The Rochesterian

The Rochesterian PDF Author: Joseph O'Connor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description

The Rochesterian

The Rochesterian PDF Author: Joseph O'Connor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Get Book Here

Book Description


You Can't Die

You Can't Die PDF Author: John C. Wolfe
Publisher: Wolfe Books
ISBN: 154532770X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Get Book Here

Book Description
“A DAY OF CLARITY,” by John C. Wolfe, is a detailed account of one man’s attempt to master alcohol. By the time he’s twenty years old, he is convinced that alcohol improves his character and abilities in all facets of life. At first, it’s hard to dispute his thinking. He rises quickly in his career as a writer. As Chief Speechwriter to the Governor of New York, he writes over a thousand speeches while drunk. He drinks in restrooms, courtrooms, even in the delivery room where his son was born. He even manages to sneak drinks into a three-way meeting with the Governor and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. He finds a way to drink in every situation, except once, on September 11, 2001, when he finds himself in withdrawal among the rubble of the World Trade Center. Finally, after ten years, he is coaxed into treatment by family and friends. He emerges from rehab twenty-eight days later. One night in the church of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, while sober but disoriented, he inexplicably swallows a lethal dose of a narcotic medication meant to assist his recovery. His heart stops twice and he is placed on life support. He is thought to be suicidal, banished from the State Capitol and mandated to a psychiatric center for a month of observation. While there, he becomes convinced that the strain of sobriety caused his overdose. He comes to believe that he is suffering from a mental illness that only alcohol can control, and he vows to never stop drinking again. Soon after his release from the psychiatric center, he returns to his daily routine of heavy drinking. There are countless hospital and rehab stays and severe alcohol withdrawals in detox units. His family turns to the last best hope for a recovery at the prestigious Caron Foundation in Pennsylvania. Twenty days into his treatment there, he claims the walls are closing in around him and runs from the facility. That night, he gets drunk in Reading, PA, returns to Caron the next day, then runs back to his lake house in the Adirondacks. Within two weeks, he is physically unable to go fifteen minutes without a drink without suffering dangerous withdrawal symptoms and risking a seizure. He knows he is going to die and accepts it. Opting to spend his final summer at his beloved lake house, he stays inside so no one is able to see his condition. There was little left for his family and friends to do. It was just a matter of what killed him first, alcohol or suicide. Just three months after leaving treatment in Pennsylvania, relatives find him gravely ill on the floor of the lake home and bring him to an emergency room. Doctors weren’t sure if he would live. He is heavily medicated through the withdrawal process, then sent to the detox unit. A month later, he walks out of the hospital completely sober for the first time in twenty-five years. Doctors predicted a long and difficult recovery. They warned that his alcohol abuse had stunted his emotional growth by more than twenty years. They said that all the years of intoxication may have been masking a mental illness. They said he could be agitated, confused and even paranoid for as long as two years. More than anything else, “A Day of Clarity” is the story of a man’s distrust of himself. He uses alcohol as an elixir to control all facets of his life – his mood, his decisions, even his health. He drinks to temper his anger, regulate his physical comfort and stifle what he feared were psychotic impulses. He drinks to prevent another inexplicable near death experience. At the age of forty-seven, he must begin what he believes is an impossible task: Starting all over again, right where he left off 25 years earlier, disavowing everything he believed was true when he first learned it, and relearning it all over again, while anxiously waiting for a day of clarity.

From Chivalry to Terrorism

From Chivalry to Terrorism PDF Author: Leo Braudy
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307773418
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 658

Get Book Here

Book Description
Manliness has always been linked to physical prowess and to war; indeed the warrior has been the archetypal man across countless cultures throughout time. In this magisterial excursion through literature, history, warfare, and sociology, one of our most prominent scholars tracks the complex relationship between the changing methods and goals of warfare and shifting models of manhood. This journey takes us from the citizen soldiers of ancient Greece to the medieval knights to the misogynistic terrorists of Al Qaeda. As he chronicles these transformations, Leo Braudy weighs the significance of everything from weapon technology to the hairstyles favored during different eras. He offers fresh insights on codes of war and codes of racial purity, and on cultural and historical figures from Socrates to Don Quixote to Napoleon to Custer to Rambo. Epic in scope and free of academic jargon, From Chivalry to Terrorism is a masterwork of scholarship that is both accessible and breathtakingly ambitious.

Teaching Modern British and American Satire

Teaching Modern British and American Satire PDF Author: Evan R. Davis
Publisher: Modern Language Association
ISBN: 1603293817
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 437

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume addresses the teaching of satire written in English over the past three hundred years. For instructors covering current satire, it suggests ways to enrich students' understanding of voice, irony, and rhetoric and to explore the questions of how to define satire and how to determine what its ultimate aims are. For instructors teaching older satire, it demonstrates ways to help students gain knowledge of historical context, medium, and audience, while addressing more specific literary questions of technique and form. Readers will discover ways to introduce students to authors such as Swift and Twain, to techniques such as parody and verbal irony, and to the difficult subject of satire's offensiveness and elitism. This volume also helps teachers of a wide variety of courses, from composition to gateway courses and surveys, think about how to use modern satire in conceiving and structuring them.

The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society ...

