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Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 9781581126167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
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Book Description
An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama. BACK COVER: This non-academic author exposes the poltergeist lurking in the cellar of Faulkner's uncanny and haunting novel Light in August as the ghost of Faulkner's first child Alabama. She was born prematurely and died tragically after only nine days, apparently in the clutches of fetal alcohol syndrome. Faulkner couldn't write anything substantial for 7 months and then started this disturbing novel. The author demonstrates how Faulkner's own grief experience shaped the characters and the action and how he grounded part of his personal poltergeist in this novel. The resulting novel is full of tension and alienation. Strangers occupy Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi against the background of the culturally reft South post-Civil War. The author shows how Faulkner shrouded his intensely personal grief experience in a conceptual wardrobe borrowed from the philosopher and Nobel Prize winning Henri Bergson. Faulkner borrowed Bergsonian concepts of the life and death currents for the contrast in characters between those free in the present and those prisoners of the past. Lena Grove the young and pregnant country girl walking for weeks to find the father of her child bears the life current and Joe Christmas the orphan turned rapist and murderer the death current. The author demonstrates how Faulkner created the novel's other vivid characters using similar contrasts and how the plot strands tie together in a resonating whole. The author's detailed textual analysis of important passages brings this difficult novel into focus. Like the author's other books on Joyce and Faulkner, use of this analysis either as literary foreplay or afterplay will enhance your reading experience of Faulkner's novel.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 9781581126167
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Get Book Here
Book Description
An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama. BACK COVER: This non-academic author exposes the poltergeist lurking in the cellar of Faulkner's uncanny and haunting novel Light in August as the ghost of Faulkner's first child Alabama. She was born prematurely and died tragically after only nine days, apparently in the clutches of fetal alcohol syndrome. Faulkner couldn't write anything substantial for 7 months and then started this disturbing novel. The author demonstrates how Faulkner's own grief experience shaped the characters and the action and how he grounded part of his personal poltergeist in this novel. The resulting novel is full of tension and alienation. Strangers occupy Faulkner's fictional Jefferson, Mississippi against the background of the culturally reft South post-Civil War. The author shows how Faulkner shrouded his intensely personal grief experience in a conceptual wardrobe borrowed from the philosopher and Nobel Prize winning Henri Bergson. Faulkner borrowed Bergsonian concepts of the life and death currents for the contrast in characters between those free in the present and those prisoners of the past. Lena Grove the young and pregnant country girl walking for weeks to find the father of her child bears the life current and Joe Christmas the orphan turned rapist and murderer the death current. The author demonstrates how Faulkner created the novel's other vivid characters using similar contrasts and how the plot strands tie together in a resonating whole. The author's detailed textual analysis of important passages brings this difficult novel into focus. Like the author's other books on Joyce and Faulkner, use of this analysis either as literary foreplay or afterplay will enhance your reading experience of Faulkner's novel.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581125720
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
This non-academic author, a retired lawyer, brings William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! to life as uncertainty in Dixie. He traces Faulkner's portrait of the efforts of Thomas Sutpen to create a family dynasty in wealth and community respect and of Rosa Coldfield to revenge Sutpen's treatment of her as a mere reproduction tool. Both efforts are analyzed as life sterilizers inevitably doomed to failure by the uncertainties in life and as examples of the tension between control of the future and love, a choice Faulkner had to make in his own personal life. Line by line analyses of critical portions of the novel reveal its subtleties to the reader. The explanation points out the intentional gaps and spaces in the story that invite reader participation as to what happened. This author gives you his interpretation. You are invited to create your own version of what "really" happened in this archetypal setting in Faulkner's famous Jefferson, Mississippi.
