Stylistics Meets Cognitive Science

Studying Style in Fiction and Readers’ Attention from an Interdisciplinary Perspective

Readers’ attention has been studied in stylistics using notions such as foregrounding (MukaÍovský) and psychological prominence (Leech and Short). In this article, we offer a fresh perspective on this topic from Cognitive Science. Our research draws on the psychological framework of “depth of processing” (e.g. Sanford and Sturt), which provides a context for studying different degrees of attention during reading. We identify stylistic features and narratological cues in fiction which we intuitively feel to be “attention-capturing devices.” We then use a new psycholinguistic technique, the text-change detection method (Sturt et al.), to test whether the stylistic features we have selected really do make readers more attentive, in the sense of making them more alert to textual detail.

This is an abstract from the article on Style, volume 41, number 2,Summer 2007

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Simone de Beauvoir, the passion of freedom

The Literary Magazine n°471.
January 2008

In the Ceremony of the good-byes, Simone de Beauvoir notes qu’in November 1976 the literary Magazine published "a length and very interesting" maintenance with Sartre with Michel Sicard in connection with L’Idiotic of the family. As D’different events with the glory of Sartre had surrounded this number, Simone de Beauvoir, S’while congratulating for him, S’exclaimed: "What a beautiful come-back! "And Sartre to answer, malicieusement: "a funerary come-back" Its health did not cease being degraded and Beauvoir consigned with a precision relentless the stages of this slow dilapidation in a newspaper which will give the Ceremony of the good-byes.


C’is aujourd’today with the turn of Simone de Beauvoir to make its come-back. Hundred years after its birth – on January 9, 1908 – a come-back D’in addition to-falls! Through various conferences, special numbers, biographical republications, and tests – of which that of Daniele Sallenave – this commemoration will be abundantly celebrated. Beauvoir left its purgatory to become a figure prodigiously present and alive. L’History gave wrong to those which décrièrent combat qu’it carried out for the women, reproaching him for alienating them with the male model. L’one of the large priestesses of the MLF, Antoinette Fouque, had these terrible words at the following day of its death: "This death N’is not an event. C’is an adventure which perhaps will accelerate L’entered of the women the xxie century "Judgement extremely hasty whose virulence is with L’image of the attacks undergone by Beauvoir throughout its life.

Vilified in France at the time of its publication, the Second Sex had to await the American dedication for S’to impose as a book founder of the feminist thought; aujourd’today still, in fact the theories of the kind, developed on the other side of the Atlantic put at the foreground the analyses of Beauvoir. In two short sentences, L’author of the Second Sex opened an immense breach: "One is not born woman. It is become ", wrote it since 1949, putting at bottom the quiet certainty of the triumphing patriarchate.

Beyond the combat for the women, Beauvoir knew to develop a philosophy which one perceives aujourd’today L’extreme richness. According to its most radical disciples, it would have blown in Sartre the premises of the thought existentialist. More certainly, it knew, starting from the substrate which was common for them, to develop an original philosophy, L’applying as well to female condition qu’with the question of the old age, in connection with which it had also a role of pionnière. It is time to read again its tests like its autobiographical novels and its accounts. L’together of sound œuvre, marked by the taste of the word right and sparing, guard an intact force.

Source: http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr

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The Literary Magazine, Vol 469 November 2007

Pascal, mirror of our life

By Jean-Louis Hoots

Sweeping in three words the perfidies voltairiennes, Chateaubriand sealed the posthumous glory of Pascal: "This alarming génie… "So much d’inventions, of combat, fulgurances in a so short life – Pascal dies in 39 years. This man who hates it to me does not cease gearing down himself. Here it is in turn the cloîtré, despaired and cynical, mystical society man and and calculator. The diversity of its thought astonishes. Scientist, it invents the projective geometry, the theory of probability, experimental physics; perched with highest of l’Auvergne, its native stronghold, it challenges ḻantic theory according to which nature would have horror of the vacuum. Contractor, it designs at 19 years the arithmetic machine, which precedes the computer, and twenty years later, lance in Paris fit with body them with five grounds which are our first buses. Man d’action, it reinforces against the Jesuits, at the sides of the Jansenists. Thinker of the policy, it defines a justice of the orders to criticize l’absolutisme.Écrivain, finally and especially, camouflaged under seven distinct identities, it advances by fragments and invents a style which combines l’esprit geometry with l’obsession of the word right.

This appalling genius chose l’effroi like regulates life. Written Pascal leaned with nothing, tied by the fear of death. It prophesies the modern condition of l’homme which, to flee its anguishes, finds refuge in the entertainment. He is the contemporary of our small miseries and our great questions. All trembles at Pascal, l’homme which n’est that thinking reed, its sick body of which it auscultates the disastrous dilapidation, its hand which writes, readily haughty and indecipherable. Like any genius, he wants to be singular. And recluse, cultivating the withdrawal, l’anonymat, the temptation of poverty, the to know certainty nothing: "I know whom m’a put at the world, neither what c’est that the world, nor that myself; I am in a terrible ignorance of all things; I know only c’est that my body, that my directions, that my heart and that this part even of me which thinks what I say "Under these conditions, how not to choose s’en to give to God?

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Ulysses, from one exile to another

By Helene Monsacré
Literary magazine n° 221
Juillet/Août 1985 (File literature and the exile).


"Oh! not, nothing is softer than fatherland and parents; in the exile, what good is the richest residence, among foreigners and far from its parents?"
Ulysses in.

It is at the time when Ulysses has just declined his identity in Phéaciens, and before even beginning the long account of its adventures, which it makes reference to the hardness of the exile. And what a exile! Ten years with guerroyer under the walls of Troy with the other Greeks, nine years to be wandered on the seas with the research of the way of the return. Because,it is to it the post-war period; it is the account of the returns of the Greek heroes in their hearths, more particularly the recit of the return of Ulysses. During nearly ten years, Ulysses fights to leave the inhospitable regions where, inlassablement, it fails; during ten years, this so difficult return will lead it of one exile to the other.

And which best framework to choose to make wander a man than that of the sea, of this Mediterranean, sea "in the medium of the grounds", on which Ulysses is condemned to undergo the anger of Poséidon? The sea is dangerous and is not made for the man: to cross wants to say to expose itself to the storms, the marine monsters, the desolation of the moving and sterile vastness. Coming from the sea Ulysses does not miss the tests: hurricanes, storms, shipwrecks, exhaustions and bad meetings abound. Each stopover holds its surprises and moves away a little more Ulysses of his goal, the ground of the "men eaters of bread"; each halt brings its batch of sufferings.
As of the first towards poem, it is "that which such an amount of wandered (…) and, on the seas, passed by so many anguishes ", and its first appearance is characterized pareillement: prisoner of Calypso, it spends his days to be cried, with the variation, over his impossible return. The fabulous history of Ulysses it is, in a certain manner, the most completed human experiment exile, truth: that which makes that a man is nothing any more, is nobody any more. Beyond the account of tirednesses, wounds, frights which a man can support, there is in the marvellous painting of a temporary depersonalization. Because, in the last analysis, Ulysses is nothing any more, it very lost: its spoils, its boat, his/her companions, its weapons, his heroic past and until its name. It is an unknown, shipwrecked man anonymous; it "most obscure of all the men", is insulated in an inhuman world.
Where is king d' Ithaque, where is the hero of Troy? In these fabulous regions, the fame of Ulysses is impossible, does not have a catch. It is compared to the company of the men, thanks to the song of the aède which praises its value, that a hero can exist as such in the memory of the alive ones.
But, we know it, the destiny of Ulysses is not to disappear without burial at sea-bed, or unknown ground of the men. The poet shows it well: if it does not save any test with its hero, it always leaves him however its intelligence; and this intelligence, it is also the memory of its humanity. Ulysses never loses the direction of the return.
Ulysses held good: he never forgot his fatherland, never given up his wife, in spite of the charm of Calypso and the proposals for an immortality that she makes him. To remain on the island and in company of the nymph, safe from any concern, eternally young, would however be easy. Ulysses, however, faithful to itself, i.e. his temperament of endurance, resists and chooses the tests of the return, the anguish of the sea to find his place of mortal.
But if it finally leaves, thanks to Athéna, the world of the exile in fabulous country, it did not finish any, for all that, with the refusal of its true identity. Even in Ithaque, Ulysses is always except statute, of itself. He must pass by again a series of tests, to undergo many tests to find his véitable identity.
State of old anonymous vagrant, collected by his own Eumée pig-keeper, with that of poor wretch begging sitted on the threshold for its own palate, Ulysses, disguised, will know all humiliations. Once more, the variation is large between the condition of the beggar haillons some, abused by the applicants, and that of the all-powerful king of justice; it is in the sense that, even in Ithaque, Ulysses did not finish any with the exile. It is only after the contest of the arc and the massacre of the applicants, who mark the ultimate transition in the reconquest from his royalty, that his identity is recognized of all. By making a success of the exploit which qualifies it, it is worthy of the royalty, worthy of his wife; it is become again Ulysses, king d' Ithaque at the same time as the victorious hero of Troy.
In were Troy, precisely, the Greeks ofIliade confronted with the feeling of exile? More than one index makes it possible to think it. It is advisable, however, to moderate the things: nothing is comparable with the long wander of Ulysses of, with his progressive dispossession of identity.
Iliade never evokes the need for warlike exploits without the obligatory reference to the fame, with the heroic morals which takes its direction only compared to the fatherland of origin. It is a question of taking Troy to avenge the made affront with Ménélas, but also to return as a winner to Greece.
Allusions to the discouragement, with lassitude abound and punctuate the action with the camp of the Greeks. And, in a certain direction, the community of the Achaens is in exile under the walls of Troy: the confrontations last since too a long time. The recurring memory of the native soil corrodes the tired warriors. But this memory stimulates them at the same time: the topic of the fatherland is dissociable heroic requirement. Because, being a hero, it is to be worthy of his ancestors, warriors them also, and valorous for his sons; it is to acquire the glory which will be sung by the generations to come. To return overcome is impossible.
The Achilles, most courageous of the Greeks, it knows better than whoever, even if temptation to return in his country effleure one moment. Indeed, since his quarrel with Agamemnon, Achille is with the variation of the combat. Far from its fatherland, far from his comrades in arms, it makes, for the time, him, "best of the Achaens", appears of exiled. But its inactivity cannot last. The history is known: it chooses glory, it is essential on him, it will remain in Troy. "If I remain to beat me here around the town of Troy, it in is done for me return; on the other hand, an imperishable glory awaits me. If I return myself from there on the contrary in the war of my fatherland, it in is done for me noble glory; a long life, on the other hand, is reserved to me, and the death, which all completes, for a long time could not reach me."
Since Patrocle, his/her friend, this "other itself", is massacred by Hector, death is already on him. It does not escape from its destiny which is to die young person, in an immense glory: it will kill Hector, allow the catch of Troy and will die far from its country.
If the topic of the distance, of the exile is present in Homeric poetry, it is it to differing degree. On a side, inIliade, a community of warriors is temporarily cut of his country during ten years; other, in, an individual is ballotté with the liking of the fury of a god in dangerous worlds, in a nonhuman space and indelimity.
With Ulysses of the east evoked confusedly, but with force, the need for belonging in a community, a city. It is necessary to be at home to have an identity, like if, in this end of VIIIe century before J.-C., the obligatory reference to something moreover more extremely than the individual aristocratic values started to be felt.

