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Memoir and meditation on blindness.
Tillie Olsen's fiction and nonfiction portray, with all their harsh contours, the lives of people who cannot speak for themselves or whose words have been forgotten or ignored. Olsen's writing is neither serene nor despairing. In this sensitive thematic reading, Mara Faulkner shows that its most subversive function is the assertion that human life can be other than and more than it is. Olsen's promise of full creative life aims to make her readers forever dissatisfied with physical, emotional, and intellectual starvation. Faulkner finds in Olsen's writing a triple-layered pattern combining protest against oppression (blight), celebration of courage and strength (fruit), and the heartening dr...
He examines the connection between the personal and the political, showing that Gordimer has always seen the two as inseparable, and that her understanding of this relationship has developed profoundly during her career. Though the book is not biographical, it explores more fully than any preceding publication Gordimer's attitudes toward feminism and her connections with her Jewish background, thereby expanding our comprehension of her social context. Ettin includes a succinct overview of her career and devotes each of six chapters to a major theme, tracing and analyzing the themes as they recur in selected stories, novels, essays, and interview reflections, and as they have emerged in relation to circumstances of her own life. The author sees Gordimer's work as a tool not of propaganda but of understanding, a means of sharpening our perceptions of one another's lives.
“A compelling collection of essays that address the experiences of many who have genetically based illnesses.” —Library Journal The contributors to The Story Within share powerful experiences of living with genetic disorders. Their stories illustrate the complexities involved in making decisions about genetic diseases: whether to be tested, who to tell, whether to have children, and whether and how to treat children medically, if treatment is available. More broadly, they consider how genetic information shapes the ways we see ourselves, the world, and our actions within it. People affected by genetic disease respond to such choices in varied ways. These writers reflect that breadth of...
Collaborating as writers, designers, photographers, and editors, friends of Joseph O'Connell offer a glimpse of his creativity in Divine Favor, a photographic collection of this master-artist's work. Introducing Joseph O'Connell's principal works to a broader public, Divine Favor contains photographs of his work as well as background information and reflections. Readers will find a sketch of O'Connell's life and work in the "Chronology of Principal Events in the Life and Work of Joseph O'Connell," an affectionate introduction to the life of Joe as artist and friend in J. F. Powers "Dear Joe" and a tribute to the man and artist in Garrison Keillor's "He Was in the Arts, You Know". Other write...
Showing work where none seemed to exist, The Work of the Heart suggests emotion work as a key measure of women's status, whether for the twenty-first century or the eighteenth, and offers an analytical tool for historians exploring the self.
Gathered here for the first time are both published and unpublished writings of Anne E. Patrick, a leading feminist Catholic voice, revered both as a teacher and as a critical scholar of theology, ethics, literature, and the arts. Her scholarly publications broke new ground in a number of Catholic theological subdisciplines, including feminist ethics, liturgy, and contemporary expressions of religious life. This is an essential resource for anyone seeking to understand post-Vatican II theological development in the Catholic Church in the US.
Contrary to previous studies of Tillie Olsen’s writing, Tillie Olsen and the Dialectical Philosophy of Proletarian Literature analyzes the impact of one of the most important philosophies of the last century, dialectical materialism, on the form and content of Olsen’s fiction. By revealing the unconceptualized dialectics of Olsen’s work and its appreciation by scholars and casual readers, this study achieves a dialectical synthesis that incorporates and extends the insights of and about Olsen in terms of dialectical materialism. By foregrounding Olsen’s dialectical approach, it explains and largely resolves apparent contradictions between her Marxism and feminism; her depictions of class, race, and gender; the literature of her earlier and later periods; and her use of realist and modernist literary forms and techniques. Consequently, this project makes a case for the importance of Olsen’s Marxist education during the “Red Decade” of the 1930s and within the U.S. proletarian literary movement.