Author: John Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 9781581125153
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
This is a detailed reader's guide to the power of Conrad's novel Victory. This non-academic author analyzes Conrad's format as a conflict between the life philosophies of Buddhist separation and Holy Spirit connection, a conflict played out dramatically in the emotional relationship of one man and one woman living on a remote south sea island. Anderson identifies the major themes as follows. Baron Axel Heyst, living alone to avoid emotional entanglements, nonetheless rescues Lena from a touring orchestra, and they escape to live together 24/7 on his remote island. Lena's connection to Heyst matures from initial interest to sexual love to selfless or spiritual love. But Heyst's response to her remains stuck in sexual possession. Given this failure of love connection, representatives of evil arrive on the island shortly thereafter. The victory of the title is Lena's victory over the fear of death that generates the selfish "me first" attitude in humans. Grounded in love for Heyst, she achieves a permanent and real sense of self and an ability to deal with evil. Finally the Holy Spirit force field powers her ultimate sacrifice for Heyst. He remains self-possessed, ultimately giving nothing of himself to Lena, but ironically without a secure sense of self or the ability to deal with evil. This author sees Conrad's large structure for Heyst's failure of the spirit as the biblical account of Mary Magdalene's part in the Resurrection of Christ. Heyst's failure to love Lena is his resurrection lost. This author also analyzes the sophisticated art of this novel as an unfolding from stem-cell metaphors into more specialized metaphors producing a powerful artistic victory.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581125402
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
This non-academic author has previously brought you reader's guides to the depths and subtle pleasures of works by Joyce and Faulkner. With this book he brings you to the ultimate pleasures of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece. This author treats Madame Bovary as the Zen novel, working on the reader in the same way Zen works on a disciple. He shows how Flaubert uses a radically new style in order to create a literary breakthrough of a similar order as Zen and has composed the ultimate music of this novel in the counterpoint of style and plot. The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like detachment and freedom whereas the plot is mired in desire, illusion and determinism. In the plot the inevitable demise of Madame Bovary is driven by her passionate nature and corresponding vulnerability to illusion. By contrast Flaubert's radical style is built on the philosophy of detachment. Flaubert finds a principal enemy of human freedom deep in the guts of mankind in the tapeworm of desire. The desire tapeworm feeds on freedom and excretes dissatisfaction. Emma or Madame Bovary is not free because she has the worm. Emma wants, Emma gets, but she is quickly dissatisfied and then the worm wants more. Emma could be a poster girl for our 21st century credit card society. Flaubert's novel shows through the fate of Emma Bovary the dangers of the worm. For those without freedom fate is in charge.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1612332749
Category : Study Aids
Languages : en
Pages : 501
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Book Description
This eighth in a series continues this ground-breaking word-by-word analysis of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. This volume covers chapter 3.3, a long and difficult chapter in the form of a father's dream. Father HCE dreams of a passive son named "Yawn," a version of Shaun. Made passive by sucking up to customers, the father's primal desires project a passive son potentially subject to father control. And this Yawn is so passive he needs help in releasing his feces. Talk about anal retentive! The dreamer's script loads Yawn's defenseless psyche with aspects of father-troubled sons from the collective past, including Freud's famous client Wolfman, Cain and Oedipus. Father trouble registers as distortions in the son's sexual relationships. Father-fearing Wolfman took his controlled son role to a "hole" new level. After witnessing his parents' sex a tergo [male erect, female on knees, doggy style or "dog ma"] and fearing his father's angry reaction to his witness and celebratory primal turd, he adopted the ultimate passive beta male attitude: he wanted to be his father's wife. Yawn in the role of father-troubled Cain is questioned in the dream by the synoptic gospellers [Matthew, Mark and Luke]. They serve as tools of the father's desire to control his son, as they controlled the historical presentation of god's son Jesus. They try to reduce Yawn's particular take on independence, his Cain-like tendency to pursue his whims, including killing to get all the sisters. Cain's