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The white Review with the magnifying glass

By Jean-Baptist Baronian
The Literary Magazine n°468
October 2007

In addition to Alfred Jarry and Octave Mirbeau, the white Review accomodated talented writers, aujourd’hui forgotten.

Jarry and Octave Mirbeau, the white Review accomodated talented writers, aujourd’hui forgotten.

"Center of rallying of all the divergences" according to the formula d’André Gide, the white Review regularly makes l’objet, these last decades, d’études and of work. Witness, the very recent bibliography of the a hundred and forty pounds qu’elle published, of 1892 to 1902, established by Patrick Fréchet with the editions of Lérot (see the literary Magazine n° 461).

Aujourd’hui appears, under the signature of Paul-Henri Bourrelier, l’ouvrage richest, vastest, most detailed and undoubtedly most exhaustive on the review, its activities and its history. They are twelve hundred pages in small characters where all is thoroughly described and commenté: life of the three Natanson brothers, founders, the part played by famous collaborators like Alfred Jarry or Mirbeau Octave, l’affaire Dreyfus, Nabis, writings of Claude Debussy, operas of Richard Wagner, occult sciences if appraisals in the French cultural life of the end of the XIXe siècle…

One of the great interests of this work is to put l’accent on figures aujourd’hui little known, but extremely active and sometimes extremely influential with l’époque. C’est as Paul-Henri Bourrelier devotes a whole chapter to Gustave Kahn qu’il describes as "ombrageux poet" and which one will remember qu’il was one of the flag-holders of symbolism. In the same way, it s’attarde on the curious personality of Victor Barrucand, one of the pillars of the white Review since 1895, at the same time "fighter, globe trotter, cosmopolitan, seducer unrepentant, inventive, dilettante". In revolt against the injustices of the company, Barrucand will n’aura be to be strictly accurate an anarchist. On the other hand, it will have l’idée d’en to change the reports/ratios of force by proposing the free distribution of bread "In l’état present, will say it, one can quite simply die of hunger. C’est the social evil qu’il is necessary to cure, before speaking about the cases d’anémie. "In 1900, it was to publish With fire, a novel which occurs in the anarchistic mediums at the time from the attacks. The Phébus editions republished this book in 2005, with an excellent presentation d’Éric Dussert.
Evocations of this type, one finds tens throughout this history of them. Manes for impassioned letters and the bibliophiles, always in search of references and bent information hand. From now on, c’est sure, one will not be able to evoke any more the white Review without speaking at once about Paul-Henri Bourrelier and his gigantic work.

The white Review, a generation in l’engagement, 1890-1905, Paul-Henri Harness-maker
Éd. Beech, 1195 p., 29 €.

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Kafka Pragois

By Jean Montalbetti

Literary magazine n° 198
September 1983

1983. Whole Europe celebrates the centenary of Kafka. In Paris, a conference is devoted to him to the Sorbonne. But Prague, city whose Kafka is indissociable, continuous to regard it as a declining author, of which proscire is needed work and the memory.

"It seemed to to me that the nature of works of Kafka is such that it is likely to make of him the completely frightening civil servant of the Castle which he describes (...) It is the humour which prevents Kafka from becoming this monument petrified and risen by the mass of interpretations that one brings."
Vaclav Jamek

Our younger centenary, Franz Kafka, is dpuis some thirty-five years become universal. Author of German language, pertaining to a Jewish family established in Bohemia, young Czech at the end of monarchy austro-Hungarian woman of François-Joseph and Charles, citizen of the Czechoslovakian Republic of Masaryk since 1918 until his death on June 3, 1924, Kafka is before a whole indissociable writer of Prague. Its life was narrowly registered in a topography which goes from the Place of the Old City, dominated by the two turns of Tyn, with the castle of Hradcany - still today seat and symbol of the temporal power - which dominates Prague over other bank of Vltava, while passing by the dark lanes of Mala Strana at the end of the Bridge Charles. Its education, it received it with the German gymnasium installed in the very beautiful building baroque of the Kinsky Palate where his/her father, Hermann Kafka, transferred in 1906 his trade from innovations. Balcony of this same Kinsky Palate, on the Place of the Old City where was set up the statue of the Czech reformer Jan Hus sharp flaring on oredre of the Council of Constancy, Klément Gottwalt proclaimed the Blow of Prague on February 21, 1948 in full cold war.
America had just appeared in Prague in Czech translation, first volume of what was to be an edition of complete works in ten volumes. Gottwald gave the order to put America at the rammer. Franz Kafka was proscribed of Prague for ten years and some of its defenders knew the Stalinist prisons. Fifteen years after Germany hitlérienne, the verdict was the same one from Berlin 33 in Prague 48: this declining author was to be flaring.
Some French intellectuals baited themselves to change the course of the literary history: Andre Breton who placed Kafka in his Anthology of the black humour, Albert Camus which published in 1943 a text on the Hope and the absurdity in the work of Franz Kafka included in the Myth of Sisyphus, Jean-Paul Sartre who drew also Kafka on the side of the existentialism, Maurice Blanchot more kafkaïen of our writers and Marthe Robert. But the first translator and introducer of Kafka in France were Alexandre Vialatte who published the Lawsuit in Paris in 1933 at the time when Berlin proscribed "the declining Jew".
Will the year of centenary make it possible Kafka to know the amnesty? 1983 are marked by many demonstrations, conferences, exposures, whose blow of sending was from the 16 to May 19 the international Symposium Kafka in Vienna. Italy did to it his in Bari. Will follow Mainz for FRG, Montreal, Such Aviv, Paris this month.
And In Prague? July 3 a small group of admirors went to the cemetery of Strachnitz in the suburbs of Prague. In the medium of a nature in waste land, among the abandoned tombs of
Jewish families exterminated during the war, this bunch of anonymities came to place a crown of flowers against the drawn up stone of the burial where Franz Kafka was buried on June 11, 1924 and where his/her parents were buried a few years later. There the Jews have habit to deposit on the edge of the tombs a small stone of the memory. One can see several hundreds of them in front of the memorial of Dr. Franz Kafka. The University Charles of Prague - one of oldest of Europe -, the Union of the Czechoslovakian Writers, continue, them, to be unaware of Kafka whose Czech poet Urzidil wrote: "Kafka, it was Prague and Prague, it was Kafka".
How Prague can it ignore at this point its history? This traditional hearth several cultures and, in this first half of the century, not of meeting of the avant-gardes in literature as in painting. One forgot one of the cries of revolt of Kafka in his Newspaper: "All that isn't literature annoys me and causes my hatred"? Claude David, in his foreword with the complete Works published in the Pleiad, underlines it with accuracy: "the world of Kafka is unaware of the conflicts of opinion, nations, races, it is unaware of the war, in the time even where it takes place. It is often oppressive but it shows violence little. Loneliness is heavier there than the collective constraint. The fabulous worlds that the daydream of Kafka causes are not drawn with the resemblance of ours." See in Kafka a painter of the communist company or capitalism at the last stage of its contradictions is to make a realistic writer of it. Milan Kundera, itself novelist pragois, prefers to draw it on the side of Jaroslav Hacek, towards the spirit of not-serious and from humour pragois. It is probably as was interpreted the first chapter of the Lawsuit, and one believes max Brod of them. As for Kafka, he writes in his been engaged Felice Bauer, after a reading at max Brod of the Metamorphosis of Gregoire Samsa which awakes one morning in vermin: "We spent a good moment and we laughed much."
The existential anguish of Kafka recorded by the Newspaper and transmitted by the correspondence, its conflict with the father in filigree of the bright Verdict then in the Letter with the father, his professional subjection, the development of a serious illness with a pulmonary tuberculosis diagnosed in 1917, should not make us forget the extraordinary vitality of Kafka, its corrosive humour, the play impassioned of imaginary engaged in a perpetual production of strange images intended to put in very logical rout and to subvert the rational one. Albert Camus and Maurice Blanchot see there one and the other a religious inspiration which according to Camus gives him a universal dimension and according to Blanchot marks the revenge of God-death: "Dead, it is only more terrible, more invulnerable, in a combat where there is no more possibility of overcoming."
The psychologist and novelist of Austrian origin Manès Sperber, which read the first texts of German Kafka in Vienna in the Twenties, entrusted to me that Kafka would be surprised today place that one lends to him. Goldstücker known as of Kafka which it was "Verdun of the years of Cold war". It is perhaps time to leave side the political, sociological, psychoanalytical grids of the work of Kafka, to make on the level reading a work as new as that undertaken by Malcolm Pasley on the manuscripts of the Bodléienne Library of Oxford for the scientific establishment of the texts such as they were written by Franz Kafka. This would make it possible to return Kafka to the literature, after one half-century an animated turning of 1933 to 1983. It would be after all a pretty gift for one centenary. Happy birthday Mr Kafka.

