Author: Christopher Isherwood File Type: epub This second volume of Christopher Isherwoods remarkable diaries opens on his fifty-sixth birthday, as the fifties give way to the decade of social and sexual revolution. Isherwood takes the reader from the bohemian sunshine of Southern California to a London finally swinging free of post-war gloom, to the racy cosmopolitanism of New York and to the raw Australian outback. He charts his ongoing quest for spiritual certainty under the guidance of his Hindu guru, and he reveals in reckless detail the emotional drama of his love for the American painter Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior and struggling to establish his own artistic identity.The diaries are crammed with wicked gossip and probing psychological insights about the cultural icons of the timeFrancis Bacon, Richard Burton, Leslie Caron, Marianne Faithfull, David Hockney, Mick Jagger, Hope Lange, W. Somerset Maugham, John Osborne, Vanessa Redgrave, Tony Richardson, David O. Selznick, Igor Stravinsky, Gore Vidal, and many others. But the diaries are most revealing about Isherwood himselfhis fiction (including A Single Man and Down There on a Visit), his film writing, his college teaching, and his affairs of the heart. He moves easily from Beckett to Brando, from arthritis to aggression, from Tennessee Williams to foot powder, from the opening of Cabaret on Broadway (which he skipped) to a close analysis of Gide.In the background run references to the political and historical events of the period the anxieties of the Cold War, Yuri Gagarins spaceflight, de Gaulle and Algeria, the eruption of violence in Americas inner cities, the Vietnam War, the Summer of Love, the moon landing, and the raising and lowering of hemlines. Isherwood is well known for his prophetic portraits of a morally bankrupt Europe on the eve of World War II in this unparalleled chronicle, The Sixties, he turns his fearless eye on the decade that more than any other has shaped the way we live now.**From Publishers WeeklyWhen Isherwood starts the new volume of his diary, it was 1960 and he was spending his 56th birthday with his partner, Don Bachardy, along with Hope Lange and Glenn Ford, whose hug Isherwood finds insincere. By the end, hes finished Down There on a Visit, written A Meeting at the River and A Single Man, pages of diaries, numerous screenplays, and books and articles for the Vedanta Society, home of his guru, all while convinced that hes slacking off. Hes dined with Igor and Vera Stravinsky, Tony Richardson, Jennifer Jones, Truman Capote, and W.H. Auden, to name a few. Hes started transcribing his parents diaries and letters, visited Australia, Tahiti, India, New York, and England, repeatedly forsworn drinking and smoking, gone to the doctor and the gym, seen friends die, read an astonishing number of books, and worried about the Cuban missile crisis and the Negro problem. Like all diaries, his (usefully annotated by Katherine Bucknell) is best dipped into its gossipy, funny, wide-ranging, and revealing. Though Isherwood isnt always appealingand is casually anti-Semitic throughouthe comes across as approachable, aware, and passionately interested. (Nov.) (c) PWxyz, LLC. Review These diaries are, in their core, a love storythanks to [them], we bear witness to it alland are all the richer for it.

Author: Eglantina Remport File Type: pdf This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskins immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. **From the Back Cover This book is the first comprehensive critical assessment of the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Augusta Gregory, founder, patron, director, and dramatist of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It elaborates on her distinctive vision of the social role of a National Theatre in Ireland, especially in relation to the various reform movements of her age the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, the Co-operative Movement, and the Home Industries Movement. It illustrates the impact of John Ruskin on the aesthetic and social ideals of Lady Gregory and her circle that included Horace Plunkett, George Russell, John Millington Synge, William Butler Yeats, and George Bernard Shaw. All of these friends visited the celebrated Gregory residence of Coole Park in Country Galway, most famously Yeats. The study thus provides a pioneering evaluation of Ruskins immense influence on artistic, social, and political discourse in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. About the Author Eglantina Remport is Senior Lecturer in the School of English and American Studies, Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, where she teaches modern Irish literature, Victorian literature, and Modernist literature. She holds a Ph.D. from the School of English, Queens University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Author: Clare Hayes-Brady File Type: pdf This book examines the writing of David Foster Wallace, hailed as the voice of a generation on his death. Critics have identified horror of solipsism, obsession with sincerity and a corresponding ambivalence regarding postmodern irony, and detailed attention to contemporary culture as the central elements of Wallaces writing. Clare Hayes-Brady draws on the evolving discourses of Wallace studies, focusing on the unifying anti-teleology of his writing, arguing that that position is a fundamentally political response to the condition of neo-liberal America. She argues that Wallaces work is most unified by its resistance to closure, which pervades the structural, narrative and stylistic elements of his writing. Taking a broadly thematic approach to the numerous types of failure, or lack of completion, visible throughout his work, the book offers a framework within which to read Wallaces work as a coherent whole, rather than split along the lines of fiction versus non-fiction, or pre- and post-Infinite Jest, two critical positions that have become dominant over the last five years. While demonstrating the centrality of failure, the book also explores Wallaces approach to sincere communication as a recurring response to what he saw as the inane, self-absorbed commodification of language and society, along with less explored themes such as gender, naming and heroism. Situating Wallace as both a product of his time and an artist sui generis, Hayes-Brady details his abiding interest in philosophy, language and the struggle for an authentic self in late-twentieth-century America. **Review Hayes-Brady is deft in identifying the recurring concerns which run, sometimes obsessively, throughout [Wallaces] writing ... She moves freely between texts, drawing examples from across his work in the development of a wide-ranging perspective on these key ideas ... Perhaps the books most significant contribution is found in its final chapter on Gender, Difference, and the Body. Textual Practice As the field of Wallace Studies matures, it has become a challenging task to outline a framework through which the entire subject of Wallace can be fruitfully viewed yet, in this publication, Clare Hayes-Brady does just that. ... Hayes-Brady establishes a theoretical framework that can be used as a foundational approach for critical work on Wallace, proposing that failure and inexpressibility, in various forms, are the organizing principles of Wallaces work. This framework elegantly accounts for previous trends in Wallace scholarship that have focused on Wallaces preoccupations with connection, sincerity, solipsism, and his relation to postmodernism. ... For anyone interested in dwelling on what Wallaces writing does, or negotiating the inexpressible in contemporary literature, this book offers an excellent way of thinking through what it means to fail. U.S. Studies Online Can the writing of David Foster Wallace, which has met with such critical and commercial success, best be described in terms of failure? Clare Hayes-Brady answers a provocative yes to this question, tracing how acts of frustrated communication in Wallaces fiction generate an endless need to try and fail again. The book also draws attention to Wallaces less productive failures with regard to gender, race, and the body. These provocations make The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace a welcome contribution to a vibrant critical debate. Adam Kelly, Lecturer in American Literature, University of York, UK, and author of American Fiction in Transition Book Description A critical overview of the writing of David Foster Wallace, taking his persistent interests in philosophy, language and plurality as points of departure.

Author: Claire Bishop File Type: pdf In the face of austerity cuts to public funding, a handful of museums of contemporary art have devised compelling alternatives to the mantra of bigger is better and richer.In Radical Museology, art historian and critic, Claire Bishop presents the collection displays of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional de Reina Sofia in Madrid and MSUM in Ljubljana as outlines of a new understanding of the contemporary in contemporary art.Rather than denoting presentism, the contemporary comes to signal a dialectical method scouring the past for the origins of our present historical moment, which in turn is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. It is an anachronic action that seeks to reboot the future through the unexpected appearance of a relevant past.Accompanying and complimenting Claire Bishops text are illustrations by artist Dan Perjovschi.