Shaping Up Art Drawings Essays Poetry And Interpretations

Shaping Up is more personal and intimate than the author's previous works. The poems and images reflect a period while he was living outside of Zimbabwe, in South Africa. The immigrant experience gives the work a more personal, closed, abstracted feel driven by loneliness of the exilitic condition. Living in the element, uninhibited and careless can help deal with confounding, controversial issues more easily, this theme can be dissected from the drawings to do with sex, sexuality and gender issues. The line breaks, whirls, thins out, sometimes is bold, sometimes is barely there, thus the drawings straddle the tenuousness of time and life.

A collection of essays on life and literature, from one of the most iconic authors and astute critics in contemporary letters. Words Are My Matter is essential reading: a collection of talks, essays, and criticism by Ursula K. Le Guin, a literary legend and unparalleled voice of our social conscience. Here she investigates the depth and breadth of contemporary fiction--and, through the lens of literature, gives us a way of exploring the world around us. In "Freedom," Le Guin notes: "Hard times are coming, when we'll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now ... to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We'll need writers who can remember freedom--poets, visionaries--realists of a larger reality." Le Guin was one of those authors and inWords Are My Matter she gives us just that: a vision of a better reality, fueled by the power and might and hope of language and literature.

The Shape of Hebrew Poetry explores foregrounding and structural cohesion as the dual discourse function of linguistic parallelism in biblical Hebrew poetry through a robust application of Roman Jakobson's theory of linguistic parallelism in poetry to the Egyptian Hallel (Psalm 113–118).

This volume examines the criticism of five influential British writers on the visual arts—John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and Sir Herbert Read. Their works span a period in the history of art that “in productivity and significance is more impressive than any other period since the Renaissance.” Each of these writers possesses extraordinary literary skills. Another common tie is their awareness of serving as spokesmen for art to an audience that was mainly indifferent or even hostile. Even though the aesthetic outlook of Pater, Fry, and Bell represents a violent reaction to Ruskin’s moralistic and literary interpretation of art, they were no less concerned than he to overcome the national apathy toward art and to assert its cultural importance. Sir Herbert Read reconciles the oppositions in the work of his predecessors in an aesthetic philosophy that stresses the social and ethnical values of art without sacrificing the idea of individual expression. The major part of Solomon Fishman’s study is an examination of the aesthetic theories embodied in the writings of each critic. He extracts the theoretical assumptions that form the basis of each writer’s critical practice and traces the development of aesthetic doctrine as it was modified by the critic’s experience of actual works of art. The body of work of these writers is representative of the whole development of modern art criticism and aesthetic theory. Although they display great diversity in ideas and taste, all five critics were instrumental in shaping the response of the public, first of all toward art in general, and finally toward modern art. Their work represents a unified segment of the larger enterprise to understand and illuminate art and will interest anyone who wishes to enlarge their own understanding. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1963.

The astonishing, powerful debut by the winner of a 2016 Whiting Writers' Award WHEREAS her birth signaled the responsibility as mother to teach what it is to be Lakota therein the question: What did I know about being Lakota? Signaled panic, blood rush my embarrassment. What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics. —from “WHEREAS Statements” WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

The Shape of Revelation highlights the image of form-creation, sheer presence, lyric pathos, rhythmic repetition, open spatial dynamism, and erotic pulse unique in the work of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and German Expressionism in order to explore the overlap between revelation and aesthetic shape from the perspective of Judaism.

In Vise and Shadow, the critically acclaimed poet and memoirist Peter Balakian brings together his most influential essays of the past twenty-five years. He argues that the force of the lyric imagination is able to hold experience under pressure like a vise, while it also shadows history. Precise, lyrical, and eloquent, Balakian's essays explore the ways poetry engages disaster and ingests mass violence without succumbing to the didactic. He gives us new insights into the relationships between trauma, memory, and aesthetic form; his essays on major Armenian voices and the aftermath of genocide are a fresh contribution to contemporary literature and art. Other essays engage painting, collage, song lyrics, and film as forms of enduring lyric knowledge. With a range that includes W. B. Yeats, YeghisheCharents, Joan Didion, Hart Crane, Primo Levi, Robert Rauschenberg, Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, Arshile Gorky, and Adrienne Rich, Vise and Shadow offers a cosmopolitan vision of the power and resilience of the human imagination.