Discussion with Edouard Goldstücker, the saver of Kafka

Kafka knew in Prague a small decade of respite, continuations of the 20E Congrès of the PCUS at summer 68. Edouard Goldstücker was the principal craftsman of this literary thaw which enabled him to organize in Czechoslovakia, in Liblice in 1963, the first international conference Kafka. He was then a director of the Institute of the Germanic studies at the University Charles. He lives today in exile in England and sign at the University of Brighton. Met in Vienna, it testifies fifteen years afterwards on the ostracism whose Kafka is victim in Prague since 1948.

- Between 1948 and 1957, no book of Kafka was published nor any criticism on its work. One regarded Kafka as a prototype of the destroying decline, especially near youth. By là-même, it was an author who did not have a place in a company building socialism. This is why it was removed. You should not forget that during the years of cold war Kafka was used against the Soviet Union and the people's democracies while being presented as the prophet who had predicted and described the bureaucracy of the Stalinist world. Myself I was communist since 1933. From 1951 at the end of 1955 I was held in prison. Released, I am turned over to the University at the time of the 20E Congrès. It is only after that that one could mention in public the name of Kafka without having to use a pejorative epithet.

- In 1962-1963 it ya have in the USSR the era khrouchtchévienne of cultural release with the publication ofOne Day of Ivan Denissovitch. Did Kafka profit from it in Prague?

- In 1962 I was invited to make a conference at the University of Moscow on the writers pragois of the Xxe century. I spoke about Kafka. The first question that one posed to me was: "do you Regard Kafka as realistic-critical?" If I had answered yes, that wanted to say that from my point of view it was acceptable for the official line. I understood that in the University one tried to save Kafka. It is at this time that I organized a committee of the Germanists of all the Universities of Czechoslovakia and I proposed to them to join together a symposium on Kafka with the specialists Marxists. We put under discussion at this conference of Liblice in 1963 the cogency of the charge carried against Kafka: was it, yes or not, a pessimist susceptitble to have a harmful influence on the company building socialism? The result was that after Liblice one authorized the publication of the work of Kafka in Czech translation. Thus were published in Prague in five years: The Lawsuit, the Castle, Description of a combat and a collection of accounts just as the biography written by max Brod.

- the Castle has for topic impossibility of being made adopt and by the authorities and the population in a country where one is felt like foreigner. That was often the case of the Jews in Europe. Is this the Jew which was proscribed of Prague, where since 1968 one cannot find any book of Kafka, even not in the libraries?

- Certainly after the occupation of Prague in August 1968, there was in the attitude of the authorities with regard to Kafka a specific element of anti-semitism.

- When one carries out a survey in Prague, one ends up knowing the semi-official charge retained against Kafka. It is proscribed like "Zionist". Is this there a confusion between the convictions of Kafka and those of max Brod?

- You must include/understand the official language. When one tells you "Zionist", it is necessary to hear "Jewish". It is only one euphemism of the anti-semitism.

In literary magazine n° 198 - September 1983

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The Literary Magazine October 2007: Great quarrels between philosophers

Benefits of the controversy
By Jean-Louis Hoots

L’art of the polemic goes up with highest Antiquity "Polemos [ the conflict ] is the father of all things and the king of all things", affirmed Héraclite. All l’histoire of Greek philosophy can be summarized with a succession of arguments. Oscillating between theoretical debates and personal attacks, refutation and invective, this practice of the controversy, lengthily ground in the Platonic dialogues, n’a ceased d’échauffer philosophers. In the middle of the XIXe century, Schopenhauer reformulated of them the rules and the tricks in a treated court, nicely entitled L’Art to always d’avoir reason. Enumerating thirty-eight stratagems, the philosopher taught how to be right at all costs by sapping the arguments of l’adversaire and while showing himself of worse faith than him. After having suggested many easy ways, pretences and pro­vocations, Schopenhauer advised like ultimate ad personam l’attaque recourse, by showing "die­sobligeant, aggressive, offensive, coarse".

This file of the literary Magazine is made l’écho various invectives, insults, mocking remarks and insults that the philosophers during two millenia launched out. Perhaps one will reproach us for bringing back squabbles sometimes worthy d’une playground "polé­the mists disgust me", said Bernanos, repenting the pannings of which it overpowered so many of its contemporaries. The polemic, when it concerns the mania, is useless, even degrading. But it can be salutary when it emerges with relevance to revive the debate. It s’apparente then with a tournament where it s’agit less to embank l’adversaire that to d’enrichir a common reflexion.
This file wants to be an illustration of the good use of the dialectical one. It recalls by the menu the most famous duels, and most fertile, of l’histoire of philosophy "the controversy is often beneficial with l’un as with l’autre, of the fact qu’ils rub their heads between them, and is used for each one d’eux to rectify its own thoughts, and also to conceive new sights", concludes in its Schopenhauer treaty which, definitely, had...

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Great love of Honore de Balzac

By Hubert June
in literary magazine n° 120
January 1977

It is to Mrs Hanska that Balzac very entrusted. The "Letters" which were restored to us, in 1976, by Roger Pierrot form most invaluable of the comments to "the human Comedy"

What there is astonishing of and applicant in the world by the library, it is that the authors most notably known reserve surprises, and that one does not come from there, finally, never with end. I want to say that these surprises are serious and call into question numbers established concepts. As well Balzac was done various as to gather them all together one would attend a ball dressed up (and masked) the most succeeded of.

So that it is necessary, fortunately, to recover some to the patient work from the editors. One of most important, for our matter, publishes the final edition of one of the beautiful books of Balzac, which is a correspondence. The editor, it is Roger Pierrot. The book: "Letters with Mrs Hanska" (editions of the Delta). It is of other key to this book only the reading: I do not know anything, for my part, of also enthralling, and I want to say why. With the risk to shock, I affirm that Balzac attracts the prigs as much as honey the flies: one is Balzac by mood, which arranges all (at least this is there what one believes commonly). In reality, all is contrary: if Balzac is not a temptation, it is that it is nothing! See: the thickness of work is made of an exceptional transparency. It is a paradox, but which touches finger: between Balzac and its work the distance is carefully maintained. One said for Balzac - which from this point of view does not say anything - that Balzac was not nowhere, whereas it is enough to read it, with a natural transport, to understand that it is everywhere. When I walk in the lanes of high-Angouleme, I am Balzac in fact, and drawn out of Angouleme to be returned, all, in Balzac. "the lost Illusions", it is not a veil, but on the contrary, a tear. I included/understood that in the place that I said, in a time when I was obstinated not to include/understand the "Balzac ones" (it is as that which should be said), because the geographical place who is Angouleme is split like fig even or open nut (it is a fruit which comes to Charente) to allow M.de Balzac, a cane with the hand, to appear. I had sworn that one would not take to me more there.

The crib

And here me is captive. With new. And, again, I see under work the man. I know value of criticism of today, and that it is necessary to distract the work from the alibis that the criticism of yesterday gave him, which was, as well, to speak only about the entours. I include/understand the advantage of a scientific step of pace. But finally, these combined headlights that are Balzac, and Stendhal, they seen are reduced with écirture alone? And can that be conceived? They have curious passion to exist. Stendhal is polygraph before being a novelist. Balzac is supplier with the sheet. It is enough to say that they are summarized only in them. In fact complicated machines are located in the first ranks of these named bats, by the old authors and Alexandre Vialatte, men. They teach quality, which must return to us modest.