lack of caring gives us the problems of cities, which are splattered all over this chapter. Yawn in the role of father-troubled Oedipus makes the same mistake as Jesus in Gesthemane: he treats his foster father as his real father. Oedipus ends up with his mommy as wife as Yawn is hung up on his. The suggestion is made that the dreamer knows at some level that Shaun was fathered by Father Michael with a blackmailed ALP, not by foster father HCE. Freud's hypothesis plays out through Yawn's porous character: "individual gaps in human truth are filled by prehistoric truths." Yawn bears the puncture wounds of the prehistoric father desires for control. Yawn is defenseless because he lacks individuality. The chapter starts with an anal retentive and dependent son Yawn all alone in the dark, fearful and needing help with an enema. The chapter concludes as the new day dawns and a spontaneous evacuation is made. Gracing these more promising circumstances, the voice of the Holy Ghost [Joyce's version] as the individuality-enhancing father of Jesus boldly breaks into the dream, silences the OT father voice and brands as fraudulent the presentation of Jesus as a servant and eunuch by the three synoptic gospellers. The mystical gospeller John bears witness to the presence of the Holy Ghost by unloading a trinity of turds of shame and the old in order to clear his mind for active and mystical participation in the Holy Ghost. He unloads spontaneously, just as Wolfman did his primal turd. The Quick shed the Dead.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1627341870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 283
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Book Description
This non-academic author presents a study of Salinger’s major writings, a study designed to enhance the reader’s enjoyment even in a reread. The study is an analysis of their artistic structure, especially Salinger’s sophisticated use of the narrator’s voice or voices. Catcher comes off as the Hindu Connection, Franny and Zooey as Take Out Zen and Raise High as Kabbalah Reception. The Hindu connection structures what happens to Holden in Catcher, and fast as take out Zen structures what happens to Franny in Franny and Zooey. Principal tenants of Kabbalah influence and structure important aspects of the story Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters, particularly the lack of civil reception of “others” at the wedding reception. These choices were no doubt influenced by Salinger’s experiments with different forms of spirituality. Salinger apparently came to the conclusion that your spiritual soul lies in your individual identity, a conclusion Joyce and others had reached earlier from connection with Eastern Spirituality. Direct versions of Jesus and Buddha dwell within you just waiting to be discovered. You don’t need an escort. For many young readers in the 20th century, these stories made up the New Testament, the new gospel as to what was important in life values. Read here how and why they were so powerful.
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1627340823
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Fresh from the twilight zone of Kafka's The Metamorphosis, this non-academic author treats on a line by line basis two of Kafka's last stories, stories written while he was wheezing with tuberculosis. Not surprisingly, these stories features pipes, just what Kafka was thinking about all the time while he was bed ridden, his sore pipes. Kafka experienced the threat of death at the same time as he experienced the love of his life with Dora Diamant. In these two stories Kafka spot-lights fear and love, the most basic human issues and those that had taken possession of Kafka's life. Fear and love in the lives of a mole-like creature alone in a burrow and mice in a crowded colony. In stories with no humans, Kafka teaches us what is most important in being human. The Burrow examines fear-based isolation of a mole-like creature living all alone in his underground burrow. The only connection with others is fear-based taking, taking by claws and teeth. You are either the diner or dinner, never a guest or host. You are alone but not independent because fear eats your life possibilities independence could give. You are your own worst enemy. Josephine the Singer features love-based giving through art, Kafka's last word on the purpose of art. Like a loving parent giving to her child, the artist mouse Josephine attempts to inspire independent individuality in other mice in the colony through the example of her unique and spontaneous singing. This she gives free of charge. Because of fear of survival stoked by the colony leadership, the rest of the mouse collective hears her singing as a mouse but not as an individual. They remain in fear-based group think with reduced life possibilities. In both stories, the issue is the effect of fear or love on independent individual identity and life possibilities. For Kafka, this was the uber human issue as he prepared to meet his maker.
