Signs of the Literary Times

Signs of the Literary Times
Author: William O'Rourke
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 1993-11-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780791416822

This book is O'Rourke’s first volume of nonfiction since his 1972 The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, which Garry Wills hailed as "a clinical x-ray of our society's condition." That book prompted Herbert Mitgang to name O'Rourke "one of the finest writers of his generation." Signs of the Literary Times provides new evidence for that assessment. It brings together O’Rourke’s unique mixture of literary, political, and cultural criticism published periodically during the last twenty-two years. The collection ranges from autobiographical essays describing his generation’s literary evolution, to articles on free speech issues, such as nude dancing and the Bush-era NEA controversies, as well as book reviews that provide a fresh and largely uncharted critical map of the period. O’Rourke is not only interested in genre bending and expansion, but in persevering during this age of academic specialization as, in his phrase, “a person of letters.” In the two decades between his first work of nonfiction and this volume, O’Rourke has published three highly acclaimed novels, The Meekness of Isaac (1974), Idle Hands (1981), and Criminal Tendencies (1987). Of the last, The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote, “Of all the novelists paraded in recent years by publishers as natural successors to Graham Greene, this one comes the closest. A thoroughly entertaining literary event.” Signs of the Literary Times is not so much a compendium of diverse pieces on various subjects, as it is a cogent and continuing x-ray of our society's condition.

Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times
Author: Elizabeth Abel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2010-05-06
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0520261836

"The George Gund Foundation imprint in African American studies."--Page [i] of preliminary pages.

Signs of the Signs

Signs of the Signs
Author: William Brevda
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2011-05-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1611480434

This book is a study of signs in American literature and culture. It is mainly about electric signs, but also deals with non-electric signs and related phenomena, such as movie sets. The 'sign' is considered in both the architectural and semiotic senses of the word. It is argued that the drama and spectacle of the electric sign called attention to the semiotic implications of the 'sign.' In fiction, poetry, and commentary, the electric SIGN became a 'sign' of manifold meanings that this book explores: a sign of the city, a sign of America, a sign of the twentieth century, a sign of modernism, a sign of postmodernism, a sign of noir, a sign of naturalism, a sign of the beats, a sign of signs systems (the Bible to Broadway), a sign of tropes (the Great White way to the neon jungle), a sign of the writers themselves, a sign of the sign itself. If Moby Dick is the great American novel, then it is also the great American novel about signs, as the prologue maintains. The chapters that follow demonstrate that the sign is indeed a 'sign' of American literature. After the electric sign was invented, it influenced Stephen Crane to become a nightlight impressionist and Theodore Dreiser to make the 'fire sign' his metaphor for the city. An actual Broadway sign might have inspired F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., John Dos Passos portrayed America as just a spectacular sign. William Faulkner's electric signs are full of sound and fury signifying modernity. The Last Tycoon was a sign of Fitzgerald's decline. The signs of noir can be traced to Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd.' Absence flickers in the neons of Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles. The death of God haunts the neon wilderness of Nelson Algren. Hitler's 'empire' was an non-intentional parody of Nathanael West's California. The beats reinvented Times Square in their own image. Jack Kerouac's search for the center of Saturday night was a quest for transcendence. This book will interest readers who want to learn more about the city, the history of advertising, electric lighting, nightlife, architecture, and semiotics. In contrast to other cultural studies, however, Signs of the Signs is primarily a work of literary criticism. Lovers of literary light will appreciate this book the most.

Signs of the Times

Signs of the Times
Author: David Lehman
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1992
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780671775940

One of the most talked about books of the year. "A lucid and fiercely intelligent study of the disturbing implications of deconstruction, and at the same time, an impassioned argument for a more humane study of literature".--The New York Times.