What it is necessary to initially say of the "Letters for Mrs Hanska", it is that they make a work in margin of the general correspondence. It is what Pierrot showed by separating these letters from the others, that it publishes in addition (Traditional Garnier). When the two sets appear, we will undoubtedly not see Balzac differently, but will see we it better. Although I come from there to doubt that, so much the letters with Polonaise teach Balzac with those who saw it badly, and inform the others about the capacities of this wretched fellow. It is that it is necessary to take these letters in the tread of the great period of creation (at least for the second volume, which rameute 112 missives written from March 1841 to June 1845), then, generally, in a relationship with the works in progress: one seizes, here, which it is that the memory of Balzac. It is movement, not arrangement. It is dynamic and creative. Balzac, it is an eye - and a dream.

Better: with good lira the letters of this man who did without newspaper or notes, and with which Mrs Hanska, literally, was used as crib - still that it did not keep of doubles, nor did not redemandait its mail to him: it was enough for him, once and for all, to write -, I imagine that one will découvira what Proust, in his "Against Sainte-Beuve", said being "the admirable invention of Balzac, to have kept the same characters in all its novels". It well here is perceived: it is that the universe of Balzac does not extend in latitude and longitude, but increases in gravity and depth. It is not spread out, this world, it thickens. The memory of the writer resembles more one madrepore than with a land register: sedimentations occur, which weigh down the vision. And it is wonder, suddenly, to perceive the large man in the center of his theatre, character among his characters (what "the human Comedy" gives, at the bottom, little with entendre).Barbey of Aurevilly, which said by political dandyism some stupid things about it, was not mistaken while writing: "Balzac did not need to be invented romantic. Naturally, it was - and perhaps most romantic for it of all the heroes of novel which it had invented!"

Beautiful and rich

In such way that the beginning of the relations with Mrs Hanska is due narrowly to the romantic one. In Odessa, in February 1832, a woman who signs "Foreign" the address a letter with Balzac via the Gosselin editor. This message was to be of an extremely remarkable interest, since we see Balzac showing of it reception by the way of the small advertisements, in the Gazette of France initially, and in the Daily one then. It is into 1833 that "the Foreign one" will take figure in its eyes: it meets it in Neufchâtel, then in Geneva. Balzac, which is prompt to ignite, ignites at once. Mrs Hanska, born countess Rzewuska, fore-mentioned Eve, wife of U noble Polish, belongs to an old family. She is beautiful, undoubtedly, but she is rich. Then the most extraordinary ballet of the world starts. It will finish only in March 1850, by a marriage, a few months before the death of the writer.

One said much evil of Mrs Hanska and undoubtedly deserves it this fate. But one said, on this subject, much of evil of Balzac, reproaching him a little heavy consents which it made, writing to close relations that it was going to marry a situation and a fortune, and not so much a woman. Andre Wurmser, in his masterly book ("Balzac visionary", éd.Seuil), joined, from this point of view, which said Marcel Proust to his mother: that Balzac missed delicacy. It is necessary to see, seems to me it, the things differently: Balzac amourache in 1832 on the faith of some letters, is impassioned in 1833 with the first meeting, is caught of a sharp hope in 1842 when Venceslas Hanski dies, but it marries only in 1850 with the day before to die. Add to that of the many races through Europe: Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Russia... Constancy - at least - y is. And more still: it is to Mrs Hanska that Balzac entrusts all, and initially what is due to him to the body: its work. The Letters, such as they are restored to us by Roger Pierrot, form most invaluable of the comments to "the human Comedy" which can be imagined.

All that was mysterious or secret, the reason of transitory characters who hardly appear on the scene for disappearing at once, the roots, it is here that one will find of them most surely the keys. Better: it is in the comparison that the reader can make between the anecdote delivered by the Letters and the savour of the novel published, that the reader precisely will measure the creative power of Balzac. Albert Béguin said: Balzac the visionary. Yes! of a matter of living room, it makes an unforgettable character. Of a circumstance even, a considerable romantic event. Not that the Letters with Mrs Hanska are a laboratory: on the contrary, one sees there the novelist in the noise of the life.

Balzac is thus...

There are amusing things. Balzac was not a ladies' man (like one says), but it was a man who loved the women (what is better) in these ways of engagement which is stretched over eighteen years, there are connections. Acrobatics which it makes to dissimulate them with the remote beloved are not to be believed: it is a swaying walk penaud.

Of course, the question arises: Was Balzac in love? One would have - now (thanks to the Letters) - bad thanks to denying it: it is only to see in which state the met its passion, and how it is deluded with hope to fall at once into the darkest discouragement. That it has seen - in the same time - beautiful party that it could to make, and there that it was possible good to sit a fortune which had been unceasingly staggering, it is undeniable. Balzac is thus, it is necessary to put up with it. It devours all in the time even where its work devours it. In the last months of its life, when it is made collector, it is itself that it will put at the museum (but it will be it his). It has the vanity of the large workers.

When he dies, Eve will deliver to the public only one handle of letters: she will claim that the others were destroyed in Moscow. it should be waited until in its turn she disappears to find them, and it is eminent Balzac Charles de Spoelberch de Lovenjour who, at the end of last century, was at the origin of the version until today only known. This edition did not go without defects (Roger Pierrot gives the precise reasons of them, and it is necessary to refer to its foreword): there were mutilations due to the propriety authorized to the people still in life (or with their direct heirs), and especially the dating of the missives was - in the ignorance of a true Balzac "calendar" - whimsical. The 35 letters delivered to the public by Mrs Hanska into 1876 become four large volumes joining together more than 400 letters, but ausi one of the most astonishing works of Balzac, and the essential comment with the reading of "the human Comedy".

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The Literary Magazine July-August 2007: The silly thing, a modern invention

A stupid history
By Jean-Louis Hoots

Let us not rock the reader d’illusions: the silly thing does not leave not grown this file. Qu’il s’agisse of literature, of philosophy or of policy, it appears equal to itself. Monster afflicting, underhand, relentless, which binds the spirits and involves them towards the abyssals zone. The reign of the silly thing starts with the death of God and his angels, when l’Histoire and l’opinion public s’emparent world. Exit l’idiot and the insane one. Place at the animals and rough, with remained and stupid, with the imbeciles of the plains and the cretins of the mountains.

This n’est not a return towards the Middle Ages but well a modern diving in l’âge, of which Tocqueville was the first to have a presentiment of the dangers. The democratic capacity, prophesied it, "does not tyrannize, it obstructs, it compresses, it extinguishes, it stupefies, and it reduces finally each nation to n’être more qu’un d’animaux shy persons and industrial herd whose government is the shepherd". All is in order so that the silly thing triumphs and becomes, crystallized in its torpors, its tricks and its buffoonery, l’obsession of the novelists. Flaubert made his preferred enemy of it, and sought to muzzle it "We suffer only d’une thing: the Silly thing, entrusted it to George Sand. But it is formidable and universal "the Such white monster continued by Achab, the Animal, qu’il had tracked through its œuvre whole, escaped to him. The Dictionary of the generally accepted ideas was to be used as common grave to all the conneries given birth to by ḻhumanity. Mow. This work d’ensevelissement remained unfinished, as if the silly thing were a subject too vast and proliferating to be able to be thus contained. D’autres, after Flaubert, dreamed d’un catalogues which would garner all ineptitudes, remarks useless and dilatory, stupid things and boobs encumbering this low world. Titanic ambition, so much the tricks and the faces of the silly thing are multiple. It proceeds by metastases, plays of mirror, put in abyme. It is prodigiously talkative, and quasi inexhaustible when it speaks d’elle-même. Very like televisual nothing, which proceeds by the same set of repetitions and narcissistic assemblies to carry out the greatest number to l’abrutissement, the silly thing likes s’autocélébrer. "In the large idiot, all is good", assene l’un anonymous imbeciles whose Jean-Marie Gourio s’est makes the faithful rapporteur in her Short of counter. And still: "When you have a life of idiot, is not necessary especially to be intelligent, you suffer more" Or: "connery, c’est that the immersed part of l’iceberg. Below, one does not see what you think "One would like to quote, jusqu’à more thirst, because the silly thing thus ingurgitée by small glasses is like the song of the sirens, it fascine and petrifies. Thus let us let spread out it its sufficiency in a long procession of matter of counters, commonplaces, well-worn jokes. And fault of being able to make it burst, let us take the party d’en to laugh.

::source http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/

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The Bastard of Istanbul

Book Review by Dmetri Kakmi

When Elif Safak's latest novel was released in her home country, she was arraigned and accused of insulting Turkish identity. The charges were fortunately withdrawn; had she been charged, she could have faced up to three years incarceration, this in the latter stages of pregnancy. Safak escaped imprisonment, but the death threats keep coming from ultra-nationalists and they are to be taken seriously. These people are, after all, the ones who killed Armenian journalist Hrank Dink last year. The consequences of this unwarranted kerfuffle in a supposedly democratic nation is that one of Turkey's most prominent and liveliest voices is too afraid to venture out. She is so stressed, she is finding it difficult to breast feed her baby. On a positive note, it's worth noting that the Turkish edition of the book was, nevertheless, a bestseller.