Author: John Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1581129440
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 381
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Book Description
This is a reader s guide to Mann s classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized land of music, the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? The noble purposes of this novel are to understand the nature and sources of Nazi evil and to help ban it from the ring in the future. As you will note, Mann s explanation is relevant for events in Iraq in 2007. Mann gives a new answer to this question the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, serial music composed without freedom but with strict controls. Founded on repetition, this new and ultra-control German music arrived with the advent of the Nazis. Actually invented by the German Arnold Schoenberg, in the novel it is invented by a fictional composer Adrian Leverkuhn. Mann believed that this kind of music contains the key to what happened politically in Germany starting at that same time. The first composition using the serial method was published in 1921, the same year Hitler became head of the National Socialist party. The key is that the music is composed with a rigid set of rules that must be slavishly followed. Based in repetition, these rules were to govern all aspects of music melodic progression, chord structure, rhythm. The rules denied composer freedom. This kind of music is discussed against the philosophical implications of the music of various composers such as Bach and Beethoven. Mann presents the view that Beethoven s late period music paved the way to Leverkuhn s serial music, to Gestapo music. Mann finds a demonic energy field at the heart of both serial music and of Nazism. Both triggered the rise of a demonic force by reason of blind and slavish obedience to rigid rules designed to establish control over too much, control over so much that freedom-denying methods were necessary to try to hold the result together. But Mann means something radically different by a demonic energy field. This is not your father s devil and this devil does not wear Prada. Mann s demonic is real and intangible but not a supernatural force. It is triggered by humans trying to control too much, even if the control is ostensibly designed for a good purpose. It happens when the end justifies the means. Then the means can and often become anti-humanitarian. Does that sound familiar? In the demonic energy field and like Doctor Faustus before him, Leverkuhn receives genius level energy but is rendered impotent of love, the demonic destroying the freedom that is the foundation for love. Genius-powered Leverkuhn produces serial music of a dissonant, fragmented and irreconciled character. His music is presented as the inevitable product of his pride twisted soul, which also has the uncanny power to influence otherwise natural events toward evil. In order to indicate that the same demonic process was at work on the national level in the case of the Nazis, Leverkuhn is given many of the personal characteristics of Hilter, including syphilis, and Leverkuhn s biography is told in a brilliantly structured counterpoint against the last years of the Third Reich [from 1943 to 1945].
Author: John P. Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 1627340661
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Fresh from the magic kingdom of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, this non-academic author ushers us line-by-line into the shadows of Kafka's spectral bug theater. He walks the bug back along hints left by Kafka as to what happened the night before, why that night was different from all other nights. In this reading, father Samsa betrayed his first-born and needy son Gregor by declaring him unwelcome at home, even though Gregor was paying the rent. Stimulated by this betrayal of blood by blood, the twilight zone opened momentarily allowing father's brutality to transform the son into a giant bug. Three months later, the combined protective forces of Easter and Passover are necessary to finally put the creature to rest: Easter for his spirit and Passover for his bug body. Using then-current formulas from psychoanalysis as to hysterical conversion and from psychodynamics as to the human energy system, this explanation locates in a story often found mysterious a coherent path to the lack of memory by Gregor of these events and the reason for his hard back and soft underbelly. As the author sees it, irony fuels the title because the metamorphosis changed Gregor's exterior but not his inner nature, his "indestructible" love for family, while just the opposite happened to his convenience-loving family. And irony fuels the results because father Samsa got just the lazy and dependent son he criticized Gregor for being in wanting to stay at home. The author traces how Kafka uses verb tense and aspect, psycho-narration, as well as changes in the narrator's voice to make meaning in this drama theater. In the last act and after Gregor is disposed of by a Mary Magdalene-suggesting charwoman, the parents prepare their last child, their daughter, for departure, which will leave them in complete convenience. For her they have saved a nest egg that will help supply a nest for her family eggs, a family nest denied to their first-born.
Author: John Anderson
Publisher: Universal-Publishers
ISBN: 9781581124859
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
This non-academic author explores Conrad's classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad's character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named the Patna, he is judged by a court of inquiry and humiliated. Pathologically subject to shame because of the lack of any secure self, the dependent Jim attempts to hide by moving from port to port and finally into the jungle in out of the way Patusan. Crowned Lord Jim by the natives, he meets a seemingly inevitable fate because of his continuing need for approval from others. The independent Marlow helps Jim and in the process develops nuanced attitudes beyond conventional morality. Anderson sees the principal art of the novel as the connection Conrad forged between Jim and the Patna. Damaged by a submerged object while carrying Muslim pilgrims on their annual pilgrimage, the cause and effect of damage to the ship are metaphors for the cause and effect of Jim's psychic damage, damage that makes him susceptible to the pressure of opinions of others. Damaged early by the lack of a mother's nurture, Jim has no strong inner bulkheads to resist the pressure of the opinions of others. This author views the background of the novel, the background against which Conrad constructed Jim's life drama, to include the Garden of Eden myth and the attitudes towards free will in Islam and Christianity. As he did with works by Joyce, Faulkner and Flaubert, Anderson gives his analysis in a chapter by chapter and selected paragraph by paragraph reading of the novel.