Signs of Life

Signs of Life
Author: Stephen Fabes
Publisher: Profile Books
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 178283477X

'A thoughtful exploration of humanity ... Fabes is great company and makes riding bicycles seem like the best way to see and understand the world' - Guardian They say that being a good doctor boils down to just four things: Shut up, listen, know something, care. The same could be said for life on the road, too. When Stephen Fabes left his job as a junior doctor and set out to cycle around the world, frontline medicine quickly faded from his mind. Of more pressing concern were the daily challenges of life as an unfit rider on an overloaded bike, helplessly in thrall to pastries. But leaving medicine behind is not as easy as it seems. As he roves continents, he finds people whose health has suffered through exile, stigma or circumstance, and others, whose lives have been saved through kindness and community. After encountering a frozen body of a monk in the Himalayas, he is drawn ever more to healthcare at the margins of the world, to crumbling sanitoriums and refugee camps, to city dumps and war-torn hospital wards. And as he learns the value of listening to lives - not just solving diagnostic puzzles - Stephen challenges us to see care for the sick as a duty born of our humanity, and our compassion.

Signs of Writing

Signs of Writing
Author: Roy Harris
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1995
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780415100885

By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how other forms of writing obey the same principles.In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech.By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext.This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.

Signs & Wonders

Signs & Wonders
Author: Marina Warner
Publisher: Vintage Books
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2004
Genre: Culture
ISBN: 9780099437727

From a highly original and profound commentator on the culture of the past and present comes this superb 25-year retrospective collection of her finest essays on fiction, drama, religion and fairy-tale.

Earthly Signs

Earthly Signs
Author: Marina Tsvetaeva
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2017-12-05
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 1681371634

A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsvetaeva ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia’s greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life buffeted by political upheaval. The essays collected in this volume are based on diaries she kept during the turbulent years of the Revolution and Civil War. In them she records conversations of women in the markets, soldiers and peasants on the train traveling from the Crimea to Moscow in October 1917, fighting in the streets of Moscow, a frantic scramble with co-workers to dig frozen potatoes out of a cellar, and poetry readings organized by a newly minted Soviet bohemia. Alone in Moscow with two small children, no income, and a missing husband, Tsvetaeva struggled to feed her daughters (one of whom died of malnutrition in an orphanage), find employment in the Soviet bureaucracy, and keep writing poetry. Her keen and ruthless eye observes with compassion and humor—bringing the social, economic, and cultural chaos of the period to life. These autobiographical writings not only give a vivid eyewitness account of Russian history but provide vital insights into the workings of Tsvetaeva’s unique poetics. Includes black and white photographs.

Empire of Signs

Empire of Signs
Author: Roland Barthes
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 132
Release: 1982
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780374522070

This anthology by Roland Barthes is a reflection on his travels to Japan in the 1960s. In twenty-six short chapters he writes about his encounters with symbols of Japanese culture as diverse as pachinko, train stations, chopsticks, food, physiognomy, poetry, and gift-wrapping. He muses elegantly on, and with affection for, a system "altogether detached from our own." For Barthes, the sign here does not signify, and so offers liberation from the West's endless creation of meaning. Tokyo, like all major cities, has a center--the Imperial Palace--but in this case it is empty, "both forbidden and indifferent ... inhabited by an emperor whom no one ever sees." This emptiness of the sign is pursued throughout the book, and offers a stimulating alternative line of thought about the ways in which cultures are structured.

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs

Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs
Author: Karen Fang
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2010-02-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813928826

Nineteenth-century periodicals frequently compared themselves to the imperial powers then dissecting the globe, and this interest in imperialism can be seen in the exotic motifs that surfaced in works by such late Romantic authors as John Keats, Charles Lamb, James Hogg, Letitia Landon, and Lord Byron. Karen Fang explores the collaboration of these authors with periodical magazines to show how an interdependent relationship between these visual themes and rhetorical style enabled these authors to model their writing on the imperial project. Fang argues that in the decades after Waterloo late Romantic authors used imperial culture to capitalize on the contemporary explosion of periodical magazines. This proliferation of "post-Napoleonic" writing—often referencing exotic locales—both revises longstanding notions about literary orientalism and reveals a remarkable synthesis of Romantic idealism with contemporary cultural materialism that heretofore has not been explored. Indeed, in interlocking case studies that span the reach of British conquest, ranging from Greece, China, and Egypt to Italy and Tahiti, Fang challenges a major convention of periodical publication. While periodicals are usually thought to be defined by time, this account of the geographic attention exerted by late Romantic authors shows them to be equally concerned with space. With its exploration of magazines and imperialism as a context for Romantic writing, culture, and aesthetics, this book will appeal not only to scholars of book history and reading cultures but also to those of nineteenth-century British writing and history.