But what is the fuss about? For the answer we must examine the novel itself.

First and foremost, The Bastard of Istanbul is a cross-continental family saga. It examines in loving detail and with much humour the lives of two families: one living in contemporary Istanbul and Turkish, the other residing in San Francisco and Armenian. They are the Kazanci and Tchakhmakhchian families, respectively. It appears initially that the two have nothing in common. But don't be fooled. Turkey is the classic metaphoric haunted house, sitting astride the continental divide; consequently, from inside its many rooms the past and present are still largely at war, while from unexplored corners voices are trying to be heard, come what may. In other words, every ethnic and religious group that has traversed Anatolian soil has at one time or another shared a bed with the opposition. It's called sleeping with the enemy. Often not only does the right hand not know what the left hand is doing, but there are two or more sides to every story. The consequences of this incessant kvetching is that no one is unsullied. This is where the Kazanci and the Tchakhmakhchian s are implicated. They do not know it, but long fingers are reaching from the blighted past to inextricably bind them together for all time. The conduits that will bridge the gap, that privilege, belongs to the young. And they are a spunky crew.

The first is the bastard of the title, nineteen-year-old Asya Kazanci. She is a modern Turk, rebellious, outspoken, and belligerently without a past, in more ways than one. She is also the youngest of a household of several generations of women, the men having died mysteriously at a young age. The second conduit is Armanoush Tchakhmakhchian. She is sensitive and searching for her Armenian roots in, of all places, the American desert. Her curiosity about the 'genocide' of the Armenians compels her to finally meet the enemy on their own turf. Thus she deceives her family and flies to Istanbul to learn more about her beloved grandmother's past. She cannot know what a Pandora's box she is opening, and what a hidden blessing she will find.

It's an intriguing premise that allows the horrors of what took place in 1915 to slowly rise to the surface. I won't go into more detail because the scenario Safak creates, the intrigues, the agonies, the loops and connections, the surprising revelations, ought to be discovered on ones own. I will say, though, that I was so captivated that I swallowed the book whole in two days and when I finished, I read it over again. I didn't want to part with the characters. They are so alive and so familiar to anyone who has grown up in that part of the world. And the contradictory face of modern Istanbul is so beautifully evoked.

What I can say is this. This is a smart and brave book, by a smart and brave author. Firstly because it attempts something that is quite difficult to pull off in literary terms. The Bastard of Istanbul is an absorbing and artfully composed meditation on Turkey's changing face. The trick is that it is posing as an easily digestible popular entertainment, complete with lashing of scrumptious Turkish food (there's a recipe), transgressive (for Turkey) gestures, and illicit encounters.

Second, by using the Kacanci household as a metaphor for her country (the women are split right down the middle: half are conservative, while the others move with the times), Safak explores Turkey's amnesiac brain with a deftness and compassion that ought to be applauded. She is, when one reads carefully, being fair to both sides. Despite what I said above, Asya Kazanci is not the bastard of the story. Turkey is. This is because, as Safak suggests, the country exists almost purely in the present, with a steady eye on the future. Sure, it embraced the glories of the Ottoman past, but it has almost entirely divorces itself from the more painful elements of that imperial glory. The pangs of nation building might as well have happened in another country, not merely in the near past. In this regard, Turkey is shown to us as a bastard afloat in time. And what Safak suggests is that a country without a full knowledge of its past is not a country at all, just as a person without a past feels less than human. With one particular plot permutation, Safak goes on to suggest that the country might even have an unhealthy or even unnatural relationship with its sense of self. It must first embrace both the good and bad in its history before it can begin to even dream about moving forward.

If the book is hard on Turks, it does not go easy on Armenians either. Those with victim complexes to nurture, beware. You will find little or no solace here. Safak deftly avoids mentioning the word 'genocide'. Instead she uses the noun 'massacre'. There is, after all, no proof that the Ottomans sanctioned a systemic annihilation of the Armenian people along the lines of what the Nazis did to the Jews and other 'undesirables'. There is, however, ample evidence to show that Armenian legionaries inside and outside Turkey fought for the Russians and the French against the Ottomans during World War One. In an effort to safeguard the interests of the country, the Ottomans forcefully deported a very large number of Armenians (the figure is disputed) in the July heat from the northeast of the country to the far southeast. Many cruelly perished along the way.

The beauty of Safak's book is that it is not a political diatribe. Rather, it is a humanist plea to recognise the past, to commemorate the dead, and to finally move on. Far from seeming glib, it is a sensible solution.


*This review is officially published in Istanbul Literary Review, visit http://www.ilrmagazine.net/article/article3.php

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On Repeat: The Mobius Strip of Grief in Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising

by Gabriel Milner

As the coup d’ grace in Ronald Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, the incumbent President appropriated Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.”, perverting the chorus’ cynicism and vitriol into a chauvinist Republican rallying cry. In summarily ignoring the narrative of post-Vietnam, post-industrial malaise that belied the exuberant, synthesizer-addled song, the Gipper set off perhaps the most tragic irony of American popular culture in the 1980’s.[1] Unwillingly, Springsteen was reconceived as a puppet of the conservative jingoism he so palpably attacked throughout Born in the U.S.A.—marring his reputation for my own generation, which knew him neither as the New Dylan of Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ , nor the disheveled roué of Darkness On the Edge of Town, but as the tight ass in blue jeans on the album’s cover. The biting irony of this image, coupled as it was with a Stars-and-Stripes backdrop, was lost to me for some time. As a document of September 11th, The Rising (Columbia Records, 2002) retains similar potential.[2] Now, five years after the attacks on the Twin Towers, four years after the United States invaded Iraq, and six months after North Korea detonated a nuclear bomb, we must ask: Why no repeat of 1984? Why has the Boss, and his stirring album, not again fallen into the agenda of bellicose conservatives? And, will posterity finally give Springsteen his due, positing The Rising alongside the Gettysburg Address and Guernica as provocative, multifaceted reactions to destruction?

Increasingly, I perceive this album as a cynosure for the miasma of world events. In form and content, it is a work about confusion, paradox, and irresolution that undertakes a daunting task: It gives full range to the spectrum of human emotions without imposing answers. Summoning forth the events surrounding September 11th, it presents a Cubist landscape of multiple angles and endless repetitions. With 9/11 as the nexus, we confront a pastiche of voices: Spatial elements united by the fourth, temporal dimension of the Attacks. As befitting its title, images and sentiments rise up, as though from a collective memory bank. This is not about revenge or redemption. This is about the catharsis of contemplation.

The Rising marks the reunion of the E Street Band—from, among other careers, solo efforts (guitarist Patti Scialfa), Conan O’Brien’s house band (drummer Max Weinberg), and The Sopranos (guitarist Steve Van Zandt)—for the first time since 1984. Despite pushing middle age, they sound as invigorated as they did 23 years ago. Like the welter of personal narratives mixed in the album, the music recognizes no boundaries: Nashville fiddles, saxophone solos, doo-wop choruses, martial drumbeats, Azaans, hand-claps, hand drums, drum machines, accordions. If I don’t quite buy the Bossrs’ best impression of a Sephardic cantor on “Worlds Apart” (“lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai, lai-lai-lai-lai-lai-lai”), I appreciate the nod to multiculturalism. Strings herald some sort of victory march in album opener “Lonesome Day,” Springsteen whoops in the background, and Weinberg sets off a spark with a pop out of “Like a Rolling Stone.”[3] Yet belying this tried-and-true rock method—the whoop from “Born to Run,” the drum aping the greatest rock song of all time[4]--is a leitmotif that sets The Rising apart from more forthright reactions to the attacks. To wit, the first words:
Baby once I thought I knew Everything I needed to know about you. Your sweet whisper, Your tender touch. I didn’t really know that much. The joke's on me. Yeah, I’m gonna pray. If I can just get through this lonesome day.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are about to enact a paradigm shift.

Pre-The Rising Springsteen was all quotidian ennui, bitterness, hope, and joy. Characters were connected either geographically (New Jersey’s factory towns and seedy boardwalks, or the Rattlesnake Speedway in the Utah Desert) or economically (the anomie and alienation, or the weekend bliss and nostalgia of blue-collar existence), or both. Here, though, individuals convene under circumstance. We are introduced to the self-abnegating firefighter in “Nothing Man”; the grieving spouse fielding consoling telephone calls in “You’re Missing”[5]; the contemplative suicide bomber in “Paradise”; and the barflies in “Mary’s Place,” who, on finding joy in listening to a turntable at midnight, are reminded of their grief. They ask, “How do you live broken-hearted?” We get the bad-ass of “Further On (Up the Road),” with his “dead-man’s suit and . . . smilin’ skull ring.” And the peacemaker of “Worlds Apart,” snarling, as if in some last-ditch effort, “Let the living let us in before the dead tear us apart.” In essence, these are the same folks who always populated Springsteen’s songscapes: The worker, the mourner, the embittered, the conflicted, the caught-up, the merry-maker. Only, here they are transmogrified by events. The everyday does not dissolve. Instead, it is now imbued with mythic proportions: Opportunities to be heroes, villains, and everything in between on an epic scale. And indeed, when, on “Let’s Be Friends (Skin to Skin),” he sings that the, “Time has come, let the past be history, if we just start talking,” he could be propositioning an ex or drawing out a peace accord.