The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society ... PDF Author: American-Irish Historical Society
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Irish
Languages : en
Pages : 482

Get Book Here

Book Description


Making of the English Literary Canon

Making of the English Literary Canon PDF Author: Trevor Thornton Ross
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773516832
Category : Canon (Literature)
Languages : en
Pages : 412

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon-formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalisation of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature in English society, highlighting the diverse interests and assumptions that defined and shaped the literary canon. An indigenous canon of letters, Ross argues, had been both the hope and aim of English authors since the Middle Ages. Early authors believed that promoting the idea of a national literature would help publicise their work and favour literary production in the vernacular. Ross places these early gestures toward canon-making in the context of the highly rhetorical habits of thought that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture, habits that were gradually displaced by an emergent rationalist understanding of literary value. He shows that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, canon-makers became less concerned with how English literature was produced than with how it was read and received. By showing that canon-formation has served different functions in the past, The Making of the English Literary Canon is relevant not only to current debates over the canon but also as an important corrective to prevailing views of early modern English literature and of how it was first evaluated, promoted, and preserved. It is widely accepted among literary scholars that canon-formation began in the eighteenth century when scholarly editions and critical treatments of older works, designed to educate readers about the national literary heritage, appeared for the first time. In The Making of the English Literary Canon Trevor Ross challenges this assumption, arguing that canon- formation was going on well before the eighteenth century but was based on a very different set of literary and cultural values. Covering a period that extends from the Middle Ages to the institutionalisation of literature in the eighteenth century, Ross's comprehensive history traces the evolution of cultural attitudes toward literature in English society, highlighting the diverse interests and assumptions that defined and shaped the literary canon. An indigenous canon of letters, Ross argues, had been both the hope and aim of English authors since the Middle Ages. Early authors believed that promoting the idea of a national literature would help publicise their work and favour literary production in the vernacular. Ross places these early gestures toward canon-making in the context of the highly rhetorical habits of thought that dominated medieval and Renaissance culture, habits that were gradually displaced by an emergent rationalist understanding of literary value. He shows that, beginning in the late seventeenth century, canon-makers became less concerned with how English literature was produced than with how it was read and received. By showing that canon-formation has served different functions in the past, The Making of the English Literary Canon is relevant not only to current debates over the canon but also as an important corrective to prevailing views of early modern English literature and of how it was first evaluated, promoted, and preserved.

Swift and Others

Swift and Others PDF Author: Claude Rawson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298574
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
Jonathan Swift's influence on the writings and politics of England and Ireland was reinforced by a combination of contradictory forces: an authoritarian attachment to tradition and rule, and a vivid responsiveness to the disorders of a modernity he resisted and yet helped to create. He was, perhaps even more than Pope, a dominant voice of his times. The rich variety of the literary culture to which he belonged shows the penetration of his ideas, personality and style. This is true of writers who were his friends and admirers (Pope), of adversaries (Mandeville, Johnson), of several who became great ironists in his shadow (Gibbon, Austen), and of some surprising examples of Swiftian afterlife (Chatterton). Claude Rawson, leading scholar of the works of Swift, brings together recent essays, as well as classic earlier work extensively revised, to offer fresh insights into an era when Swift's voice was a pervasive presence.

Wright and Ditson's Lawn Tennis Guide

Wright and Ditson's Lawn Tennis Guide PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Tennis
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description


Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830

Satire and Sentiment, 1660-1830 PDF Author: Claude Julien Rawson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300079166
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Get Book Here

Book Description
Claude Rawson examines the evolution of satirical writing in the period 1660-1830. In a sequence of linked chapters, some new and others revised substantially from earlier articles, he focuses on English writers from Rochester to Austen, both within a contemporaneous European context and as part of a tradition deriving from classical and sixteenth-century Humanist predecessors (Homer, Virgil, Erasmus, Montaigne) and leading to later writers like Flaubert and Yeats. Within the period 1660-1830 satire moved from an unusually dominant position to a relatively modest one, softened by the cult of 'sensibility' or 'sentiment'. The transition was connected with large social and cultural changes culminating in the French Revolution. Rawson's method is to concentrate on stress points, on evasions and internal contradictions, and on continuities and discontinuities with earlier and later periods and with literatures and modes of thought outside Britain.

Borderland Blacks

Borderland Blacks PDF Author: dann j. Broyld
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807177679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the early nineteenth century, Rochester, New York, and St. Catharines, Canada West, were the last stops on the Niagara branch of the Underground Railroad. Both cities handled substantial fugitive slave traffic and were logical destinations for the settlement of runaways because of their progressive stance on social issues including abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and temperance. Moreover, these urban centers were home to sizable free Black communities as well as an array of individuals engaged in the abolitionist movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Anthony Burns, and Hiram Wilson. dann j. Broyld’s Borderland Blacks explores the status and struggles of transient Blacks within this dynamic zone, where the cultures and interests of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and the African Diaspora overlapped. Blacks in the two cities shared newspapers, annual celebrations, religious organizations, and kinship and friendship ties. Too often, historians have focused on the one-way flow of fugitives on the Underground Railroad from America to Canada when in fact the situation on the ground was far more fluid, involving two-way movement and social collaborations. Black residents possessed transnational identities and strategically positioned themselves near the American-Canadian border where immigration and interaction occurred. Borderland Blacks reveals that physical separation via formalized national barriers did not sever concepts of psychological memory or restrict social ties. Broyld investigates how the times and terms of emancipation affected Blacks on each side of the border, including their use of political agency to pit the United States and British Canada against one another for the best possible outcomes.