural and humanities cooperation between China and Russia has a long history. In recent years, under the role of the“Belt and Road” initiative, the SCO, and the Sino-Russian Humanities Cooperation Committee, Sino-Russian culture and humanities cooperation has continued to deepen. Entering a new era, taking the opportunity to promote Sino-Russian relations into a “new era China-Russia comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership”, the development of human relations between the two countries has entered a new historical starting point, while also facing a series of problems and challenges. This article is based on the current status of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, interprets the characteristics of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, analyzes the problems and challenges of Sino-Russian human relations in the new era, and tries to propose solutions and solutions with a view to further developing Sino-Russian cultural and humanities relations in the new era. It is a useful reference, and provides a reference for future related research, and ultimately helps the Sino-Russian cultural and humanities relations in the new era to be stable and far-reaching.

The Modernities of H. Lawrence Freeman

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 719-779
Author(s):  
David Gutkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
White Press ◽  
Grand Opera

H. Lawrence Freeman's “Negro Jazz Grand Opera,” Voodoo, was premiered in 1928 in Manhattan's Broadway district. Its reception bespoke competing, racially charged values that underpinned the idea of the “modern” in the 1920s. The white press critiqued the opera for its allegedly anxiety-ridden indebtedness to nineteenth-century European conventions, while the black press hailed it as the pathbreaking work of a “pioneer composer.” Taking the reception history of Voodoo as a starting point, this article shows how Freeman's lifelong project, the creation of what he would call “Negro Grand Opera,” mediated between disparate and sometimes apparently irreconcilable figurations of the modern that spanned the late nineteenth century through the interwar years: Wagnerism, uplift ideology, primitivism, and popular music (including, but not limited to, jazz). I focus on Freeman's inheritance of a worldview that could be called progressivist, evolutionist, or, to borrow a term from Wilson Moses, civilizationist. I then trace the complex relationship between this mode of imagining modernity and subsequent versions of modernism that Freeman engaged with during the first decades of the twentieth century. Through readings of Freeman's aesthetic manifestos and his stylistically syncretic musical corpus I show how ideas about race inflected the process by which the qualitatively modern slips out of joint with temporal modernity. The most substantial musical analysis examines leitmotivic transformations that play out across Freeman's jazz opera American Romance (1924–29): lions become subways; Mississippi becomes New York; and jazz, like modernity itself, keeps metamorphosing. A concluding section considers a broader set of questions concerning the historiography of modernism and modernity.

38. Max Brodel (1870-1941): His artistic influence on surgical learning at John Hopkins Medical School

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 47
Author(s):  
P. Pace-Asciak ◽  
T. Gelfand
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Neck Surgery ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Medical Illustration ◽  
3 Dimensional ◽  
Teaching Anatomy ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
Pathological Disease

Medical students depend on illustration to learn anatomical facts and details that may be too subtle for the written or spoken word. For surgical disciplines, learners rely on tools such as language, 2-dimensional illustrations, and 3-dimensional models to pass on important concepts. Although a photograph can convey factual information, illustration can highlight and educate the pertinent details for understanding surgical procedures, neurovascular structures, and the pathological disease processes. In order to understand the current role of medical illustration in education, one needs to look to the past to see how art has helped solve communication dilemmas when learning medicine. This paper focuses on Max Brodel (1870-1941), a German-trained artist who eventually immigrated to the United States to pursue his career as a medical illustrator. Shortly after his arrival in Baltimore, Brodel made significant contributions to medical illustration in Gynecology at John Hopkins University, and eventually in other fields of medicine such as Urology and Otolaryngology. Brodel is recognized as one of America’s most distinguished medical illustrators for creating innovative artistic techniques and founding the profession of medical illustration. Today, animated computer based art is synergistically used with medical illustration to educate students about anatomy. Some of the changes that have occurred with the advancement of computer technology will be highlighted and compared to a century ago, when illustrations were used for teaching anatomy due to the scarcity of cadavers. Schultheiss D, Udo J. Max Brodel (1870-1941) and Howard A.Kelly (1858-1943) – Urogynecology and the birth of modern medical illustration. European Journal of Obstetrics & gynecology and Reproductive Biology 1999; 86:113-115. Crosby C. Max Brodel: the man who put art into medicine. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991. Papel ID. Max Brodel’s contributions to otolaryngology – Head and Neck surgery. The American Journal of Otology 1986; 7(6):460-469.

Neoliberalism, Law and its Discontents: Three Recent Interventions

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ravi Malhotra
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Princeton University ◽  
The Law

Honor Brabazon, ed. Neoliberal Legality: Understanding the Role of law in the neoliberal project (New York: Routledge, 2017). 214pp. Paperback.$49.95 Katharina Pistor. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). 297 pp. Hardcover.$29.95 Astra Taylor. Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone (New York: Metropolitan Books--Macmillan, 2019). Hardcover$27.00

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