In amassing this Babel, Springsteen and Co. paint a landscape of paradox through an unstable lexicon. And it is here that The Rising begins to acquire its more provocative elements. As it reiterates words and images, it recaptures, repositions, and replays experience. To this end, “sky” crystallizes the anxieties and anguishes of the survivors of, and the witnesses to, the tragedy. Literal observations describe emptiness vis-à-vis the Twin Towers’ conspicuous absence: “I woke up this morning to an empty sky” (“Empty Sky”). Destruction abounds furthermore in surrealistic dreamscapes, with a “sky . . . falling and streaked with blood” (“Into the Fire”). The sky proves the lodestar to disbelief, as when the firefighter in “Nothing Man” remarks unbelievingly, “The sky is still the same unbelievable blue.” And, just as Springsteen finds hope in sublime, limpid space—“Sky of fullness, sky of blessed life”—he also confronts a “Sky of blackness and sorrow” (“The Rising”).

As evinced in the use of “love,” the metaphysical is similarly fraught. At times, it evokes grief and nihilism: “Our love’s this dust beneath my feet” (“Countin’ On a Miracle”). At others, it memorializes: “May your love give us love” (“Into the Fire”). It is even a desperate plea to maintain peace and mental equilibrium: “We pray for love, Lord” (“My City of Ruins”).

This very confusion enables The Rising to function on variegated levels, its stories transcending their specificity. “You’re Missing,” an elegy of plinking, homey piano keys and moaning strings, vividly evokes this fluidity. Springsteen begins the song by rattling off a laundry list of ostensible domestic stability: “Shirt’s in the closet/ Shoes’ in the hall. / . . . Coffee cup’s on the counter. / Jacket’s on the chair. / Paper’s on the doorstep.” Then he laments, “Everything is everything, but you’re missing.” So who’s missing? It’s not the narrator’s wife. (He early on tells us that “Mama’s in the kitchen, baby and all.”) I don’t think it’s the narrator’s husband. (“Mama’s in the kitchen” would mean he’s referring to himself in the third-person, undercutting the song’s homespun flavor.) I don’t think it’s a friend or a child, because Springsteen speaks to a certain intimacy: “When I shut out the lights, you’re missing”; and later, “I got too much room in my bed.” When the narrator sings, “I got too many phone calls,” we must ask, Are friends consoling a personal loss, or are they out-of-towners, offering their support to a New Yorker? We might do well to ask not who is missing, but what? What paradigm shift was precipitated by September 11th? The sense of intangible loss creates uneasiness, then melancholy. This is the saddest song I’ve ever heard.

Within this cosmology of grief, tradition and expectation are subverted. Ancient imagery is appropriated and metamorphosed to explain something so palpably outside our ken. This is heady stuff for the Springsteen set. Raised a Catholic, the Boss has always been inclined toward religious iconography, populating his songs with prodigal sons, Mary Magdalenes, and Jobs. And The Rising is rife with its own biblical milieu: martyrs in “Into the Fire,” sanctuary in “Mary’s Place,” and sacrilege in “My City of Ruins.”[6] But something odd emerges in these narratives, as well—a desperate attempt to comprehend life when traditional tropes are rendered insufficient.[7] At one point, this is manifested as recourse to alternative spirituality. Hence, the “seven pictures of Buddha” in “Mary’s Place”, or the opening scene of “Empty Sky”: “On the plains of Jordan, I cut my bow from the wood. This tree of evil, this tree of good.” More provocatively, it also expresses a truly physical inversion. Namely, the Orpheus-like journey of “Into the Fire,” wherein our firefighter hero goes not down to Hell, but “up the stairs into the fire.” Sometimes, it’s just puzzling. “God’s drifting in Heaven,” he sings in “You’re Missing. “Devil’s in the mailbox.” In the album, 9/11 both reverses and confuses. The Rising, therefore, throws us for a loop, positing a welter of post-modern spirituality to express a globalized world bereft of both borders and answers. Sometimes, all we are left with is the comfort of meditation. Here is Springsteen’s Om:
Further on up the road. Further on up the road.
(“Further On [Up the Road]”)

And,
Empty sky. Empty sky. I woke up this morning to an empty sky.
(“Empty Sky”).[8]

Tumult, though, ultimately proves The Rising’s most salient element. In one sense it is the fractured vision of any second-rate Cubist—the desperate attempt to evoke, through art, a sense of metaphysical chaos. Roland Barthes posited the concept of narrative braiding—the breakdown of temporality and the perpetual revision of memory—to define the metanarrative inherent in personal historiography. Akira Kurosawa explored the fallacy of subjectivity in Rashoman, which recounts a rape from different perspectives, thereby belying the concept of an objective truth. And Lawrence Durrell wrote in his author’s note to Balthazar, one-fourth of his epic Alexandria Quartet, “Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the proposition. . . . Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe for a continuum.” The stakes are higher in Springsteen’s album, where simply giving a voice to a terrorist is anathema to the methods of the Department of Homeland Security. As events transmogrify with the storyteller, we reconsider the nature of truth and, potentially, the Manichean extremes propounded by Bush’s Axis of Evil.

Yet The Rising is not merely driven by desperation. Sonically and lyrically, it demands we confront the cultural collisions of September 11th and to discern the conspicuous absence of resolution. Indeed, its varied inconsistencies prove its ultimate strength. In this sense, it contorts the Five Steps of Grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to create a Mobius strip of associations and paradoxes. What we face is unending experience—a phenomenon endemic of the attacks on the Twin Towers. Captured on the news and in the papers, in photographs and novels, the attacks were, if nothing else, well documented.[9] In our mind and on our computers we can summon forth these events at any time, recapture and reexperience them. We can shift our perspectives from—as in my own case—passive observer to camcorder-equipped eyewitness. We can break time down. Or we can reverse it. We are, ultimately, preoccupied with it. And, as the folks in “Mary’s Place” show us, as much as we might like to relegate it to a time and place, it’s under our skin, waiting break out just as we think we might be shaking it. We can’t help but summon forth all of our resources, letting the full spectrum of human emotions reign.

If The Rising attempts to position 9/11 as an element to be incorporated into everyday experience, then the album’s closer, “My City of Ruins,” is testament to the fluidity of memory. Ostensibly a song about Ground Zero, it describes destruction, loss, and rebirth. The narrator opens with his vision of “A blood red circle on the cold dark ground.” He is guided by the ghosts of the past: “The church door’s thrown open, I can hear the organ’s song. But the congregation’s gone.” He looks around his “city of ruins” and sees “The boarded-up windows, the empty streets, all my brothers down on their knees.” Someone’s gone, someone who “took my heart when [he or she] left.” The narrator wonders, “How can I begin again?” At 1:57 we literally hear “the organ’s song” in a Garth Hudsonesque solo. We are seamlessly transported to someone else’s perspective, which now becomes our own. The collective conscious solidifies. Yet it is important to know that this song was actually written before September 11th, about Springsteen’s old haunts in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Memory is thus reconfigured. As the album closes with a chorus of “Rise up,” we are left provoked, though not quite sated. “Rise up”? Against what? In the face of what? How? This is Bruce Springsteen’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” where the answer is a paradox: Simultaneously at hand and elusive.

Unfortunately, The Rising too often he relies upon cliché as its main vehicle of expression. When he launches into “It’s a fairy tale so tragic, there’s no prince to break the spell” (“Countin’ On a Miracle”), I have to stop myself from reaching for the skip button. In terms of landscapes, I’ve always preferred the doomed characters of Darkness on the Edge of Town. The factory worker whose job both “takes his hearing” and “gives him life,” the ingénue smitten with the town whore in “Candy’s Room,” the drag racers of “Racin’ In the Streets,” and the poets of the ominous outskirts all evoke a mythology all their own and all more subtle. I prefer the tongue-in-cheek rockabilly of The River. And I especially enjoy the sprawling, orchestral turns of The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. This is not the point of The Rising. In this album, we find a chronicle of events, a call for contemplation and catharsis a full year-and-a-half before the United States opted for the opposite. There was nothing like it at the time. And for sheer ambition and scope, there is still nothing like it. To this day, The Rising stops me in my tracks.


[1] See CNN.com - Analysis: The age of Reagan - Jun 16, 2004

[2] The best story I’ve heard is that shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers, Springsteen was riding around New Jersey in his pick-up. He heard a pedestrian shout, “Bruce, we need you.” And the album’s seed was planted.

[3] When Springsteen inducted Bob Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989, he remarked, “The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came the snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” Quoted in Greil Marcus, Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York, Public Affairs, 2005), 94.

[4] See Rolling Stone: The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

[5] This is just one sense evoked by the song. “You’re Missing” will be discussed in detail later.

[6] More on this later.

[7] This theme proved lodestar in the 9/11 Commission’s Report, which found a lack of imagination to be the main reason the events were not foreseen.

[8] For the 2001 “A Tribute to Heroes” benefit, he introduced an acoustic version of “My City of Ruins” as a “prayer for our fallen brothers.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1djqEnh4cbQ

[9] Sometimes, this documentation raises more questions than it answers: See Frank Rich Is Wrong About That 9/11 Photograph. - By David Ploz - Slate Magazine

Works Cited

Durrell, Lawrence. “Note” (1957). In Balthazar (1958). New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Kurosawa, Akira. Rashomon. Daeie Studios. 1950.

Leopold, Todd. “Analysis: The Age of Reagan.” Cnn.com, 16 June, 2004.

http://www.cnn.com/2004/SHOWBIZ/06/16/reagan.80s/

Marcus, Greil. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads. New York, Public Affairs, 2005.

Plotz, David. “Frank Rich Is Wrong About that 9/11 Photograph: Those New Yorkers Weren’t Relaxing!” Slate, 13 September, 2006. http://www.slate.com/id/2149508/?nav/tap3/; accessed 20 December, 2006.

Seed, Patricia. “‘Failing to Marvel’: Atahualpa’s Encounter with the Word.” In Latin

American Research Review 26:1 (1991). 7-32.

Springsteen, Bruce. Born In the U.S.A. Columbia Records. 1984.

---------. Born to Run. Columbia Records. 1975.

---------. Darkness On the Edge of Town. Columbia Records. 1978.

---------. Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ. Columbia Records. 1973.

---------. “My City of Ruins” (live, acoustic version). “A Tribute to Heroes.”

Broadcast 15 October, 2001. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1djqEnh4cbQ; accessed 20 December, 2006.

---------. The Rising. Columbia Records, 2002.

---------. The River. Columbia Records. 1980.

---------. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle. Columbia Records. 1973.

“The RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” Rolling Stone. 9 December, 2004.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/500songs; accessed 17 December, 2006.

Bruce Springsteen Official Sony Site. www.brucespringsteen.net; accessed 10 December, 2006.

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This artcle is officially published in The Red China Literary Magazine, visit the website http://www.redchinamagazine.com/home.htm

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Granta 92: The View from Africa

Africa is too large and diverse for generalizations. It has fifty-four nations, five time zones, at least seven climates, more than 800 million people and, according to the latest diligent research, maybe 14 million proverbs. South Africa and Burkina Faso have as much in common as Spain and Uzbekistan. And yet people do generalize; Africa has become the continent of moral concern.

This issue of Granta contains fresh voices from Africa, in all their differences, as well as memoir and reportage which reflect the past and present of its people.


Contents:
John Ryle, Introduction: The Many Voices of Africa (read)
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Master
Moses Isegawa, The War of the Ears
Kwame Dawes, Passport Control
Segun Afolabi, Gifted
Binyavanga Wainaina, How to write about Africa (read)
Geert van Kesteren, The Ogiek
Ivan Vladislavic, Joburg
Adewale Maja-Pearce, Legacies
Nadine Gordimer, Beethoven Was One Sixteenth Black
Helon Habila, The Witch's Dog
Daniel Bergner, Policeman to the World
Santu Mofokeng, The Black Albums
Lindsey Hilsum, We Love China (read)
John Biguenet, Antediluvian

Visit the Granta official website http://www.granta.com/back-issues/92?usca_p=t

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Find Literary Magazine around the world

I used to find literary information from a magazine. In my country, Indonesia, we hard to find any litarary magazines, it isn't that they're not sould in some bookstores, but it's caused there only a very little literary magazine that provide good quality information, both in writing style and its contents.

So that why, I prefer to find them from the internet. And this is the results which i got from http://www.world-newspapers.com, some literary magazines around the world. I think you sholud check it to find more about contemporary literary documentations:

3AM Magazine
Brings you the hottest in online literature, entertainment, and music.

Anotherealm
Magazine of short speculative fiction.

Apple Valley Review
Online literary magazine featuring a collection of poetry, short fiction, and essays.

Barcelona Review
English-Spanish ezine offering the best of contemporary fiction.

Blackbird Foreword
Online journal publishing poetry, fiction, drama, essays, interviews, reviews and visual arts explorations by widely known and emerging talents.

Bloomsbury Magazine
Blend of literary magazine, reference library, publisher and bookshop, aimed at delivering the literary life direct to the computer screens of book-lovers, readers and writers.

Born Magazine
Experimental venue marrying literary arts and interactive media.

Boston Review
Political and literary magazine featuring the best in cultural debate, fiction, poetry, and reviews.

Expatriate Literary Circle
"Designed to bring together a group of intellects looking to share good classic reads and stimulating discussions."

Exquisite Corpse
Art and literary journal, edited by writer Andrei Codrescu.

failbetter.com
Online quarterly that publishes original works of fiction, poetry and art.

Granta
Respectable quarterly magazine publishing fiction, personal history, reportage and inquiring journalism. Also features documentary photography.

Istanbul Literature Review
International literary magazine from Turkey.

Jacket Magazine
Australian review of new writing, with poetry, creative prose, interviews, reviews, and informative feature articles.

Literary Review
Quality fiction, poetry, and essays from many nations to English readers.

Little Magazine
Largely translations from the South Asian languages.

Mad Hatters' Review
Multimedia magazine featuring "edgy and enlightened literature, art and music in the age of dementia".

Me Three
Small online magazine publishing both non-fiction and fiction.

Mississippi Review
Quarterly journal primarily devoted to short fiction.

Narrative Magazine
Features fiction and nonfiction, with writers such as Rick Bass, Joyce Carol Oates, Jane Smiley, Tobias Wolff, as well as emerging writers.

New England Review
Sample works of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction from the print quarterly.

Nuvein Magazine
Features fiction, poetry, film, and music.

Painted Bride Quarterly
Philadelphia-based literary magazine publishing poetry, fiction, essays and art.

Paris Review
Selected pieces from international literary quarterly focusing on original creative work - fiction and poetry- not to the exclusion of criticism.

Per Contra
Online magazine for art, fiction, interviews and book reviews.

Pif Magazine
Poetry and short stories by emerging writers, as well as book, CD, movie reviews and political commentary.

Ploughshares
Good samples from current and recent issues of respected literary magazine.

Red China
Magazine of literature and the arts that "offers a “pool” unique by nature".

Richmond Review
Online British monthly offering short fiction, poetry, travel essays, and book reviews.

Threepenny Review
Prestigious quarterly magazine, featuring reading room, art gallery, excerpts from past and current issues, and ways to subscribe.

Timothy McSweeney's Internet Tendency
Literary magazine edited by Dave Eggers.

Underground Voices
Monthly magazine "about addictions, alcoholism, mental illnesses, psychiatric sessions, torments, confessions, purging".

Web Del Sol
Portal hosting over 25 literary publications and publishing original fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews.

Word Riot
Online literary magazine of experimental and non-genre prose and poetry.

Words Without Borders
Undertakes to promote international communication through translation of the world's best writing - selected and translated by a distinguished group of writers and translators.

WriteThis
Mixed genre e-zine, includes fiction, poetry, interviews.

Zoetrope: All-Story
Magazine, founded by Francis Ford Coppola, featuring online submissions and reviews of short stories.

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Freud and his works: The Adventure of the psychoanalysis

Hors-Série n°1 - 1^er semestre 2000, Magazine Littéraire

Inaugurating the XXe century with " the Interpretation of the dreams ", Freud opens a royal way. The discovery of unconscious shakes the reign of the Reason and invites the men with a new experiment of themselves. Vast adventure where are revealed the most secret mechanisms to be it. Freud locates the man on another scene where the memory, the language and the History are tied. The whole century will be convened there. Beyond the therapeutic one, the thought freudienne, which touched with fields as various as the literature, art or the policy, became the great philosophical and cultural experiment XXe century. Freud thus joined Marx to form with the zenith of the Sixties a mythical tandem which carried many hopes of revolution. Hundred years of psychoanalysis. Hundred years of words. And also, with the image of a movement whose genesis was extremely tormented, hundred years of conflicts, quarrels, unceasingly disputed theories. First seraglio freudien with the experts of today, this extraordinary melts our modernity. It is a question here of telling it.

Freud in its time

7 the lapse of memory of Vienna per Paul-Laurent Assoun
8 Chronology by Raymond Bellour
11 everyday life of Freud according to Ernest Jones
the 14 asceticism freudienne: letters with Fliess
by Eric Laurent
18 Freud, thinker and thought by Gerard Legrand
21 Freud and Nietzsche by Paul-Laurent Assoun
24 Zweig: the witness by Colette Soler
26 biographical sources of Freud
by Raymond Bellour

Glances on work

29 the discovery of Freud per Serge Cottet
30 "Five psychoanalyses" of Freud
33 what to dream wants to say by Jean-Pierre George
35 "the Interpretation of the dreams", hundred years afterwards



36 dreams of Freud per Monique Schneider
40 Some famous patients :
Anna O, the first by Colette Soler
42 gynécophile by Julia Kristeva Gilded
44 the man with the wolves by Daniel Sibony
45 small Hans by Patrick Guyomard
47 Thomas Woodrow Wilson: between Machiavel
and Ubu by Gerard Miller
48 Freud, Dostoïevski, the caster by Philippe Sollers
55 a theory of civilization
by François Châtelet
58 speeches on the policy by Christian Jambet
To see Freud

Heirs to Freud

64 Dictionary of the direct heirs
by David Rabouin
69 Jung, the irreducible one by Gilbert Durand
73 Ferenczi, the child cherished by François George
74 Lou Andreas-Salome, the admirable one
by Raymond Bellour
76 Binswanger, the disciple by Catherine Clément
78 America freudienne 1906-1960
by Elisabeth Roudinesco
the 80 United States: antifreudism of the end of the century


82 Reich and Marcuse:
misadventures of the freudo-Marxism
by Domenica-Antoine Grisoni
85 Adorno vis-a-vis with the psychoanalysis
by Grooving Rochlitz
88 Sartre: the existential psychoanalysis
by Michel Contat
91 the antipsychiatric dispute
by Christian Delacampagne
93 antipsychiatry today
94 Homage to Lacan by Philippe Sollers
95 Lacan or European identity
by Catherine Clément
97 Lacan in some dates
98 To read Lacan
99 the child post-freudien by Anny Cordié
102 "Marx-and-Freud": history of a myth
by Catherine Clément
105 Crisis of the psychoanalysis?
by Elisabeth Roudinesco
107 Short history of the freudism in France
109 Assessments
110 the French constellation by David Rabouin
114 the psychoanalytical revolution remains to be made
by Marthe Robert

This article translted from France by Altavista Babelfish, to read the original version, visit http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/dossiers/hors-serie.htm

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Theathre: Avignon, 60e

A history polemizes of the Festival d’Avignon.

By Gilles Costaz
The Literary Magazine n°466
July-August 2007

Founded in 1947, the Festival d’Avignon reaches its 61e edition and festival its 60e birthday! One will celebrate there Rene Char who, by giving the name of Jean Vilar, had found the solution gaining for a quite vague project of demonstration to the palate of the Popes. Bruno Tackels, by publishing the Voices d’Avignon (at the beginning a serial for France Culture), recalls it with l’ambition more or month acknowledged d’écrire a against-history of the Festival. He insists much on the fact that l’entreprise, by its artistic choices, seldom made ḻunanimity. If its new direction, that of Vincent Baudriller and Hortense Archambault are disputed, this n’est not a new fact. Vilar and its successors since 1971, Paul Puaux, Bernard Faivre d’Arcier and Alain Crombecque –nous point out it – were very often ridges some with the polemic.

C’est to insert an open door – these battles are well-known – but that makes it possible to ḻautor to firmly take party for the new directors "whose great force will have been to put clearly this question: how to give again direction, voice and with the artists d’aujourd’hui? "Perhaps, but it seems to us especially that the current owners of the festival are good captains whose weakness is in the theoretical speech, impromptu qu’étayé. It will be also noted that Tackels is located in a intellectual current very precise – approximately the thought France Culture plus Release – and that, s’il quotes many critics, it never reproduces an article of Michel Cournot in the World, d’Armelle Héliot in the Barber or of Jean-Pierre Léonardini in L’Humanité.
The book n’en less strong amusing with its shape of assembly d’archives is not found and d’entretiens new facts in urgency. Here is Sartre and Vilar being chamaillant on the concept of "popular theatre", Jacques Lassalle éructant against criticism, the war of distinct when the Festival staggers under the revolt of intermittent, there are four ans… The whole has l’allure d’un joining ḏactualities rowdy. With the program of this summer, there will be the Silence of the Communists in a translation and a setting in scene of Jean-Pierre Vincent. One will await much of this rather insane project drawn from nontheatrical texts. A man of the left noncommunist Italian, Vittorio Foa, request with two ex-leaders of the NCV, Miriam Mafai and Alfredo Reichlin: why did you keep silent yourselves vis-a-vis from the errors and the horrors of Communism? Gilles David, Melania Giglio and Charlie Nelson will play this extreme epistolary debate.
Gilles Costaz

The Voices d’Avignon, Bruno Tackels, éd. of Seuil/France Culture, 22 €.
The Silence of the Communists, Foa, Mafai, Reichlin, éd. of L’Arche, 13 €.
Festival d’Avignon, July 6-27, www.festival-avignon.com. Tel.: 04 90 14 14 14.

image caption: The Court ḏhonnor at the time of the 59e Festival in 2005.

This article was translated from this http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/papiers/theatre-466.htm

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Magazine littéraire: Travel to Italy

By Pascal Bonafoux
The Literary Magazine n°466
July-August 2007

A history of l’art in l’Italie of the Rebirth which is read like a detective novel.

C’est l’été, the time of the holidays, of the voyages, and, among the destinations known as tourist, Tuscany and Florence are not most inconsistent. Whoever will have made the choice d’un such course in these landscapes which seem to have posed for Giotto, in these cities where Brunelleschi, Alberti or Vasari could open new building sites, will have to leave with How l’art becomes l’art in l’Italie of the Rebirth d’Édouard Pommier. (What does not want to say that the others are exempted of this essential reading.) Not parce qu’il would be l’un of these guides slipped into a pocket or a bag which marks out a course, but parce qu’il is without the slightest doubt l’une more relevant syntheses of the Italian Rebirth.

he first pages of this attractive test hold of the detective novel: c’est that the first assertion of the Lives of the best painters, sculptors and architects of Vasari is a "lie" … They are these same Lives, published for the first time at Florence in 1550, these are the more quoted Lives qu’aucun other delivers by Pommier, c’est this same Vasari "lying", which invent the Rebirth.

Curiously, the book of Apple tree which dialogues with that of Vasari, still seems, beyond the centuries, being a response to Michelet. L’introduction of volume VII of final l’édition of its French history s’ouvre by this sentence: "L’aimable word of Rebirth recalls the friends of beautiful only l’avènement the d’un art nouveau and the free rise of imagination. For l’érudit, c’est the restoration of the studies of ḻAntiquity; for the legists, the day which starts to shine on the unmatched chaos of our old habits "In the same first pages of this book where it is l’un first to have recourse to this" pleasant "word of Rebirth, gratifié d’une capital, it raises the question: "does D’où come that l’art died (except of so rare exceptions)? Would C’est what l’histoire l’a killed "L’essai de Pommier be an answer to this disillusioned question, if this n’est worries, of Michelet? C’est l’histoire of l’invention even of l’art, its attributes, its allegories, its ambition, its academies which Pommier tells. This account, s’il "historically", therefore very rigorously is very reported, holds of the tale, the legend. This n’est not by chance if the first s’ouvre page on a "lie" … Was L’art n’a been able to be this qu’il (this qu’il is still?) that parce qu’il is a myth.

Tranlated by Altavistababelfish. Source http://www.magazine-litteraire.com/papiers/art-466.htm


Voyage en Italie

Une histoire de l’art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance qui se lit comme un roman policier.

C’est l’été, le temps des vacances, des voyages, et, parmi les destinations dites touristiques, la Toscane et Florence ne sont pas les plus inconséquentes. Quiconque aura fait le choix d’un tel parcours dans ces paysages qui semblent avoir posé pour Giotto, dans ces villes où Brunelleschi, Alberti ou Vasari pourraient ouvrir de nouveaux chantiers, devra partir avec Comment l’art devient l’art dans l’Italie de la Renaissance d’Édouard Pommier.

(Ce qui ne veut pas dire que les autres soient dispensés de cette lecture essentielle.) Non parce qu’il serait l’un de ces guides glissés dans une poche ou un sac qui balise un parcours, mais parce qu’il est sans le moindre doute l’une des plus pertinentes synthèses de la Renaissance italienne. Les premières pages de cet essai fascinant tiennent du roman policier : c’est que la première affirmation des Vies des meilleurs peintres, sculpteurs et architectes de Vasari est un « mensonge »… Ce sont ces mêmes Vies, publiées pour la première fois à Florence en 1550, ce sont ces Vies citées plus qu’aucun autre livre par Pommier, c’est ce même Vasari « menteur », qui inventent la Renaissance. Étrangement, le livre de Pommier qui dialogue avec celui de Vasari, semble encore, au-delà des siècles, être une réponse à Michelet. L’introduction du tome VII de l’édition définitive de son Histoire de France s’ouvre par cette phrase : « L’aimable mot de Renaissance ne rappelle aux amis du beau que l’avènement d’un art nouveau et le libre essor de la fantaisie. Pour l’érudit, c’est la rénovation des études de l’Antiquité ; pour les légistes, le jour qui commence à luire sur le discordant chaos de nos vieilles coutumes. » Dans les mêmes premières pages de ce livre où il est l’un des premiers à avoir recours à ce mot « aimable » de Renaissance, gratifié d’une majuscule, il pose la question : « D’où vient que l’art est mort (sauf de si rares exceptions) ? C’est que l’histoire l’a tué. » L’essai de Pommier serait-il une réponse à cette question désabusée, si ce n’est inquiète, de Michelet ? C’est l’histoire de l’invention même de l’art, de ses attributs, de ses allégories, de son ambition, de ses académies que raconte Pommier. Ce récit, s’il est très « historiquement », donc très rigoureusement rapporté, tient du conte, de la légende. Ce n’est pas par hasard si la première page s’ouvre sur un « mensonge »… L’art n’a pu être ce qu’il a été (ce qu’il est encore ?) que parce qu’il est un mythe.

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